Grief, Blame Over Jorge’s Suicide Can’t Be Laid to Rest : Tragedy: Boy’s death reverberates through community. Latinos complain of cultural insensitivity.

The priest stood next to the short white coffin and spoke of the “moment of sickness” that had stolen Jorge David Licea’s life. The sickness, it was understood at this rosary Mass, had more than one name and symptoms that overlapped. Violence, guns, poverty and despair.

But Jorge was only 10 years old.

Last week, students arriving for classes at 49th Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles saw him place the muzzle of his father’s .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol to his temple, then collapse in his pooling blood. Nobody can understand a suicide such as this.

“A few years ago when I was in Uganda, I saw children dying of starvation,” said another priest at another Mass for Jorge in Los Angeles. “Those children had almost nothing. But here, where there are so many things, children are dying of violence. This helps us to understand so much about our society. We must not let this death be in vain.”

Jorge Licea, a sensitive child who dreamed of becoming a policeman, was buried Friday in Durango, Mexico, because that country is where his immigrant parents feel most at home. Jorge was born in Los Angeles, where his father was convinced that opportunity would give Jorge a much better life than his own.

What went wrong? From nearly every quarter, now come recrimination and guilt. A 10-year-old boy told the world, emphatically, that things were not right. His spectacular suicide begs the question: Is everybody a little to blame?

The reverberations run deep and wide. His father says he will think hard before ever bringing another gun into the family home. His mother says her son felt humiliated by the way his teacher disciplined him at school. The teacher says she is grieving, that she cannot talk about Jorge without breaking down in tears.

A tearful classmate recalls that when Jorge got in trouble for hitting her, he cried too. Another is having nightmares since his friend died. Some Latino parents are suddenly vocal about what they see as cultural insensitivity and a lack of supervision at school.

On the morning of Jorge’s suicide, children and teachers were sobbing and screaming, even throwing up. Nobody was sure at first who had been hit, or how. As the first waves of shock subsided, Principal Lemuel Chavis announced that everyone was to go about their business as usual, that April 14 would be a normal day at school.

But for 49th Street Elementary and those associated with it, normal is elusive still.

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A picture of what took place in the days and hours leading to Jorge’s death--and how the boy interpreted such events--is necessarily incomplete. His suicide gripped everybody who knew him in horrified surprise. There were no threats, no apparent depression, no big upheaval in his life. If there were troubles at school or at home, his seemed no worse than those of other children growing up in his inner-city neighborhood.

Like other children his age, Jorge enjoyed sports and liked to watch television, especially cartoons and “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol.” He was the second-oldest of four brothers, including a baby of 4 months. On the Sunday before his death, Jorge went with his family to an aerospace museum.

“My son swallowed his problems,” said his father, Jorge Ramiro Licea Aguilar, a mechanic without a steady job. “This is so hard. As close as we were, he didn’t tell me.”

The school principal, citing fear of a lawsuit by the Licea family, said he will not talk about the boy or how he got along in class other than to say he cannot believe the school is to blame.

He told teachers that they must not talk about it, either, and during a school assembly also warned the students not to talk to reporters. Like the shooting 10 years ago in which a deranged neighbor killed two people and wounded 13 others on the school playground, Jorge’s suicide is simply called “the crisis” at 49th Street Elementary School.

Many people, however, decided to talk about Jorge--their classmate, friend, brother and son. They shook their heads over his death, shuddered and shed tears. As they stepped toward his open casket at the rosary Mass, young and old stared in pain at his bandaged face, tinged blue by death.

“I just hope and pray that the young people will stop and think and get hold of themselves,” said Martha Dickson, who was accompanying one of Jorge’s friends, her 7-year-old granddaughter, Kevonia Allen, at another Mass for the boy. “He was just a baby. He didn’t know what life was about.”

Jorge was, by all accounts, a normal kid who teachers sometimes disciplined for such infractions as speaking out of turn, spitting on the playground or playing too rough. In his backpack were notebook papers with the sentence, “I will obei (sic) my teacher” written in pencil 300 times.

But there was no file on Jorge in the principal’s office for serious disciplinary problems that, for example, would warrant a formal suspension from the school he had attended since kindergarten.

His parents, however, said that in the three weeks before his death, Jorge brought home five notes from his teacher about misbehavior. A parent was required to sign each note, and then come to school. Jorge would then apologize to his teacher while his father--and his classmates--looked on, the parents said.

School district officials would not comment on the parents’ account, and directed inquiries to the principal, who likewise refused to discuss it.

“The teachers should be more considerate,” Jorge’s father said. “They should give the children a little privacy so that the other kids don’t laugh at them.”

Yet Jorge had many friends at school and in the neighborhood--girls and boys, Latinos and blacks. On the school playground, they played handball together and another game called “suicide,” which was Jorge’s favorite.

As his friends describe the game, the child who catches the ball must make a run for the wall to avoid other players hitting him about the head.

