Mother Struggles to Cope With Loss of Son, ‘Best Friend’

Mary Corson can’t take a breath without thinking of her son Stephan.

She worked for him, saved her money for him, devoted weekends to watching him play baseball or juke down the football field for the Chatsworth Chiefs peewee football squad.

Six weeks ago she moved to Palmdale, a windy, sandy place where she didn’t know anybody, hoping to find a house she could afford and a safe community for her 13-year-old son.

Four weeks later, on Nov. 24, she buried him.

Mary Corson was at work in a Panorama City hospital, transcribing doctor’s scribble into clean copy, when she got the call that creased her heart. Stephan, the youngest of her three sons, had been knocked unconscious in a fistfight at school and was in the emergency room on a respirator, a school principal said.

Mary’s mind was scattered as she raced the 50 miles up the freeway from Panorama City to Antelope Valley Hospital. Wasn’t it just that morning that she had hugged her boy before school, slipped a cherry Pop-Tart into his hand and said, “Love ya, Steph, love ya,” as he wheeled out the door?

Before she made it to the hospital, Stephan died. It’s still not completely clear what caused his death, a mystery that bores away at Mary whenever she thinks of her son--which is all the time.

“We had plans,” she said in an emotional interview last week. “He was getting his grades up. I was saving money. We were going to have a house with our own piece of dirt to play on.”

After two weeks of interviewing children who witnessed the fight, Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives provided a preliminary account last week of what happened Nov. 19 on the concrete playground of Juniper Intermediate School.

The trouble began in class when the other boy involved, a 14-year-old, was ordered by a teacher to pick up spitballs, said Sheriff’s Sgt. Barry Wish. Stephan tossed some scraps of paper onto the floor and told the boy to pick those up, too, Wish said. The boy refused and the two started arguing.

When class let out, Stephan socked the other boy--who then fought back, knocking Stephan to the ground, Wish said, citing witness statements. Stephan banged his head on the pavement, which detectives said may have been what killed him.

Authorities are waiting for final autopsy results, not expected for several weeks, before they rule whether Stephan’s death was an accident or a case of involuntary manslaughter and therefore grounds for criminal charges against the other boy.

Stephan’s mother doesn’t believe her son started the fight and wants the other boy to go to jail. Some of Stephan’s friends told her the other boy attacked Stephan after the fight was broken up, she said. At 95 pounds and small for his age, Stephan was known to help break up fights, not start them.

“He is the sweetest boy, friends with everybody, never angry or upset,” his mother said.

Every day is now a long day for Mary Corson. She still speaks in the present tense about her dead son.

Her Son’s Birth Signaled Life Change

Mary remembers what it felt like Aug. 21, 1986, the day Stephan was born.

“Suddenly, I saw life in a different way,” she said, and for a moment her grief gave way to a smile. “I realized there was a beautiful world out there and that for my baby to be happy, I had to be happy.”

At the time, the Corson family was squeezed into a tight apartment in North Hollywood. Her husband and Stephan’s dad, Freddie Anderson, was a drummer in a jazz band. Mary, who had her first son when she was 15, was a medical transcriptionist.

The jazz band thing didn’t work out and Stephan’s dad left the family a few years later. Soon after, Mary’s eldest son, Scott, joined the Army and Jay, the middle son, faded out of the picture, in and out of trouble with the law. Mary poured her life into Stephan.

When it was time for him to go to preschool, Mary went too, landing a job doing the preschool’s bookkeeping.

When Stephan was 5, Mary found an apartment in Canoga Park, the first of several moves to progressively better neighborhoods.

As he got older and showed signs of being a good athlete--quick, coordinated, spirited--she signed him up for karate, football, baseball and other sports and went to every event.

“Steph was going to be our major league star, the one who made it,” she said.

On Oct. 24, Mary and Stephan moved to Palmdale, a growing high-desert city with some of the most affordable new homes in Los Angeles County.

Stephan, who was known as a shameless mama’s boy, quickly made friends, as evidenced by some of the cards the family received after he died.

“Polite. Honest. Amazing in his own way,” one student wrote.

Death Reawakened Racial Tensions

In the days since Stephan’s funeral--he lay in a cream-colored suit, white roses on his chest--Mary has felt so alone she doesn’t want to step outside her wood-paneled apartment. She’s a 46-year-old woman devastated by losing, in one unexplainable blow, both her son and her best friend.

The incident has rekindled racial tensions in the area. Last month, three white skinheads from nearby Lancaster were sentenced to prison for beating a black man to death with a wooden board.

Black activists from Los Angeles have come to Palmdale to help members of the Corson family in their quest for the justice they feel they deserve. Some Palmdale residents have said the schoolyard fight is none of the activists’ business.

The boy who hit Stephan is getting preferential treatment because he is white, said Melanie Lomax, a Century City attorney and former Los Angeles Police Commission president who has been hired to represent the Corson family.

“We all know if a black boy slugged a white boy and the white boy died, the black boy would be sitting in jail right now,” Lomax said.

Palmdale school officials have said race played no role in the fight or how it has been handled. They have suspended the other boy and deferred further punishment, possibly expulsion, until the autopsy is complete.

Mary squinches her eyes shut every time she hears the word autopsy, and her mind takes her somewhere else.

It’s a place where she sees a boy not even 5 feet tall combing his hair in front of a bathroom mirror, sprinkling a few drops of cologne on his neck.

That was his ritual every morning. She can still smell the cologne.

“Stephan was the reason I got out of bed every morning,” she said. “He was my little man.”