Scars Linger From Stockton School Shooting

Stockton Victims Still Scarred By Massacre

January 16, 2009
KCRA (Stockton, California, USA)

STOCKTON, Calif. -- When more than 60 shots ran out across the playground of Stockton's Cleveland Elementary School, a teacher and 34 students were hit.

Five of those children died.

Savan Chitt was a first-grader when she was involved in the country's first major elementary school shooting, on Jan. 17, 1989.

She was shot three times -- in the lower leg, her back and her thigh.

"Sometimes it still affects me," Chitt said. "Sometimes when I hear stuff, I jump or stay in the house."

The shooter, Patrick Purdy, killed himself after the shooting, and no one has ever figured out why he opened fire.

But his violent act drew significant national attention, prompting Congress to enact a federal assault weapons ban.

A teacher who survived the shooting founded the Children's Museum of Stockton. At a service Friday, the museum hung a plaque in her honor.

"It's just a real testament to a community gathering together and forming something positive, making something positive come out of that day," Nancy Collum said.

At the University of the Pacific in Stockton, students were raising money for picnic tables at Cleveland Elementary.

"We thought instead of doing a memorial service that would dredge up all the sadness and horrible memories of the day, we would do something useful and helpful to the school," said Shellynne Allan, with the UOP Chaplain's Office.

Violence, Forclosures Define Cambodian Community 20 Years After School Shooting

Jan 17, 2009
Eric Tang
New America Media, News Report
National Public Radio (USA)

Editor’s Note: Twenty years after a gunman opened fire on a schoolyard of mostly Southeast Asian children in Stockton, Calif., the Cambodian American community tries to heal from that violence, and the larger issues affecting refugee immigrants to America. Eric Tang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His forthcoming book is titled 'Unsettled: America’s Refugees and the Struggle for a Just Resettlement.'

STOCKTON, Calif. -- “Going back to teach at the school was my way to letting go of it all,” said Rann Chun, a third-grade teacher at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, Calif.

Exactly 20 years ago, on January 17, 1989, Chun was a nine-year-old student at Cleveland when a lone gunman opened fire on the schoolyard, killing five and injuring 30 before taking his own life. Chun’s six-year-old sister, Ram Chun, was among those killed.

Before Columbine or Virginia Tech—indeed before “school shooting” became familiar phraseology in American culture—there was the Stockton schoolyard incident.

Few outside of Northern California recall this tragedy in which 24-year-old gunman Edward Patrick Purdy emptied 105 shots from an AK-47 assault rifle into a schoolyard of approximately 450 schoolchildren. Fewer still recall that at the time of the shooting, Southeast Asian refugee children comprised 70 percent of Cleveland’s student body. Among the five fatalities, four were Cambodian Americans—including Ram Chun—and one was a Vietnamese American. Their ages ranged from 6 to 9 years old. The families of these children had recently resettled in Stockton in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia.

Twenty years ago, the tragedy brought forth divergent – if not competing – analyses and lessons. Racial justice advocates demanded that the attorney general consider the incident a hate crime. Others took the occasion to call for stronger gun control laws. But for the mostly Cambodian-American survivors, there was another lesson gleaned: The struggle for peace and survival does not end with resettlement in the United States.

According to Stockton community leader Sovanna Koeurt, those who lost their children had to “either let go and build something new and for the better or they didn’t survive.”

Chun’s father found this impossible to do. Though he had had lost loved ones to the Khmer Rouge, he could not pull himself together after the killing of his youngest daughter.

“He didn’t survive,” Chun said. Within 10 years of the shooting, the father passed away, succumbing to deep depression and heavy drinking.

Three years ago, Chun returned to Cleveland Elementary to become a first-grade teacher—incidentally, this was the grade his sister was in during the time of the shooting. He now teaches third grade.

“I went back to be role model for change, for a new beginning,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave it behind as a place where my life changed for the worse, but for the better.”

According to Koeurt, Chun’s story exemplifies not only triumph over tragedy, but also the way in which a young man can beat the odds in a community plagued by poverty and gang violence.

“Resettlement to America was just another verse, another phase, in our story of refugee survival,” said Koueurt, who is the founding director of APSARA, a social service agency and community development corporation created in the wake of the shooting. She is referring to how life in the United States presented a new set of hardships and tragedies, and how refugees had to draw on the skills from their past lives in order to survive. Indeed, the schoolyard shooting has not been the only hurdle to overcome in the past 20 years.

Long Keo, 27, was among the 30 wounded during the shooting, having sustained a bullet wound to the abdomen. He recalls multiple surgeries throughout his childhood, going in and out of hospitals for years after the incident. And yet, when he looks back on his adolescence, surviving the shooting is not his defining struggle. Instead, he recalls the gang violence that gripped Stockton and nearly took his life on more than one occasion.

Several years ago, his living room was riddled with bullets from a drive-by shooting. Then, this past summer, his mother learned that the family would be evicted from their home. They were renting from a landlord who was on the brink of foreclosure. When I came to speak with the family about the 20th anniversary of the shooting they, understandably, were more interested in talking about their current housing crisis.

