Young Victims, All-Too-Routine Pain as Gunshots Ring Out

Rebel McMahon was 3 years old. Blond, with ears he hadn’t quite grown into. Smart as a whip. Put a magazine in front of him, point to a picture of an airplane, and Rebel would say what kind it was.

Police say the 12-gauge shotgun was less than 12 inches from his smooth face when his mother pulled its trigger. When the law came, Rebel’s body was on the sofa, his pudgy legs peeking from a sheet.

“Like he’d taken a nap,” the sheriff said.

Vincent Smith was 16, a boy on the verge of manhood. Freckle-faced, fond of stupid jokes, a proud son who wanted to be a cop like his dad and his uncle. He went to an all-boys Roman Catholic school and to Mass every Sunday. He was never in trouble.

Until one Tuesday. Police say Vincent woke before dawn, grabbed his father’s 9-millimeter handgun and his mother’s car keys, and drove south. By sundown the next day, he was wanted for killing a cop only five years his senior. In a creek bed near a Wal-Mart 1,000 miles from home, he was shot to death by police.

These are the children President Clinton recently talked about--not by name, but by number. On average, guns kill 12 children a day, he told the nation after 6-year-old Kayla Rolland was killed Feb. 29. At her Michigan elementary school. By a fellow first-grader who carried a gun from home.

But for all the notoriety attached to schoolyard shootings, most youngsters who are shot and killed live and die in obscurity, without national headlines.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4,223 juveniles were killed by guns in 1997, the latest year for which figures are available. The president’s dozen-a-day figure--he amended his statement from 13--was based on CDC numbers.

Within 48 hours of Kayla’s killing, which received so much attention, several more children were shot to death. Here are two of their stories.

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Edith McClesky lived pretty far out, even by rural Texas standards.

Up a clay road, through tangles of pine, looms an aging gray house with plywood floors. There, the unemployed mother reared three children.

They lived on the outskirts of Shelbyville, population 1,100, where Texas bleeds into Louisiana. They survived on food stamps and a child support check meant for the family’s youngest member. Rebel McMahon’s daddy, Tommy McMahon, lived north in Tehana. He sent $280 each month.

On the same day Kayla Rolland was shot in Michigan’s Mount Morris Township, McMahon was awarded custody of his son in a Shelby County courtroom about 200 miles east of Dallas.

The judge agreed with Rebel’s father: McClesky was inattentive, had no car, lived in isolation and kept loaded guns in the house, a violation of her probation for firing a shotgun at another ex-husband, Dennis Ray Moore, the father of Sunni, 11, and Todd, 15.

It was Sunni who bathed Rebel and told him stories. It was Todd who played games with him. Their mother didn’t seem too interested, said Grover Russell, an attorney appointed to safeguard Rebel’s interests during the hearing.

“Around here, plenty of people live in old houses like that,” Russell said. “But those kids were on their own.”

McClesky was ordered to give up Rebel on March 2. That afternoon, according to local law enforcement officials, McClesky called the attorney who represented her in the custody dispute.

“I killed my baby,” she allegedly said.

It took deputies nearly an hour to reach the secluded shack. McClesky was waiting outside, they said, in a snarl of branches and dead vines that constituted her frontyard.

“He’s on the couch,” she told them.

McClesky was arrested on suspicion of killing her son. She is being held in lieu of bail at Shelby County Jail and awaits a court-appointed lawyer. Since being locked up, authorities said, she has refused to answer questions. Sunni and Todd are staying with relatives in Louisiana.

“In this case,” said prosecutor Lynda Russell, “death is the only justice.”

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To his family and friends, the answer can only be this: Vincent Smith went to sleep an exemplary 16-year-old. He woke up as someone else.

“I just want you to know that the same boy who pulled that trigger is not the same boy who we raised and loved. Something in him snapped and only God knows what,” wrote his father, police Lt. Thomas C. Smith of Buffalo, N.Y.

Lt. Smith was writing to the family of 21-year-old Sheriff’s Deputy Todd Widman, whom his son allegedly shot to death in Hiawatha, Kan., two days after running away from home.

Vinnie Smith had been an altar boy. At Holy Family Roman Catholic Church, he mowed the lawn and shoveled snow. He adored his father and his uncle and wanted to be a cop, like them.

On a Monday night, Vinnie made tea for his parents. Then he went to sleep.

“He went to bed a good kid and woke up scared and alone,” said Mary Smith, no relation, a longtime family friend. “Maybe he was too quiet. Maybe he kept too much inside.”

What he kept inside is a mystery. His grieving parents don’t understand. Neither do his classmates at Bishop Timon-St. Jude High School.

“He was a real innocent kid. He wouldn’t even stand up for himself. He’d just back off,” said friend Ryan O’Neill.

His parents and grown brothers and sister searched all day and night Tuesday before filing a missing-person report on the baby of the family.

By that time, Vinnie was somewhere between Buffalo and Kansas.

Vinnie didn’t know how to drive, his parents said. But he navigated his mother’s Ford Tempo to northwest Missouri, where he ditched it and began hitchhiking.

On Wednesday, about 5:45 p.m., a Kansas motorist complained that a homeless person was walking on U.S. 73.

The Brown County Sheriff’s Department dispatched Widman, a part-time rookie studying criminal justice at Washburn University in Topeka.

Widman was born and raised in Hiawatha, population 3,600, just south of the Nebraska line. His mother, Brenda, is a secretary at the high school. His sister, Jill, is a junior there.

Widman drove for nearly an hour before spotting Smith trudging along the western edge of town, toting a duffel bag.

Amy Langley was driving to Wal-Mart with her two children. She noticed the boy and the deputy talking by the side of the road. Everything seemed low-key, she said.

“I would have stopped if I thought there was going to be a problem,” she said.

Sheriff Lamar Shoemaker said Smith sat in the front seat of Widman’s cruiser and was not handcuffed. What happened between the two isn’t clear.

“Both parties who know aren’t here anymore,” Shoemaker said.

Seven minutes after Langley drove by with her kids, Widman radioed that he had been shot, authorities said.

Hit twice, Widman died at a hospital.

Long after dark, deputies and state police tracked Smith into a wooded creek bed near the Wal-Mart.

Helicopters beamed searchlights across rolling farmland. According to law enforcement officials, Smith crouched in the creek, then jumped up and began firing. A Kansas state trooper shot him in the chest.

At his funeral, a friend described the boy he knew--a polite, caring son. A gentle, silly joke teller. A boy who sounded too good to be true.

“The question which has swirled around our community and a community 1,000 miles away cannot be answered today,” said the Rev. William Bigelow, “and probably will not be answered on this side of the heavenly Jerusalem.”

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John Milburn in Kansas City, Megan Stack in Houston, Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo and Kelly Wiese in Topeka contributed to this report.