She Will Never Be Carefree Again

My younger daughter wore the purple and gold, reveling in the spirit of this small-town perfect world, and although it has been more than three years since she moved on to college, some of her best memories came as a basketball player at Santana High School.

But Monday, a yellow line of police tape identified Santana High School as a landmark to tragedy, my own daughter standing on a street named “Carefree,” of all things, saying never again will she be able to walk on this campus.

It has been hours since students were sent running for their lives, everyone coming together at the Albertsons across the street, mothers and fathers screaming, “Have you seen my boy,” as if everyone knew their boy, and in this small town, they did.

It has been hours, and while all the kids are gone, they have left one behind, and a callous TV newsman, learning my daughter was a former Santana Sultan, asks her to help him visualize just where that body bag might be.

I’m sure it will be years before that nightmarish sight, provided by her own imagination, gives way to the good times she thought she would never forget at Santana High.

I brought her here a little more than seven years ago, moving the family from a nearby town just because of this high school and its academic and athletic reputation.

But now we’re standing together outside some place that has become nationally known for the mayhem that has taken place.

*

School officials did not have time to change the billboard in front of the school which reads: “Fri 6 p.m. G Ball at Cox Arena” and “Thur G Soccer.”

The basketball team lost its CIF championship game Friday and has canceled further play and no one seems to remember how the soccer team did as if any of this matters right now.

Nothing looks right standing outside the campus. Teachers have been asked to not talk to the media while they wait permission from the police to retrieve their cars.

An artist from The Times has been on the telephone with my daughter asking her to provide an inside look at Santana High School in the form of a sketch. She describes a safe haven surrounded by walls to protect it from the outside world.

I remember standing between the quads--the combat zone as some are describing it now--on Senior Awards Night and what a happy place it was.

*

It’s a scene that has an ebb and flow of emotion. The morning was chaos, the afternoon a time to regroup, the evening a realization of what has happened. Inside Albertsons, the sales clerks are cutting purple and gold ribbons and pinning them together. There won’t be enough flowers available to meet all requests as the kids are returning, many of them standing in front of the store and just hugging.

“You remember Donna, my wife’s sister?” says Carlos Mora, who works in the meat department at Albertsons. My daughter played with Donna’s daughter, Shelly, on the Santana basketball team.

“She was getting the lunch cart ready, and three kids were standing in front of the cart when the shooting started and they all got hit and Donna hid behind the cart. When he went into the bathroom to reload, Donna ran and some kids grabbed her and pulled her into a room as he came out shooting again.”

A lady apologized as she interrupted, but she wanted to know “what aisle the canned tomatoes were in,” and Mora obliged.

“All the lunch ladies were waiting at the house across from ours, but Donna just lost it and they had to take her to the hospital,” he says.

I remember Donna, the lady with white hair, sitting in the upper reaches of the Santana gymnasium, and taking a trip to Winslow, Ariz., with our girls for a tournament. I’m leaning on a stack of Albertsons’ cupcakes, enthralled with a TV drama that has Donna dodging bullets and it’s all beginning to scare me.

And the next thing I hear is my own daughter’s voice, “I can’t believe this. My God, that’s Shelly’s mom. Shelly. . . . this is too much.”

*

This was supposed to be safe ground, the very safest a parent could find, and as I’m driving here from Los Angeles listening to the radio, an interview with a young boy named Michael strikes home.

“I saw him shooting, I saw the blood, and I ran and I ran,” Michael says, “and I made it to the Albertsons parking lot, and my mom finally came and got me.”

And finally he felt safe.

The yellow police tape that has been strung around the outside of the campus has prevented anyone from putting flowers on the Santana High School monument outside the school’s entrance, but now it’s being pulled back.

One bouquet is put atop the stone, and another, and balloons, and within minutes, it’s covered. Someone tapes a sign to it: “Santee Grieves [Its] Children.”

It was the sign that did it, forcing my daughter and I to walk away, back up Magnolia before making the turn to West Glendon where we had lived until June. People seek comfort in the strangest places, I guess.

*

There are TV trucks everywhere, reporters and more reporters wanting to know what kind of place this could be that kids would shoot kids.

A girl named Stephanie says, “[The shooter] looks like every other freshman here,” and that doesn’t really help.

Inside the school grounds there is a smaller quad, called the “Dark Quad,” by the kids because that’s where the “Gothics,” and kids wearing trench coats and colored hair and body piercings normally congregate, while the larger quad includes “Jock Row,” and ASB students.

The kids from the two quads do not normally mingle, but when the shooting began, kids ran everywhere.

“I just thought it was a firecracker in a bathroom trash container,” Katie says. “That’s a once-a-week thing here.”

The next time that happens, imagine what it will do to these kids, and it will, because kids are kids. Most of the time.

Dustin, a sophomore, steps off his skateboard to tell a reporter, “I saw my friend get shot and then I ran.”

He says it almost like this happens every day in this city.

Is he numb or in denial, I wonder, and I ask, “Why are you here back at school so soon?”

“I just went to the skateboard park and I’m on my way home,” Dustin says, and maybe his nightmares will come later--it’s all beyond my realm of expertise, and in a way, I’m thankful for that.

This is a place where the guy who runs the 7-11 knows his customers by their first names. It’s a Little League city with parents sharing stories while their kids play. The men and women play softball on the field adjacent to Santana High. Friday night high school football games are a big deal.

So how are any of these people going to know why this happened?

Someone says the kid who did the shooting had his skateboard stolen three times, and so I ask Dustin where he keeps his skateboard while in school.

“I hide it in the [administration] office,” he says.

Child after child steps forward to tell reporters that people knew this might happen. An adult says the same thing on TV, my daughter recognizing him as a youth basketball coach.

“I refereed his games,” she says.

The names of those shot begin to surface, and though it has been more than three years since my daughter was here, she stops on a youngster named Barry Gibson. “I hope that isn’t Kristie’s younger brother,” she says.

*

A couple of years ago I took my older daughter to John Elway’s farewell press conference just outside Denver, and realizing we were only miles from Columbine High School--a little more than a week after so many had died--we went there.

It was a horrid scene, the rains making a mess of the makeshift tributes, and so many tributes covering a nearby park that it forces us to drive on, embarrassed that we could not fully understand what had just happened here.

That’s how people will remember Columbine, a place of disaster, which was nothing like the high school my child attended. Until Monday.