Neighbors See Latest Spree as Spectacle

It was the middle of a hot Monday afternoon, an hour or so after the shootings. It was obvious that nothing else was going to happen here, outside the small five-business strip mall in Garden Grove.

Yet, the crowd wasn’t going home. Perhaps because police weren’t shooing the people away, they stayed--young, old and middle-aged alike. Bunched on the sidewalk and in the street beyond the yellow police ribbon, they stood in a hot sun, apparently content to do nothing but be part of a crime scene’s aftermath.

If they were drawn by the horror of someone murdering two people and shooting four others in broad daylight, their actions didn’t reveal it. This wasn’t a frightened, agitated crowd. It was a crowd--whether speaking English, Spanish or Korean--that stood around and watched as nothing happened.

And while several deplored the violence, none indicated they lived in fear of it. Occasional violence in America, it seems, is taken as much for granted as the Earth and sky.

“I don’t think it’s that they don’t care,” Robert Emerson said, pleasantly, as he surveyed the crime scene. “How is everyone around here supposed to act? Freak out? What can you do? . . . It’s part of life. You’re not going to stop this.”

Emerson wasn’t cavalier about the violence--after all, this was a daytime shooting not far from his paint shop--but neither did it leave him anguished or fearful.

“I just think there are a few nuts in the world,” he said. “It happens and it’s not preventable and it has nothing to do with gun control. This will never go away. It’s been going on since medieval days. It’s part of our society.”

The scene didn’t even terrify 10-year-old Candito Tolentino who, like everyone else at the scene, was in full view of the body bag on the pavement containing one of the victims. He was there with his 14-year-old sister, Norma. She was bothered by a shooting in her neighborhood, but not enough to stay away or keep Candito away.

He said he wasn’t afraid because he had seen victims before--in car accidents. “I’ve seen a lot of accidents,” he said. “It scared me the first time, then it didn’t scare me after that.”

A 34-year-old Korean father of three said he came to the scene because he lives nearby and heard a Korean man had been shot. He wanted to see how the police handled things and, “This is my home and I want to know what’s going on.”

Violence has begun creeping into the area in recent months, he said, wanting to be identified only as Jimmy. “We cannot live like this,” he said. “I want the police to take care of this very strongly.”

I don’t know what reaction I expected. Perhaps it’s to their credit that they put these isolated acts of violence into perspective, knowing that the odds still overwhelmingly dictate against them ever being crime victims.

But knowing that six people had just been shot and that the killer was still at large . . . it just seems that once upon a time in America that would have left neighbors cowering.

Not so.

Instead, people rushed to the crime scene to check things out.

Jamie Anaya, a 24-year-old Marine on leave, was at his parents’ home Monday afternoon when he heard the shots and ran to the scene. He grew up in Garden Grove and has been in the corps for 5 1/2 years. His dad tells him the neighborhood is still relatively safe.

He used to associate shootings like this with the inner-city of Los Angeles, he said. He still thinks of Garden Grove as the suburbs.

Another nearby resident, who identified himself only as Henry, said the shootings don’t make him fearful. “I’m not afraid of random violence,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me, and I don’t have a gun in the house. I used to carry a loaded gun, but now I have no use for it.”

Sophistication instead of fear?

That’s probably a good thing.

Still, I left the scene wondering if people haven’t become so accustomed to violence--either in real life or in TV and movies--that even something as awful as cold-blooded murder in their neighborhood is at best a curiosity.

I asked Emerson, who has the paint shop, why he stopped by. “It’s a combination of seeing the camera trucks, the cop cars and the pretty ladies from the TV stations,” he said. “I’m just being honest with you. I’ve never seen something like this, live. The next time, I probably won’t stop.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.