It was his penchant for the game, according to his classmates, that offers an odd twist to the final hours of Jorge’s life. His friends say that the day before the shooting, his teacher ordered Jorge to sit on a bench on the playground because he said “a bad word” during class.

But instead of following the teacher’s order, Jorge listened to another friend who said he didn’t have to, that he could play the game instead.

“The teacher yelled at him, ‘Why aren’t you sitting on the bench?’ ” said a classmate, Evelia Vera, 10. “She told him that he was the only one who had to sit on the bench three times. Then after lunch, she gave him a note to take home to his parents. He stayed quiet for a minute, but then he started to cry. The only thing he said was, ‘But. . . .’ ”

In the note, which Jorge never delivered to his parents, a school district spokesman confirmed that the teacher ordered Jorge to stay home the next day, then come to class the following day with one of his parents.

Instead, Jorge and his 8-year-old brother, Ramiro, rode with their father to school as usual, arriving at 7:15 a.m. The two boys walked to the cafeteria, where Ramiro would have breakfast. But instead of staying with his younger brother, Ramiro said Jorge got up to leave.

“I asked him where he was going,” Ramiro said softly, his head bowed. “And he said he was going to see his teacher. Then he left. Later, a kid asked me if I knew about the boy. I said, ‘What boy?’ Then I went to class and I didn’t find out what happened until real late.”

Because the teacher and principal will not talk about the events of that day, it is not known whether Jorge met with his teacher--perhaps to ask her to reconsider the informal suspension--after leaving his brother in the cafeteria.

About 15 minutes later, however, a sobbing Jorge stood in front of the school, reached into his backpack for the gun and then pressed it to his head. Students who witnessed the scene say it unfolded very fast. Later, many of those children were isolated and offered intense psychological counseling.

“Crisis intervention is like a form of triage,” said psychologist Richard Lieberman, one of two members of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s suicide prevention unit, who was called to the school. “This is our worst nightmare come true.”

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Shortly after doctors removed Jorge from life support at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the district attorney’s office considered--and then rejected--the idea that the boy’s father might be charged in connection with the death.

He had left the gun under a mattress in his bedroom, where it would presumably be accessible to ward off an intruder, but was also in reach of his son.

“I never told (my children) I had a gun in the house,” said Licea, who said he bought the weapon to protect himself and his family in their home. “I had it for a long time. I even bought another one two months ago.”

But the Children’s Firearms Protection Act addresses only loaded guns, and when Jorge took the ammunition from a top dresser shelf in his parents’ bedroom, loaded it into the gun, then stuffed it into his backpack, it seemed a particularly deliberate act for a child.

Experts in child suicide, however, note that young people unskilled in communication often act impulsively when they are in emotional pain and a gun is in their home. They want to send a message, certainly, but they may be ambivalent about wanting to die. A firearm rarely allows for a second chance.

After the shooting, police confiscated both weapons from the Licea home and neither has been returned. “I’m not planning to buy any others right now,” Licea said. “I have to think about it a lot.”

The boy’s teacher, Carolyn Pinkney, said she is too upset by the suicide to discuss it. “I didn’t see it coming,” she told a reporter during an assembly on the schoolyard, then turned away.

By most accounts, she is a respected figure on campus. A display by the school’s entrance featured six drawings and essays by children answering the question, “Who Is the Light of Your Life?” Among those chosen: Bo Jackson, Michael Jordan and Mrs. Pinkney.

Parent Ana Garcia told of walking her daughter to class on the morning of the shooting and finding the teacher leaning against the door frame, weak from grief.

“She is destroyed, the teacher,” Garcia said. “She was bathed in tears. She is an excellent teacher.”

Other parents with children in 49th Street Elementary School have been thinking beyond the sadness of losing such a young life. Although no one is suggesting a direct link to Jorge’s suicide, they say the tragedy has galvanized the anger they have been feeling for a while.

They complain of a shortage of Spanish-speaking staff members, of poor supervision on campus and of insensitivity to the concerns of Latino parents.

About 85% of the students at 49th Street Elementary are Latino and the rest are black. Like many schools in South-Central Los Angeles, the percentage of Latino students used to be far less.

One mother with two children at the school, who like most others asked that her name not be used, said: “I was a student at the school myself. It is nothing like the way it was. They do not send home notes in Spanish. They don’t care about the Hispanic community.”

Another mother said that in the aftermath of Jorge’s suicide, she has been meeting with other Latino parents and that, as a group, they plan to send a letter to the school board about problems at the school.

The Liceas’ attorney, Pete Navarro, said the family does not believe the school district is necessarily insensitive to Latinos. “They see it as a faceless system against poor people. It’s the school district, the administration, and how they react toward poor immigrants.”

Jorge’s parents have not decided whether they will file a lawsuit.

“I just don’t want another innocent to fall like this,” his father said.