Flowers Against the Fence

Autumn is coming. I can feel it in the early morning air that frames the day’s heat, a crisp tingle that chills the sunrise. I can see it in the leaves beginning to fall from the trees that grow in our yard.

It is the first day of school for my friend Nicole, and that too signals the fading days of summer, a mark on the calendar of a child’s growth that helps chart the seasons of our lives.

Nicole is 10, and I watched her go off to the fifth grade with a hug and a wave, loving both the challenge and the conviviality of a classroom that calls our young to the knowledge that awaits.

I see her turn for a final moment and smile before she enters the schoolyard, and the smile lingers on the vivid air even as she disappears among her gathering friends.

I think about that look, and as I do her face becomes that of a young boy, the smile emulsified on film, frozen in time, and I realize with a start that I am superimposing the face of Juian Coronel on that of my granddaughter.

This was to have been his first day of school too.

Instead he lies among the statistics of more than 5,000 children killed each year in this country by accidental gunfire, another small body wrapped in the tears that society sheds for its young.

And the mounds of flowers placed against the fences of gunfire’s victims appear once more in the City of Angels. The candles of remorse flicker in the cooling twilights of autumn.

*

The photograph of Juian Coronel, the last one we will ever see, appeared in newspapers and on television, the sweetness of his face looking out at a world that awaited with who knew how many wonders.

There is an easiness to his smile, the same kind of innocence that radiates through Nicole’s smile, and the eyes glow with anticipation. One can imagine that moments after the picture was taken, Juian spun away and raced toward the adventures that each moment holds for a boy of 11.

But the running stopped, and now we grieve.

Exactly what happened just after midnight last Friday remains unclear. There was a gun in the house and Juian alone, or with a brother, probably thought it was unloaded. It wasn’t. By the time paramedics reached his home in South-Central Los Angeles, he was dead.

That death is unlikely to cause even the tiniest disruption in the rhythms of the days that structure our lives. One small boy disappearing from the face of the Earth is not apt to create a large emptiness in space.

Some will grieve, I among them, who cry for each child’s death on the planet’s face or among the city’s numbers, but most will go about their business grateful, if they think about it at all, that the child who died wasn’t theirs.

I just keep seeing that face on the trembling air of the coming autumn and wondering how we could have saved Juian’s life.

*

I won’t belabor the statistics of gun deaths. You’ve heard them all, and so have I. And by hearing them too often they become yet another accepted peril among the 10,000 that exist in today’s violent society, each one indexed with a body lying in blood.

However the lines of the death graphs may swing upward, there is at least some consolation in the efforts being made to end the tragedies that the click of a trigger can create. The banning of bullets, Saturday night specials and assault rifles won’t bring anyone back to life, but it might save another life somewhere down the line.

There are miles to go in the effort. With a gun in every fourth house in L.A. County, getting rid of them won’t be easy. But get rid of them we must.

I realize that when this appears I will hear from those whose advocacy of firearms is a bluster of rationalization rooted in antiquated constitutional rights and the need for self-protection.

Cross their paths with mischief on your mind and they’ll blast you into hell. They’re always ready, guns nearby and loaded, their right to fire an unquestioned credo in the conduct of their scary nights.

When morning comes, the weapons of their survival are slipped into drawers, placed on shelves or stuck in closets, maybe loaded, maybe not, until the night comes again . . . or until a child’s hand reaches out.

The tragedy of Juian Coronel’s death is multiple. However one argues over guns, a reality exists. The boy is dead, his parents accused of criminal storage of a weapon, his three siblings placed in county custody.

The truth is sad, simple and undebatable: An entire family died last Friday night, and a gun did it.

Al Martinez can be reached via the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com.