As I interviewed teens in the aftermath of yesterday’s Santana High School shooting, I sensed a slight variation on Kidman’s mantra: You’re nothing if you’re not on the news. And if your fifteen minutes of fame just happen to come after your classmate guns down thirteen high school students-killing two-that’s just the way it is. Maybe I’m being too cynical. But the dozens of Santana High School students I spoke with were more pumped up over being on the local news than they were freaked out about the shootings themselves.
Granted, my perspective was a bit skewed. I didn’t arrive in Santee (a middle-class suburb twenty miles east of San Diego so white its nickname is “Klantee”) until five hours after a 15-year-old freshman identified as Charles Andrew Williams emerged from a school bathroom, shooting indiscriminately with a .22 caliber handgun. San Diego Sheriff’s units had cleared out the Santana High School campus and blocked off the adjacent streets. Detectives and crisis-intervention counselors had spoken with most students at a makeshift command center at a nearby Presbyterian Church. A half-dozen satellite trucks would soon pull out of the strip-mall parking lot across the street from the school. The parking lot, housing a supermarket and several fast-food restaurants, had earlier been a mob scene of hysterical parents and kids calling home on cell phones. Now, reporters and law-enforcement officers outnumbered the students still hanging around.
With my harried look and reporter’s notebook, I was an easy target. “Are you a reporter?” asked a tall, blonde girl wearing sunglasses. “Yes,” I responded. She pointed to a pink and white ribbon pinned to her sweater. “Some of my friends were shot over there. I know the shooter,” she said matter-of-factly. The girl, Tiffany Wenner, 18, continued, “Andy is just a regular kid. Sure, he might have had trouble with his dad. But all teens say they hate their parents every now and then.” Wenner scribbled out her pager number for me, promising, “If you page me tonight, I’ll have some numbers of other kids who will talk to you. And, what newspaper did you say you were with?” Disappointed, having never heard of Newsweek, Wenner nonetheless pointed me in the direction of Williams’ apartment.
The Sanside Apartment complex is two miles from Santana High. It is a quintessential “California Garden-Style” building, with two stories of shabby looking units clustered around a central swimming pool flanked by plastic patio furniture and anemic-looking flower beds. The media “stakeout” was well underway in front of the ground-floor unit Williams shares with his father, a lab technician at the clinical investigations unit of Balboa Naval Medical Center.
Four camera crews were lying in wait in front of the apartment, under the stern eye of a stocky female San Diego County Sheriff’s deputy posted at the door. A handful of reporters walked around the complex, interviewing neighbors lingering outside their units. A petite blonde named Jaime, 13, told me had been Williams’ girlfriend five months ago. Jaime (she wouldn’t give her last name) described Williams as “a really nice kid. He always had friends over. There were four or five kids there at a time. He was so, like, normal.” Jaime disputed the emerging media portrait of her former beau as an angry young man. “If someone was mean to him, he’d laugh it off. He wasn’t a bad kid. He was sweet,” she insisted.
Some of the more sophisticated denizens of the Sanside had more to offer about Williams. Next-door neighbor Vanessa Willis, 15, is a sophomore at Santana. By the time I arrived, Willis was bragging in the courtyard about the scores of interviews she had already given. “Someone said I looked terrible on Channel 10. So, I’m going to change,” she remarked. Willis soon emerged from her apartment in tight denim shorts and a tank top, much to the enjoyment of the bored cameramen. Those of us not attached to a camera weren’t exactly her top priority. But she did share a few of her oft-repeated impressions of Williams with me. “Andy was an everyday person. He had guns in his apartment. But a lot of people around here have guns for protection. His dad supposedly kept them locked. The biggest thing with him was riding his skateboard. He loved that. He was always on that thing. I consider him my friend. I don’t really care what he did.”
Fifteen-year old Kelli Chmielewski lives a few units away from Williams. She claims to have been one of the earliest contact points for Williams’ father, Charles Jeffrey. “When it happened, all of us just ran across the street to the Pizza Hut.” She says the elder Williams approached her. “He came up to me, and said, ‘where’s Andy Williams?’ I told him, ‘I think he’s probably, like, with the cops.’ He seemed kind of surprised. He said, ‘What? Andy Williams?’ Then, I saw him walk over to one of the police guys.”
Charles Williams hadn’t been seen at his apartment since. By late last evening, Sheriff’s department and FBI investigators entered the residence armed with a search warrant. Camera crews, reporters and scores of neighbors stood around outside, watching through the blinds as the detectives collected evidence. Some of the camera crews cajoled Willis into fetching them some pizza. Neighbors poked their heads out from their balconies and offered soft drinks to weary reporters. After two hours, the detectives emerged from the Williams apartment, carrying a plastic box loaded with file folders, a Hewlett-Packard computer and six large brown bags of evidence. (Law enforcement officials say they also confiscated seven weapons). Camera crews tripped over each other, as they filmed the detectives load the evidence into white vans, and drive off, without comment.
Perhaps not the most successful of stakeouts, from the media’s perspective. But, no doubt an afternoon the residence of Sanside will not soon forget. Observed Chmielewski, “Seeing all those guys in the apartment, it’s just like the cop shows.” Willis concurred. “Everything about this whole day has been just like T.V.”
