Principal Recovers From Attack : Violence: Rick Facciolo was shot in the face by an 8th-grader who accidentally killed himself soon after. The educator is back on the job after major plastic surgery.

The shooting of school principal Rick Facciolo had the trappings of a professional hit.

The gunman, an avid golfer, sneaked a shotgun into his home inside his bag of clubs; sawed it off so he could hide it under a jacket, then later walked calmly into the school office and, without saying a word, blasted a hole the size of a cantaloupe in Facciolo’s face.

But there were some twists.

The gunman snacked on cookies and milk before heading off to kill Facciolo. He was 13 years old.

After he shot Facciolo, he slipped outside on wet pavement and was killed when the 12-gauge shotgun discharged into his own chest.

Facciolo survived because the buckshot missed his carotid artery by less than an inch, and surgeons have since rebuilt the lower half of his face.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, Facciolo is back on the job, refusing to dwell on what he calls the incident last January.

He won’t speculate why one of his school’s eight-grade students wanted to kill him--although the boy had a beef because, with the dress code at Sacred Heart School, baggy pants were taboo.

He can’t analyze the look in the boy’s eyes when he raised the pistol-grip shotgun to his shoulder and took aim, because Facciolo never saw him.

But nor has Facciolo soured on kids, and today he’s still at work, at the same desk at the same school, with bandages to protect the lingering wound from the chaffing of a button-down shirt.

He suggests that his stoicism springs from his childhood. “My parents would say, ‘Things won’t always go your way but you have to make the best of it. Life is good but it’s not always easy,’ ” he said.

The “incident” occurred Jan. 23 after a teacher brought John Sirola into the principal’s office for a sit-down. The youngster had attended the private Catholic grade school the previous year, but spent the summer with his father in Arizona because of his mother’s hope that the incorrigible child could be better disciplined.

When the new school year began, his father sent Sirola back to his mother in Redlands and he was re-enrolled at Sacred Heart where, she figured, the school’s structure would serve him well.

But he challenged the school’s dress code for boys--traditional blue slacks and white polo shirts--by wearing baggy pants. A meeting with Mr. Fash, as everyone calls the principal, might straighten him out once and for all.

The meeting went well, Facciolo thought, and Sirola left campus, walking down a street framed by trees and old homes with front porches and white picket fences.

At home, Sirola enjoyed an afternoon snack, then picked up the shotgun that he had stolen from one of his mother’s friends near Palm Desert and shortened by about four inches, Redlands Police Sgt. Bill Cranfill said.

Sirola slung the shotgun over his shoulder, donned a long coat and walked back to the school about 4 p.m., police later reconstructed.

Office secretary Jackie Hoar was on the phone and barely noticed Sirola as he walked through her outer office and stopped at Facciolo’s door. “I saw him bring the gun up to his shoulder--he didn’t say a word--and fired, just like that. Rick never looked up from his desk. Then he turned around and walked out.”

Hoar saw her boss thrown against the side of his chair, then slump to the ground. “His face looked grotesque, like a Halloween mask,” she said. “Part of his face wasn’t there.”

Two kindergarten children, in the back of Facciolo’s office, stood in frozen terror but were not physically hurt.

Hoar screamed and called 911. She was instructed to apply pressure to the wound while paramedics were being dispatched, and Facciolo--who never lost consciousness--recoiled in pain as she pressed a sweater against the gaping hole on the left side of his face.

But Facciolo doesn’t remember much of anything.

“It happened so quickly,” he said. “I was looking down at some papers on my desk and the next thing I knew, I heard a noise--a pop--and I had this strange feeling. I gasped for breath. I thought maybe I had a heart attack or a stroke--and that I had to keep breathing--but I knew I was bleeding.

“I’d like to say there was a tremendous amount of pain, but pain didn’t enter my mind,” he said. “I was focusing on just trying to breathe. I didn’t know I had been shot until I got to the emergency room.”

At Loma Linda University Medical Center, attendants immediately began reassuring Facciolo that he would be OK.

The shot struck the front left part of Facciolo’s jaw, fracturing it “like a hammer hitting ice,” a doctor said later. It also blew off his left cheek, tore off about half of his upper and lower lips and broke his teeth. The buckshot also grazed his left shoulder and fractured his collarbone.

Three days later, Facciolo underwent some 18 hours of surgery.

“There was a hole nearly the size of a soccer ball where his face should have been,” said Dr. Douglas Hendricks, a plastic reconstructive surgeon at Loma Linda University Medical Center. “The tissue was flayed open and blown back like a flap, and the front two-thirds of his jaw on both sides was so finely fractured there was nothing left to put together.”

Hendricks and Facciolo agreed on a reconstructive surgery strategy so novel Hendricks would later present it in a paper to peers.

Rather than rebuild his patient’s face piecemeal, he removed a 10-inch length of the fibula bone from Facciolo’s left leg--one of the body’s few spares--and removed a single, 15-inch-by-10-inch section of skin from his calf, cut from a pattern based on the facial wound.

By notching the leg bone so it could be reconfigured into the shape of the lower jaw, and by attaching it with screws and plates to the jaw’s hinge in the back of the mouth, Facciolo would end up with a single new jaw bone.

And by using a single piece of skin from Facciolo’s leg, Hendricks would be able to fashion his patient a new cheek, lips and neck skin and avoid a quilt-like patchwork. Skin from Facciolo’s thigh was grafted onto his calf.

In follow-up surgery, Hendricks shortened the jaw slightly. “When we put the bone in, we erred slightly on it being too long,” he said. “I wasn’t happy with it.”

Because Facciolo’s existing facial and neck skin relaxed with time, it was stretched over his cheek in two subsequent surgeries over the replacement skin. Today, only about a third of the initial replacement skin still shows, with a single scar.

Facciolo’s left cheek is concave because the new skin is not as thick as was the fatty cheek. He typically hides the slight deformity with his hand when he sits, to deflect people’s stares.

Still to come: dental surgery for dentures. Until then, Facciolo--a gourmet cook--has not been able to chew into a steak, one of his passions.

“He is Superman,” said Hendricks. “When I ask him about scheduling another surgery, he asks me if I’m busy that afternoon.

“I don’t know if he hasn’t dealt [with the shooting] at all, or he has dealt with it so well, but he holds very little anger at what life has dealt him, or toward the child. It is amazing,” Hendricks said. “When I told him he’s my hero, he said ‘Thanks’ and shrugged it off.”

Said his wife, Suzanne, “I knew he was a very strong man but, to be honest, I didn’t know how strong he was until this happened. He’s phenomenal.”

There are days of frustration and anger, she said, “but it doesn’t last very long. Maybe that’s because he loves his work so much. Three days after he got out of the hospital, he was back at work.”

Facciolo said he wants to speak publicly about youth violence--not to cynically second-guess what prompted his own shooting, but to brainstorm constructive solutions to the problem of child criminals.

And he said he is motivated to work harder than ever to excel as a school principal.

“I’d rather be known as a principal of a great school that is working to become even greater, than be known as the principal who got shot,” he said. “I realize what happened to me, I accept it and I’m moving on.”

“I asked a psychologist to affirm that what I was thinking was OK, because I thought I should be feeling differently. He said I was doing OK.”