Families Shattered by Gunfire Face the ‘Why’ That Goes With Tragedy

When the question came, Freddie Kessee was applying cream to the scar, a burnt circle the size of a quarter on her adopted daughter’s chest.

“What happened to me?” 3-year-old Alycia Turner quietly asked as she watched Barney on television.

That was three weeks ago. Kessee knew the questions would come as Alycia grew older and began to wonder about the scar, about the absence of her mother and cousin and father, about the trips to the cemetery. She had steeled herself for them. Still, when the moment came, Kessee was caught off guard and quickly searched her faith and conscience for an answer.

“Granny doesn’t think you’d understand,” she finally said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“OK,” the little girl said, never looking away from the television.

In truth, Kessee and her husband, Richard, still aren’t sure how they will answer her questions when the time comes. In June 2002, facing divorce, Thomas Lewis Turner killed their daughter, his nephew and himself in a blaze of violence in Lake Forest that only one person survived: 22-month-old Alycia, who was shot in the chest by her father. The bullet barely missed her heart.

Today, another family is tortured by similar questions about a killing apparently provoked by the breakup of a marriage. Last weekend, a Santa Clara man facing a second divorce killed his wife, his three children from a previous marriage and himself -- a last, desperate move to keep his ex-wife from raising the children. Todd Vernon explained his motives in a letter he sent to his mother in Orange County before gunning his family down. Still, the rampage left more questions than answers.

Richard Kessee, 67, doesn’t understand his own family tragedy more than a year after it occurred.

“It’s still hard for me to comprehend,” said Kessee, a retired Baptist minister.

“I’ve tried to put the puzzle together in my mind, to figure it out, and I can’t come up with any conclusions as to why this happened.”

Acquaintances knew Turner as a helpful, churchgoing family man. But there was trouble at home. Acedra Renae Turner had had enough of her husband’s controlling nature and asked for a divorce. Turner showed no signs of violence before the shootings. Only afterward did his secret life -- a child from an earlier relationship, $20,000 in unpaid child support, a penchant for strip clubs -- come out.

Alycia has been the couple’s bedrock. “She keeps us going,” said Freddie Kessee, 57. “I know I have that little baby to be strong for.”

The Kessees legally adopted Alycia six months after the killings. Her physical wounds healed, and, with therapy, any psychological consequences have been held at bay.

Today, she is a bright and inquisitive preschooler who makes people laugh -- just as her father did. She has had no contact with his family for nearly a year. Freddie Kessee saved photos of Thomas Turner, but she has put them away.

She knows Alycia will one day want to see them, but that day is far off.

Photos of Alycia’s mother and her cousin -- Broderick was 15 when he was killed -- are prominently displayed throughout the Kessee home.

“She will go through periods when she’ll pick up one of her mother’s pictures every morning and carry it around with her through the day,” her grandfather said.

“Not in a grieving way. In a pleasant way.”

Two to three times a week, the photos will prompt Alycia to ask her grandparents where her mother and cousin have gone.

“I miss them,” she will say.

But she has never cried for them.

Alycia has visited her mother’s grave half a dozen times. A photo of her graces the stone.

“That’s my momma,” Alycia has said. And if there’s dirt on her mother’s photo, she will kneel and wipe it away with her hand.

“I tell her, ‘That’s just a picture. She’s actually in heaven with God,’ ” Freddie Kessee said. “She accepts it -- for now.”

In the 18 months since Thomas Turner changed their lives, the Kessees have endured an odyssey of emotion. They’ve scoured their memory for that one sign in their son-in-law that, if seen, could have prevented the killings.

Their grief has been channeled into caring for their adopted daughter. Their rage at Thomas Turner has evaporated. It is part of the past. Alycia is their future.

A future full of questions waiting to be asked.

“She’s doing very well. She’s surround by so much love,” Freddie Kessee said.

“She knows something happened, but she doesn’t know what and why. We’ll have to deal with that as she gets older.

“If her dad loved her, why did he do this? These are the kinds of questions she’ll be asking. I’m trusting that God can give the answers to her -- the insight -- that I won’t be able to give.”