Still Healing a Year After the Rampage

Eleanor Kadish gets up at 2 a.m. to look at her boy and listen to him breathe.

There are moments, after all her 6-year-old son has been through, when she just needs to stand in a dark room and treasure his presence.

Twelve months ago Ben Kadish was lying on the floor of the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills with two bullets in him and life gushing out. Months later he was still bedridden, with a colostomy bag stitched to his perforated stomach and doctor’s orders not to eat Gummi Bear candies, cookies or pizza.

Mommy, I can’t do this, I don’t want to do this anymore, he cried.

But you’re Ben Kadish, his mother told him, as if he were her little prizefighter. You’re Ben Kadish, and Ben Kadish doesn’t quit. Ever.

The pep talk worked. A year after the Aug. 10, 1999, shooting at the JCC summer camp, Ben is more or less back to his normal pizza-eating, mischief-making self, though his parents are still coming to grips with the most emotionally taxing year of their lives.

“I sound crazy, I know, I know, just staring at him in bed,” Eleanor Kadish said. “But it’s not like there’s a guidebook on how to handle something like this.”

For the Kadishes and the families of the three other children shot at the day camp, allegedly by a neo-Nazi, the last year has been a long, wrenching balancing act. Although they’ve each dealt with the shooting differently, all the families have had to juggle relief and anger, hope and cynicism, being protective and letting go, and trying to heal in private while their community beckons them to get involved.

What angered people the most was that the four children weren’t caught in a cross-fire--they were targets. And during the last year, Ben Kadish, Mindy Finkelstein, Joshua Stepakoff and James Zidell have struggled to reclaim some of the innocence they lost.

‘Your Life Can Change in a Minute’

Mindy Finkelstein, 16 years old at the time and a counselor at the camp, remembers every sensation of the moment she got shot: the rush of pain as two bullets drilled into her right leg, one splitting the femur, the other ripping apart her shin; paramedics screaming that little boys were bleeding; blood washing out of her; the feeling of wet carpet against her legs; the feeling she was going to die, that day, in the reception hall of the North Valley JCC.

“When I heard the paramedics yell that some campers had been shot,” she said, “I was thinking in my head: Is this Columbine or what?”

A half-hour later, her mother, Donna, dashed into the emergency room at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills and nearly dropped to her knees. Mindy’s clothes were soaked in blood. She was crying. She was scared. The waiting room was packed with hysterical parents. And reporters. And more and more police.

“You know how they say your life can change in a minute?” Donna Finkelstein said. “It’s true.”

A month later, Mindy wheeled into Chatsworth High to begin her senior year. She had been well-known and well-liked before the shooting, but after all the publicity--her picture ran on the front page of the newspaper, and footage of her has been recycled countless times on CNN--she discovered a whole new world of popularity.

Teachers lavished praise on her and kept calling her a hero, which was really embarrassing, she said. Janitors gave her flowers. Students swarmed. Many begged to see the marks on her legs that look like they were pressed into her skin by a burning cigar.

“I love getting attention, but not that kind of attention,” she said.

But it kept coming.

In May, Mindy, whose leg had fully healed, stood in the shadow of the Washington Monument and spoke to 700,000 people about what happened to her. Her mother had gotten in on the ground floor of the Million Mom March against gun violence and used the summer camp story to raise awareness (and money) to support gun control. Mindy was one of the last speakers at the event in Washington.

She closed by saying “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you.”

Her mother cried.

One shadow remains: the trial.

Come February, Mindy is expecting to testify against Buford O. Furrow Jr., the man accused of trying to kill her.

“It’s terrifying,” said Mindy, who has spent the summer working at Linens ‘N Things and getting ready to go off to college--she didn’t want to say where. “I can just see him looking at me, laughing, saying, ha-ha, ha-ha, I shot you.”

It troubles Mindy that she was targeted only because she’s Jewish.

“I want to know why he has so much hate for me because I’m Jewish,” she said. “If he sat in a room with me for five minutes, I promise he wouldn’t shoot me.”

‘The Thing That Happened at the JCC’

Loren Lieb tells the story of how her 6-year-old son, Joshua, whose leg was broken by a bullet, shared a room at Childrens Hospital in Hollywood with a boy who barely survived a horrific car accident.

That boy had a plate in his head, stitches all over his body, tubes, hoses, wires running out of him as if he were some sort of science project.

While Joshua had received enough balloons to float him home, the other boy hadn’t received one. Both his parents had been killed.

For Lieb, the moment was like the story of the man who complained he had no shoes until he met a man who had no feet. It was a turning point that helped her gain perspective.

“We realized we were lucky,” Lieb said. “There are so many people out there quietly experiencing tragedies over their kitchen table. Our son was going to get better. Some kids don’t.”

Two months later her husband flew to Washington. Alan Stepakoff, a computer systems manager, also wanted to lend his family’s brush with tragedy to a greater cause and helped lobby for tougher hate-crime provisions. He met powerful men like Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). He walked the corridors of power and sat in front of heavy wooden desks and talked about his boy Josh. The activity burned off some of his anger. Meanwhile his wife, an immunologist, was helping with the Million Mom March from their Northridge home.

“When this kind of thing happens, you feel helpless, but to a certain extent you feel emblazoned,” he said.

The Senate passed the tougher hate-crime measure, but Stepakoff and his wife didn’t exactly celebrate with Joshua and his older brother, Seth. For them, there’s an intentional disconnect between their children and anything related to the shooting.

“Shooting, well, that’s a pretty upsetting word,” Lieb said. “If we mention it at all, we call it the thing that happened at the JCC.”

