A Gun, a Child, a Second Chance

What Robin Schilling calls “hell week” began with an urgent call at work from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Her 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Samantha, had been accidentally shot in the head by her 11-year-old son, Brandon.

Within minutes, her husband, Dennis, in Georgia on business, was beeped by his secretary. On the flight home, he kept in phone contact with Childrens Hospital, where Samantha was in surgery. It sounded bad.

He began preparing himself, thinking, “We were going to have to make decisions like when do we unplug her.”

Soon, the shooting was on the news: La Habra Heights 2-year-old in critical condition after her stepbrother finds and loads a handgun. It discharges as he points it at her, telling her, “Don’t ever play with this.”

“You can just see the scenario,” Dennis Schilling says. “Two children at home with a baby-sitter propped on the sofa eating cookies, mother at work, I’m out of town.”

Or, as one of the Schillings’ friends told him, he and Robin came across as “low-life scum who didn’t really care.”

It was hurt heaped upon tragedy.

“We felt like we did all the right things,” Robin says. “We thought our house was secure.” When Samantha was learning to walk, they put sharp-edged furniture in the garage. Kitchen cabinets are child-proofed. The children are never left alone.

But they made one mistake: the gun, a revolver, which was hidden, unloaded, in a case under the parents’ bed. Ordinarily, Dennis says, the bullets are kept in a closet, but they had been temporarily stashed under the bed while some work was being done at the house.

The Schillings consider themselves lucky. Samantha went home from the hospital Monday. She’s going to make it.

A blood-caked, four-inch scar on the right side of Samantha’s clean-shaven head and loss of motor function in her left (and dominant) hand, left arm and leg are the visible reminders of what happened the morning of April 12. A charmer with enormous, long-lashed blue eyes, she laughs readily and hasn’t lost her taste for chocolate.

Exactly how it happened isn’t clear. The children were not allowed to play in the bedroom, but Samantha would nap there. Brandon Rigney was home on spring break and they apparently were bending the rules a bit. The baby-sitter was in another part of the house.

“My son never knew the gun existed,” Dennis says. “I’m not quite sure how he found it. We’ve not talked about that yet.”

It doesn’t surprise him that the boy could load it. “Kids have a lot of exposure to television that shows some very graphic things.” And, as a 5-year-old, Brandon had a cap gun with a movable cylinder.

They are speaking out, Dennis says, in hopes that “just one person could learn from this horrible experience that we’ve had. I just want somebody to gain from this.”

The Sheriff’s Department has the gun. “If we get it back,” Dennis says, “there will be a safe installed in our house.” Says Robin: “I hope that gun never comes back in the house.”

Officials with the district attorney’s office said this week that, based on a review of the case, it does not appear that charges will be filed against the Schillings for allowing firearms to be accessible to children.

Meanwhile, the Schillings ask everyone to check, and double-check, their homes for child safety. Children may know the rules but, Dennis emphasizes: “If you assume they have judgment, you’re setting yourself up. . . . At 11, they feel so invincible.”

With Samantha out of the woods, the Schillings say they’re “on a high,” but they know the road ahead is long. For starters, there are issues of guilt and blame.

For one whole day, Dennis acknowledges, he found himself blaming Brandon. Now, he’s wrestling with his own conscience. He chokes up. “It’s my gun. When you sit in my shoes, feeling the guilt. . . .”

Neither Dennis nor Robin blames Eva, the baby-sitter, who has cared for Samantha since she was an infant. “She’s part of our family,” Robin says.

Does Samantha blame Brandon? What does he feel? No one knows yet.

Samantha hasn’t asked any questions. “I don’t think she remembers any of that,” Robin says. Dennis says, “Maybe she wasn’t even looking.”

“Eventually,” Robin adds, “I think we’re going to have to tell her the truth. She’s going to want some explanation.”

Brandon is in therapy. He stayed home from school the day after vacation ended, giving school psychologists a chance to brief his schoolmates, to get the questions out of the way. “Externally, he looks like he’s doing OK,” Dennis says. “He’s back in baseball. His classmates have been good to him.”

At the hospital, Samantha asked for him and he came to see her.

“He doesn’t talk about it much,” Robin says. “He cried for a couple of days, but I’m waiting for him one day to kind of fall apart. He’s not there yet.”

He can take some solace from having had the presence of mind to call 911. Says Robin: “Blood just freaks him out. I’m so thankful he was able to keep his wits about him. What if he’d freaked out and run to his room and shut the door?”

Samantha is alive, the Schillings know, because everyone did the right thing: sheriff’s deputies, paramedics, surgeons, hospital staff. Says Robin: “I just want to hug them all.”

As a couple, Robin, 34, and Dennis, 49, have come closer, spelling each other at all-night vigils at the hospital. Middle managers at an aerospace firm in the South Bay, they have been able to take time off to be at Samantha’s side.

For Samantha, the future looks good. “She has her personality back. It’s the same little girl,” Robin says. Yes, Dennis agrees, laughing, a child who is into “shovels, hammers and screwdrivers.”

“She’s a very lucky little girl,” says Dr. Maureen McMorrow, the hospital’s director of rehabilitation. “We’re pretty optimistic that her cognitive functions have not been impaired,” though Samantha faces extensive rehab and will probably have some permanent weakness on the left side.

Dr. Mark Krieger, who with Dr. Gordon McComb performed the 2 1/2-hour surgery, added, “If we had to paint a best-case scenario, this would exceed it.

“Initially, we didn’t think she’d survive it,” he says. “A few centimeters one way or the other, (it would have been) a clear-cut fatal injury.”

Robin calls it “a miracle. It’s like God said, ‘We’re going to give you guys one more chance.’ ”

Dennis felt so lucky last week that he bought lottery tickets. And? He just laughs and says, “Well, we’re still lucky.”

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May 6-13 is National Safe Kids Week, a project of the Washington-based National Safe Kids Campaign, which reports that each year more than 7,000 children 14 and younger die of unintentional injuries--more than those who succumb to all childhood diseases combined. More than 200 are victims of unintentional shootings.

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.