‘The Other Side of the Broken Glass’

The man on the phone was irked by my column last week lamenting that a financially strapped single mother might have to foot the bill for her teenage son’s part in a destructive vandalism spree.

It’s not, Martin Welc says, that he was insensitive to the woman’s plight. It’s just that his Mission Viejo home was one of the vandals’ targets. It was his window and peace of mind shattered at 2 in the morning by a Squirt can full of soda. It is his 7-year-old son who normally would have been sleeping in the room where the can landed and “blew up like a bomb” amid the splintered glass. It is his son who, almost a month later, still doesn’t want to sleep alone in his room.

And so, he wondered if I wanted to hear “from a voice on the other side of the broken glass.”

I did, partly to correct any misimpression that I minimize the crime spree that struck dozens of Orange County residents. Or that I in any way absolve the teens for what they did.

It was the early morning of Sunday, Feb. 28, a typically tranquil night. Then the can came flying through the upstairs window. “I jumped up and saw the car leaving,” Welc says. “It quietly drove away, methodically, almost as if it were a mob hit.”

They had knocked out one neighbor’s window and tried to knock out another; knocked out a neighbor’s frontyard light and thrown the can with such force that it crashed through Welc’s window and wooden shutters before landing in his son’s bedroom.

With cobwebs in his head, Welc didn’t immediately assess the situation.

“What was scary was that I looked for my son and didn’t see him,” Welc says. “My faculties were not about me, I was dead-tired. . . . I saw the hole in the window. I was stepping on glass splinters on the floor, thinking, ‘What’s happened to him? Did someone grab him?’ ”

Momentarily, he remembered his son was under the weather and was sleeping in his mother’s bed. “I was still trying to make sense of what happened, my heart was racing. I ran downstairs in my pajamas and went outside, and that’s when I met my neighbor and found out they were victimized at the same time.”

Resisting an impulse to chase the assailants, he phoned 911. He couldn’t convince authorities to rush out, either. Helpless, with a damaged house and jangled psyche, Welc has set about in the aftermath of that night to sort things out.

The physical damage was only part of it, Welc says.

Human nature led him to contemplate suspects. Normal as that instinct is, he resents having had to do it. Even when he wasn’t thinking of specific people, the crime forced him to ask, anguished: “Who did this? Why did they do this? Why me?”

Anyone who’s been a crime victim knows the feeling. For the next week or so, Welc went to the front window whenever a car drove slowly by. His son wondered if the family should videotape strangers or get a gun to protect itself. When police arrested the four teenage suspects a week later, Welc familiarized himself with the particulars of their spree and read all the newspaper stories.

The case troubles him, Welc says, because although he’s not out for retribution, he feels there must be accountability. For one thing, his son hasn’t shaken the knowledge that the sanctuary of his bedroom was invaded.

“He still doesn’t want to sleep in there,” Welc says. “He wants to be cool, be a big boy, he doesn’t want to be a baby, that’s important to his ego; but he still wants to sleep with his mom.”

And then there is the thinking that Welc, a 43-year-old business professor at Saddleback College, has done about the vandals. “I was no saint growing up. I’m sure there are things I could have been held accountable for that I wasn’t. To that extent, I can relate.”

But in the next breath, he says, his parents knew where he was at 2 or 3 in the morning. Destruction of people’s property is not a petty crime, he says.

As for the issue in last week’s column--the role of parental responsibility for 16- and 17-year-olds--Welc acknowledges his ambivalence. “I don’t know if I have that clear,” he says, but asks this question: “Why should the victims have the bill passed on to them?”

He’s not sure if community service or some kind of “hard time” is appropriate for the teens. “I wish I had a better recommendation,” he says, “but am I looking to be reimbursed, yeah. I don’t get where I should be left holding the bag because I was in the wrong place. If my son or daughter [did something], I’d be held responsible. So part of me says my feet would be held to the very same fire.”

Eventually, a judge will determine the teen’s fate. The district attorney’s office notes that lower-income parents occasionally get off the financial hook for their children’s crimes.

All that aside, Welc wonders if the vandals don’t owe a visit to his and his neighbor’s homes, if only to show their faces to their three young boys. Welc says he might ask this of the vandals, who thought it was so much fun to terrorize so many families:

“What was going through your heads that you did this? Why did you choose our house? And explain it to a 7-year-old so he’ll want to sleep in his room again.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com