Joshua’s wounded leg is all better now, but he still won’t talk about the incident. If he’s playing outside and hears a siren, he’ll run inside. If he sees a helicopter buzzing above him, he’ll stare until someone tugs him away.

A few weeks ago he had more nightmares. His mother went to his room to soothe him.

“I was stroking his head, telling him that nobody’s going to hurt him, that we’re not going to let anybody hurt him,” she said. “But then I had to cut myself off midsentence. I can’t tell him that anymore. And now I don’t know what’s worse: Making him more fearful or lying to him.”

‘How Can You Not Want to Do Something?’

The Zidells have a completely different take on it.

Like Josh, James Zidell is 7 years old, Jewish, has a scar from last summer’s shooting and has since returned to summer camp at the JCC.

But the similarities stop there.

Josh, for instance, recently told a visitor, “I saw a helicopter at the beach and it was taking somebody away but not somebody who had been hurt by a man with a . . . “ His sentence conspicuously trailed off because of an emotional block against the word “gun.”

James, on the other hand, came bounding up to a visitor and said: “Wanna see my scar? Wanna see where I got shot?”

James was the least seriously wounded of the four shot at the camp. A bullet sliced cleanly through his left heel without hitting any bone. That first day at the hospital, while a team of surgeons scrambled to save Ben Kadish’s life and Joshua Stepakoff sat on an operating table silent and shellshocked, James, with a little help from a playful nurse, wrapped himself up in bandages like a mummy.

“James was not permanently maimed,” said his mother, Francine Zidell. “Our attitude would be completely different if he was seriously hurt.”

James plays with cap guns. He talks freely about the shooting. His mother, a schoolteacher, says she is no more protective about where he goes or what he does than she used to be.

“This was such a freak thing,” she said. “I don’t worry that someone is going to shoot him again. I worry about things like a big wave at the beach or a baseball hitting him in the head.”

During the last year, the Zidells, who live a few blocks from the JCC in Granada Hills, have been noticeably absent from any of the rallies, marches, meetings and discussions focused on the event. Their absence has mystified other parents.

“After an incident like this, how can you not want to do something?” asked Loren Lieb, who remains friendly with the Zidells.

Gary Zidell, James’ father and a real estate appraiser, said his family is just as angry as anyone else. But he feels, especially after this incident, that gun control is futile and hate crime laws ineffectual.

“Our focus,” he said, “is on the trial.”

To all the families’ ire, Furrow’s trial has been delayed until February. The 38-year-old former mechanic from Olympia, Wash., also stands accused of killing Filipino American mailman Joseph Ileto in a Chatsworth driveway after Furrow left the camp. Investigators have said Furrow confessed to killing Ileto and wounding the four youths, along with the camp’s 68-year-old receptionist, Isabelle Shalometh, as a “wake-up call” for Americans to kill Jews.

Sometimes Gary Zidell has a fantasy of being in the middle of a crowd so big it stretches toward the horizon, where everyone is wearing I-Hate-Buford shirts and jeering the accused killer. “If we’re going to get a million people to march,” he said, referring to the Million Mom March his family avoided, “then let’s get a million people to march against him.”

‘Hey, World, I’m Not Going Anywhere’

By the start of this summer, the shooting at the JCC finally seemed behind the Kadishes, at least as much as it could be. Ben’s left leg was stronger and, though he ran with a little limp, he could almost keep up with the other kids. He was eating more and up to 104 pounds, impressive heft for a 6-year-old. He was dressing up his dog Kahlua in his parents’ clothes, a favorite prank of his. He even wanted to go back to summer camp and went with his mother to scout out a few places.

But one day while they were touring a day camp, not a Jewish one, but a camp not too far from his home in North Hills, Ben turned to his mother and asked her a question that creased her heart.

“Mommy, where should I run if a bad guy comes in again? Where should I hide if somebody shoots at me?”

It’s been a long, long year for Ben Kadish. And his family.

Ben was shot in the stomach and the leg and lost so much blood that by the time paramedics got to him, he had no pulse. It was only after several harried surgeries, with some of the top medical talent in the state leaning over him, that doctors expressed hope he would live.

“I will never match that kind of pain again,” Eleanor Kadish said.

His recovery--and the fact that he is a normal, happy, playful boy, in love with balls and dogs and ice cream sandwiches--is nothing short of miraculous.

Because his intestines were so seriously damaged, he had to rely for two months on a colostomy bag, which diverted waste into a container on his hip.

Then came the operations on his leg. Rods and pins were buried beneath his flesh, and twice a week nurses came to clean his wounds. It was torture. Ben would scream and scream. His mother would go off into a corner, out of Ben’s sight, and cry.

Sometimes the two got into shouting matches because Ben said he didn’t want any more pain.

That’s when his mother told him he is Ben Kadish, that’s who he is, and Ben Kadish isn’t a quitter.

“I’m afraid that’s gotten to his head a little,” said Eleanor Kadish, who only recently returned to work as an executive recruiter. “Sometimes we’ll pull up to a red light and Ben will say to me, ‘The light’s going to turn green now, Mom, because Ben Kadish is in the car.’ ”

But Eleanor Kadish accepts these things. She knows full well the price anti-Semitism can exact. During World War II, her father was enslaved by the Nazis making railroad ties, and the rest of his family was wiped out in concentration camps. She grew up never meeting a grandparent, aunt, uncle or cousin.

But God or somebody or something blessed her pudgy 6-year-old son with an extra dose of resilience, she is convinced. Just thinking about it that way makes her voice tremble.

“I mean, talk about heroes, Ben’s the ultimate hero. He clung to life. He said, ‘Hey, world, I’m not going anywhere.’ To me, that meant everything.”