A Sad Crusade

In the 2 1/2 months since a carjacker pumped a bullet into Alan Peterson Sr., killing the 62-year-old businessman in front of a Carson Jack-In-The-Box, his son has thrown himself into the role of crusader.

Alan Peterson Jr. has created a reward fund, advertised it on billboards, appeared at court hearings for a 16-year-old suspect, and spoken of his family’s loss to media and benefactors with the same public relations savvy he displays to clients of his marketing firm.

But behind his grim expression, Peterson, 31, is torn between anger and compassion. As much as he wishes that minors could receive the death penalty, he wishes that the boy charged with killing his father could have a dad as loving as his own.

“I think I would like to spend the rest of my life instilling in this kid the life story of Alan Mason Peterson Sr. to the point that he could love my father as much as I do,” he said. “Then he could have a broken heart as much as I do.”

What happened to Alan Peterson Sr. on Nov. 14 could have happened to anyone, family and friends say. There was nothing threatening about the restaurant right off the freeway, especially at noontime--even an affluent Laguna Beach man driving a Lexus shouldn’t have had to worry. “A million-in-one chance,” the son says.

Those close to the Petersons have lost a measure of security and trust in others. Each has had to ask why an adolescent barely old enough to drive, a boy they know very little about, would be compelled to kill for a Lexus LS400. Each has been forced to contemplate the nature of evil.

The suspect “doesn’t know that Alan started from the ground up, building chain-link fences,” said Greg Chase, who helped Alan Peterson Sr. build the Peterson / Chase General Engineering Construction Inc. firm in Irvine from “next to nothing” into a 70-person company.

The suspect, whose identity has not been disclosed because of his age, faces a preliminary hearing before a Compton Juvenile Court judge today. Prosecutors will eventually seek permission to try him for murder as an adult. His public defender, citing the boy’s age, declined comment.

The day he died, Peterson had just finished a business meeting in Carson. Before heading back on the freeway, he stopped at a Jack-In-The-Box on Avalon Boulevard. Even this fact pains the family. Peterson had just sworn off fast food, his son says. He was probably stopping just to use the bathroom.

Alan Sr. was leaving, about to unlock his car, when three males pulled up on the street next to the parking lot in an Oldsmobile they had allegedly carjacked earlier that day. Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives believe that they were juvenile gang members who targeted senior citizens for carjackings.

The rest of the details are sketchy, but according to sheriff’s and district attorney’s reports, the 16-year-old suspect confronted Peterson and a brief struggle ensued--ending with the suspect firing point-blank into Peterson’s chest. The two other suspects have not been identified.

According to one account, Peterson resisted giving up his keys. His son cannot fathom this.

“He would have handed over his keys,” Peterson said. “He would tell his highway road crews that if they were ever approached out on the field [by robbers] to hand over their wallet, keys, equipment, whatever. ‘We can’t replace good employees,’ he would say.” His father was such a believer in other people’s honesty that what the carjackers interpreted as resistance was probably sheer disbelief, the son speculates.

Alan Sr. died in a hospital 30 minutes later, before any of his family members had been told of the shooting.

A social worker from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center called Alan Peterson Jr. just as he walked into his Newport office. His mother, Carole, got the news from a secretary when she called her husband’s office from her car phone to make a lunch date. Peterson raced to the office of his 29-year-old sister, Laura, whose first tearful words were, “I want my daddy.” Then they picked up his mother, who had pulled off the freeway, stunned.

Carole Peterson says she tries to exhaust herself each day at her job as a special education teacher to defeat the insomnia that has plagued her for the last three months. Laura stays close by her side, often completing her mother’s sentences when sobs prevent her from continuing.

The son has reacted with fierce purposefulness. “From the day my father died, I was separating myself from my emotions,” he says. “There in the hospital, I knew I had to be rational and reasonable if I was going to make sure they caught the killers.” He stayed late into the night with sheriff’s detectives at the scene of the crime. He offered a reward--now $25,000--for information about the carjackers.

Ask him how many hours he has spent on the reward fund, a hotline, calls to detectives and lawyers and his resolute expression fades into weariness. He cannot calculate the time, he says. He is too preoccupied with resolving the case and his emotions.

His thoughts about the suspect range from near-empathetic to spiteful. He wonders if the suspect grew up in a broken home, then quickly calls him “truly subhuman. I feel sickened when I see him.”

A Corona del Mar resident, he says he has done volunteer work with gang members and underprivileged youths in Orange County, and has come to understand “that some people are just stuck in that environment, but still want to live successful lives like my father did. . . . Had this same kid been raised in my family, it would have been impossible for him to end up like that.”

He is a self-styled libertarian Republican who once chaired a local GOP group, but politics provide no easy answer, either. “I could blame the liberals for this complacency toward violence, this dependency. But I don’t know what causes it.”

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The family’s most personal rituals of grieving are based on small, comforting acts rather than public gestures or hopes for justice. On Christmas, Laura hung an ornament--a silver star--on her father’s wall crypt in the mortuary. On his 63rd birthday last month, the family went out to dinner. Alan Jr. spent the day talking to reporters. Carole brought a rose on her weekly visit to the mortuary.

“I tap on his niche, and he gives me a tap back,” she said.

When family and friends gather, they reminisce: Alan Sr.’s sweet tooth, and his mother’s applesauce cake recipe that Laura used to make on his birthday. The shy man’s honesty, so unyielding that he would not take soap out of hotel rooms. Three years ago, when he went on the reverse-bungee ride at the Orange County Fair with his children, they kept it a secret from Carole, because she worries.

Each family member has said that conviction and punishment of the killer, no matter how just or harsh, will not heal the wounds.

“Sure, I would like to see justice done,” Carole said. “But it will not bring my husband back, I know that. What I would like is having him shot in the leg, or the arm instead.”

Watching the Peterson family cope with the tragedy, Chase, a close friend, said he worries. He has little faith in the justice system. He believes its lack of harsh punishments leads to crimes like this. He is concerned what the system’s failures might do to Alan Peterson Jr.

“I don’t want to see him get hurt by the justice system,” Chase said. “It does not always work the way it should and it can hurt a young guy like Alan, who is so focused on seeing justice done.”

Chase, married and the father of two children, says he has always been careful, but takes extra precautions now.

“But what can I do? Just a guy like myself, what can I do to see justice done?” he said. “I’ve donated to the justice fund. But I’m going to leave it in the hands of the system. I don’t know if there is a justice for something like that. It is all of our problems.”