These smaller tragedies that have dotted the lives of Stockton’s Cambodian Americans perhaps explains why, there is little fanfare surrounding the 20th anniversary of the shooting. This is not to say that community members have become inured to violence and tragedy, but rather that there is a broader context of immigrant and refugee life in which the shooting must be discussed.

Still, on Friday night the Children’s Museum of Stockton held a small, invitation-only memorial event for the victims and heroes of 20 years ago. Today, the city’s local paper, The Stockton Record, will run a feature article looking back on the incident. And then there are those, like Chun, who find ways to “honor my sister’s memory everyday.”

“I could have taught at another school in the district,” said Chun. “But I chose to be here. Being here helps me let go of the tragedy, but still hold on to her.”

For Cambodian fishing families, an effort to hook a healthier future

Buddhist-turned Adventist pastor Sophat Sorn hands out pamphlets to fellow Cambodian refugees in Stockton warning them of the harmful mercury levels in many delta-area fish, which have been linked to learning and memory problems. [photo: courtesy Sophat Sorn]

November 27, 2007
Elizabeth Lechleitner
Adventist News Network
Stockton, California, United States

In Cambodia, small talk -- much like life in the monsoon-drenched Southeast Asian country -- is mired in the rice fields. Locals are likely to ask each other, "How's your crop this year?" Not so for the nearly 20,000 Cambodian refugees resettled along the fish-rich Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta. Here, "How're your kids doing in school?" is conversation bait.

"Over the years, Cambodians have had more and more problems with their kids. So many of these kids are not very successful in school -- they are dropping out, joining gangs," says Sophat Sorn, himself a Cambodian immigrant, community social worker and a Buddhist-turned Seventh-day Adventist pastor in Stockton.

Sorn says health and environmental researchers in California, trawling for an explanation beyond delinquency, discovered a link between learning and memory problems and a mercury-contaminated diet. In 2004, Sorn and a group of volunteers began distributing pamphlets throughout the region, warning Cambodians of the delta's mercury-laden fish.

On the front of each blue pamphlet, bold yellow lettering reads "Protect your health; Eat better fish." Inside, there's information on the link between memory loss and contaminated fish, how many fish are safe to eat, and a map of the delta indicating the tainted waterways.

The Port of Stockton, Sorn explains, is under a fishing advisory, but most native Khmers -- many of whom are subsistence fishers -- grew up reeling supper from the muddy Mekong to no ill effect and find it hard to believe the deceptively clear port is teeming with pollutants. With the pamphlets, printed in the Khmer language, Sorn hopes the Cambodians will learn to catch cleaner fish and raise healthier families.

"It's very strange information to them, you know, and they kind of resist the message at first. But we keep talking to them -- always very friendly," Sorn says. "We explain to them that sometimes in Cambodia we don't have any way to test the water, but here they do. Then they start to really listen. They tell us, 'Wow, we had no idea these fish could be bad for us.'"

Mercury, PCBs and pesticides leaking into the Port of Stockton, Sorn says, have accumulated to toxic levels in the area fish, which are ubiquitous in Cambodian cuisine.

"We had all these people eating fish two or three times a day, you know, where officials were recommending only eating them one or two times a month," Sorn remembers.

"When Cambodians see the sign that says, 'Don't eat the fish you catch here,' they interpret this to mean that the fish a few feet away are fine," says Sovanna Koeurt, director of Asian Pacific Self-development and Residential Association and a member of the Stockton Adventist Cambodian Group Sorn pastors.

"The water looks clean to them, so they don't believe the fish are bad." They're especially wary of warnings from government officials, Sorn says.

The suspicion, he adds, is understandable -- most Cambodian refugees survived the barbaric Pol Pot regime, which was responsible for at least 1.5 million deaths from execution, forced labor and starvation. "If they don't know you and trust you, they won't listen," Sorn says.

Sorn, who grew up in a Buddhist subsistence farming family in Cambodia, joined the Republican army fighting the Khmer Rouge in 1971 at age 18. When the Republic fell to Pol Pot in 1975, Sorn landed in a forced labor camp. Later, Sorn and his family fled to a Thai-Cambodian refugee border camp to escape fate in Cambodia's Killing Fields."

Eight years later, Sorn and his family were accepted for refugee relocation by the United States government and immigrated to California in 1991. He enrolled in community college, and was soon tapped by the local government to work with the Cambodian community in Stockton.

"I got to know a lot of people in the community, you know? I got to earn their trust," Sorn says. He founded United Cambodian Families, a local non-profit organization, in 2000, and has received recognition for his community service from the Blue Cross of California, the U.S. Congress and, this month, from the California Department of Public Health and Environmental Health Investigation Branch.

Over the past three years, Sorn and local volunteers have distributed the pamphlets to several thousand Cambodian refugees living in five different communities in the Stockton region. "This year, I delegate," he says. As program producer for Adventist World Radio programming broadcast from Guam, Sorn is busy translating news and information to an estimated 15 million Cambodian listeners.

"We want everybody to know, not just about the mercury in the fish, but also about Jesus," he says, adding that his motto, as a self-described "shy guy" is, "Don't talk much -- do much."