Santana High Wounds Reopen

There had been time for tears to dry, no time yet for wounds to heal.

Santee Mayor Randy Voepel had returned to work Thursday for his first full day since the shooting at Santana High School two weeks ago. It was early afternoon when he got the telephone call. Another shooting. In neighboring El Cajon. At Granite Hills High School.

“All I could do is turn on the radio and try not to cry,” said Voepel, who calls himself a small-town, part-time mayor. “It’s almost like getting robbed and two weeks later you get robbed again. We’ve been robbed of two children and here we are almost robbed again. It’s a multiple crime.”

Not so far away, the families of at least two of the students wounded at Santana High School watched in horror as details of the shooting Thursday afternoon unfolded on their television sets.

If the faces were different, the scene was too familiar and too close to home: a high school six miles away cordoned in yellow police tape, sobbing parents with cell phones, hundreds of shaken students evacuating under police escort, the injured--almost all of them young--being wheeled away, and a student in handcuffs. Again.

“It’s terrible, I just got cold chills,” said one mother, Betty Jo Leyva, her voice shaking an hour after learning of the El Cajon incident.

Leyva’s older daughter, Karla, 16, was wounded in the Santana shooting. Leyva said she was watching television with her younger daughter, Genevieve, when she decided to flip channels to see what else was on.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. “I know what they are going through.”

At Santana High, a memorial to the students killed in the March 5 shooting is still in place, but the air has seeped out of the commemorative balloons and the flowers have faded. The prayer candles have burned to stumps.

There, school officials broke the news of the Granite Hills shooting almost as soon as it occurred about 12:45 p.m.

“I was shaking, I felt I was going through it all again,” said Santana High freshman Kimberly Langnaid.

A sobbing teacher was led to her car by a friend.

Youth pastor Becky Lang rushed to Santana High School, where her daughter is a junior and head of the Christian Club. Lang hugged the girl. Then she went straight to the attendance office to offer a hand to distraught parents collecting their children.

Through all the effort, Lang was left with an overwhelming sense of futility.

“I felt very ineffective as a youth pastor,” she said. “Another kid in our community thought that resorting to violence was the answer.”

Across the street from the school, a group of shellshocked-looking teenagers sucked on cigarettes and wandered through the strip mall parking lot where, two weeks ago, apprehensive parents and weeping students milled in confusion after the Santee shooting.

Noelle Topping said she was in an English class when the teacher told students there had been another school shooting. “I was so scared,” she said, adding that she burst into tears and ran to the school’s counseling center.

“I just lost it,” said the 15-year-old. “The shooting at Santana didn’t even seem real to me yet. And I said, ‘If it happens again, it’s gonna seem real.’ I just didn’t know it would happen so close.”

Upon hearing the news of the Granite Hills High shooting, Santana ninth-grader Rebecca Rivera, 15, said, “I couldn’t believe it. We were starting to get back to our normal routine, but now I guess we’re going to have to start healing all over again.”

A few minutes later, another girl approached the group, wiping her eyes. She said she was relieved to know that a friend at Granite Hills wasn’t hurt. “They made it out OK,” said Christine Dimaggio.

John Whiteman, a sheriff’s deputy who is a resource officer at Santana High, felt his stomach drop Thursday when he and his partner got the call about the El Cajon shooting. Whiteman loves working on campus; it is the closest he has been able to get to his lifelong dream of becoming a teacher. He was not at Santana High on the day of that shooting, but has been there every day since, helping students recover.

And now this.

“It’s really hard right now,” he said. “You still get the feeling. Those have come back.”

Just weeks after surveying the tragedy at Santana High, San Diego County Supervisor Dianne Jacob again found herself on a high school campus struggling to comprehend mayhem.

“If there was a simple answer we would have had the answer by now,” said Jacob, a former teacher. “The fact is, there is not a simple answer.”

Across Santee and its neighboring communities, the angst reverberated over the airwaves on Mark Larson’s afternoon radio talk show. Anguished mothers, frightened kids, uncertain priests--they all called.

“Something has to be dealt with on a spiritual level,” Larson said during a break in his broadcast. “A deeper sense of a spiritual something is going on. It’s time to look beyond legislating another blue-ribbon panel on school violence. Let’s look at the spiritual part of this that is missing.”

News of the latest shooting hit the Rev. Anthony Baron with “intense sadness.” Baron, an Episcopal deacon and nationally recognized authority on trauma counseling, had been part of the trauma debriefing teams at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., and after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

He has counseled the U.S. Postal Service on workplace violence and written a book on school violence. Two weeks ago he was at Santee High School. Now this.

“It’s almost like a voice in my head goes off: Not again!” he said Thursday. “This is grief upon grief.”

As news of the shootings rippled through the community, the public statements came in a rush: the warnings about troubled youth, the calls for better school security, the guilt, the anguish, the fear.

Again.

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Times staff writers Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Larry B. Stammer and Michael Krikorian and correspondent Paul Levikow contributed to this story.

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Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Eric Bailey, John Beckham, Ken Ellingwood, Robin Fields, Jessica Garrison, Scott Gold, Martha Groves, Christine Hanley, Duke Helfand, Robert Lee Hotz, Greg Krikorian, Michael Krikorian, Geoff Mohan, Scott Martelle, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, George Ramos, H.G. Reza, Louis Sahagun, Noaki Schwartz, Beth Shuster, Doug Smith, Larry B. Stammer, Jocelyn Stewart, Kurt Streeter, Erin Texeira, Rebecca Trounson and Kimi Yoshino. Also contributing were correspondents Paul Levikow and Ann Shanahan-Walsh and researcher Maloy Moore.

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Gunman’s Weapon

The weapon used in Thursday’s shooting was a military-style shotgun that can fire up to nine shells without reloading. It sprays a series of pellets over a wide area, rather than firing single bullets as do rifles and handguns.

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Sources: O.F. Mossberg; Federal Cartridge Co.

Researched by MIKE FANEUFF / Los Angeles Times