A Real-Life Horror Story for Halloween

I once put a plastic pumpkin on my front porch, a few days before Halloween. It didn’t cost much. Five or six bucks, no more. It had a wacky jack-o’-lantern face that looked a little like the Alfred E. Neuman character from Mad magazine, and it glowed in the dark.

It was gone when I got home.

Stolen. I looked in the yard, just in case it had somehow blown off the porch. But I knew it hadn’t. Somebody swiped it.

“Kids,” I muttered to myself.

I blame kids for everything. I’m that kind of cranky old man. And the “kids” I blame can be 5 or 10 or even 20 years old. I’m an equal opportunity kid-blamer.

It would never occur to me that some adult would trespass onto my porch, just to rip off a plastic pumpkin. As if a grown-up had never done something so childish.

I remember being so annoyed that day. The pumpkin meant nothing to me. Being robbed meant something. Could I leave no possession unprotected? Would somebody steal my welcome mat next? Did I need a burglar alarm, a barking dog and a baseball bat to guard my property?

Suppose I had caught the kids who stole my pumpkin? What if I had surprised them as they tiptoed off my porch?

Would I have chased them? Called the cops on them? Swung a bat at them?

Over a $5 pumpkin?

*

The story of Brandon Ketsdever and Pete Solomona is as frightening a Halloween story as any I have ever heard. It scares the hell out of me, as it should everybody.

Maybe it takes a story like this to make kids think twice about pulling pranks and adults think a thousand times before striking back.

Because the 17-year-old Ketsdever is dead and the 47-year-old Solomona is looking at the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison for killing a kid.

These aren’t a couple of career criminals. This is a popular student-athlete from a La Palma high school and a well-liked, churchgoing Buena Park grandfather.

Two valuable lives destroyed, all because of an adult’s unforgivable overreaction to a kid’s stupid stunt.

I can’t shake the image of a man so furious at having a plastic Halloween pumpkin stolen that he came out of the house holding a .357 magnum.

“Kids,” he must have muttered to himself, the same way I once did.

Only he didn’t sic a dog on them, didn’t dial 911, didn’t smash the kids’ car window with a bat. He didn’t even aim his gun at the kids’ tires.

He aimed at the kids.

You know the rest. The gun went off. Either he pulled the trigger on purpose or it went off accidentally. What does it matter? A kid was killed. What was a man doing aiming a .357 magnum at a car full of kids?

Baseball bats don’t go off accidentally.

I even hesitate at making that remark. Even a bat can kill. Thinking back to my own experience, would I have swung a hunk of wood at a boy who was taunting me? Robbing me?

Maybe indoors I would. A break-in is different. Pete Solomona, though, was not fending off home invaders. A car was outside his house. The kids inside it had apparently ripped off his 3 1/2-foot pumpkin. One even supposedly made a smart crack, like: “What are you gonna do about it?”

He did something horrible, irrevocable.

This was Monday night, around 9 o’clock. Something like 36 hours later, Pete Solomona was inside a Fullerton courtroom, a prisoner of the law and of his conscience. A sister of Brandon Ketsdever stood outside court, holding up a photo of him in a football uniform, saying, “He’s still with us, watching over us.”

And a boy who accompanied Brandon that night, who saw his friend die, said if he had it to do over, “I’d just stay home. And I’d tell him to go home.”

Amen.

*

Halloween night will be upon us soon. Its entire purpose is to be a spooky little “holiday,” with ghosts and ghouls and tricks played on fools.

It wasn’t meant to last two or three weeks. Nor was it meant to scare the living daylights out of people.

The tricks are supposed to be innocent. The innocent victims are supposed to laugh them off.

You’re not supposed to rob people. You’re not supposed to shoot people.

One long-ago Halloween night, when I wasn’t at home to answer my doorbell, I found eggs thrown at my door. Oh, was I angry. I could have just killed those kids.

Over eggs.

Scary creatures, human beings.

*

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com