Sunday, February 07, 1999
TOUCHED BY TRAGEDIES
For families touched by gun violence, losses cannot be measured in dollars. Whatever settlement could come out of lawsuits against gun manufacturers will not erase their pain. Connected by a tragic bond, even they cannot agree on who should pay for the cost of crime caused by handguns.
Stolen gun twice a killer
The gun Eugene Sams bought 21 years ago was used to kill two Cincinnati police officers. The 47-year-old Avondale man can't shake the horror that his gun fell into the wrong hands.
Alonzo Davenport was 3 years old when Mr. Sams bought the .38-caliber Charter Arms revolver in Memphis, Tenn. Mr. Davenport was 13 when the gun was stolen from a party.
But in December 1997, it was the gun 20-year-old Mr. Davenport stuck in his waistband just before two plainclothes officers entered his Clifton Heights apartment to arrest him on a domestic violence charge.
Mr. Davenport used the gun to kill Spc. Ronald Jeter and Officer Daniel Pope. Then he shot himself.
“To this day, I still have nightmares about it,” Mr. Sams said. “Maybe if I had a lock on it, then I just think maybe I could have spared their lives.”
Blames people, not guns
Janet Gilbert does not want to see gun makers sued.
As the mother of a gunshot victim, she just wants people to be responsible with their guns.
Her son, Brandon, was 14 when he left to spend the night at a friend's Warren County home in 1994. He never came home. He and his friend, Billy Wessendarp, then 13, had been left at the Oregonia home alone with three handguns, three rifles and six boxes of ammunition.
Though Billy had taken and passed a firearms safety course, he shot the .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun that killed his friend. He was found guilty of negligent homicide and sent to a reform school. A judge dismissed a case against Billy's parents, John and Mabel Wessendarp, that charged them with negligence.
Suing gun manufacturers will not prevent tragedies like hers, Mrs. Gilbert said.
“Guns have their place,” she said. “There's a lot of responsible people who have guns. I just think a little common sense would go a long way.”
Driver shares lesson of danger
As a school bus driver, Jackie Gaines breaks up plenty of fights.
Once, the 48-year-old Winton Hills woman found a boy with a gun. She told him about the dangers of guns —- something she knows only too well.
Her 17-year-old son, Chester Jackson Jr., was killed in Detroit in 1987 in a school cafeteria after a 14-year-old pulled out a .357-caliber Magnum he was packing in his bookbag.
She also is the aunt of a teen who killed a friend with a shotgun.
To deal with her pain, she speaks to young people. And as a member of Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters, she attends more funerals than she would like.
“For so many years I had so much revenge, so much anger, so much guilt,” she said. “What hurts me is that children don't make life valuable. Kids are not taught about gun safety. They just don't realize the outcome.”
Mother blames gun makers
Donna Foster knows how to shoot a handgun.
She wanted to be able to protect herself after her son was murdered in 1991.
The guns she worries about are the ones used in crimes out on the streets. She worries about the kind that killed her son.
A 16-year-old boy named Roosevelt Barron owed a drug debt that summer. Ms. Foster's son, James Foster III, had a falling out over drug business. A dealer ordered Mr. Barron to shoot Mr. Foster. He was killed execution-style with a 9mm handgun.
Ms. Foster has forgiven her son's killer, but she still blames others involved.
She also supports Cincinnati's attempt to sue gun manufacturers.
“They're making guns to be shipped out on the streets,” she said. “They're making money off that. They don't care about lives.”
Boy pays with his freedom
A game of cops and robbers cost 14-year-old Jeffrey Schulte his life and stole his friend's freedom.
Delhi Township teen Jason Syme had taken a handgun from a locked closet in his father's home without permission and fired the fatal shot as the boys played in a bedroom.
Hamilton County Juvenile Court Judge Thomas Lipps ruled last week that Mr. Syme, now 16, should remain in jail.
“This case involved the lethal combination of young persons and guns with tragic consequences,” Judge Lipps wrote. “They anguish and grief of the victim's family and the defendant's family are still apparent and overwhelming. The court's response under such circumstances cannot be casual.”
Mr. Syme has spent 21/2 years at the Ohio Department of Youth Services. His minimum sentence is another year. The maximum sentence would keep him there until he is 21.
- Tanya Bricking
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