An Endless Ache Makes Comrades of the Inconsolable

Sometimes hell is to be among the living.

The mothers and fathers, the sisters and brothers and the children sipping coffee and eating brownies last week in a cozy North Hollywood living room understand that grim maxim as most of the rest of us never will. Murder has snatched their families from them and cast them into their personal circles of darkness.

A mother robbed, beaten and left to die in the cold desert night. A son riddled by gang bullets as he exited a convenience store. A daughter raped and beaten almost beyond recognition with a concrete- filled pipe.

These are the images that linger in the minds of their living families, long after the noise and light of day has faded and night’s twin demons of darkness and silence take over. The cops and the reporters and the lawyers and the judges--they’ve all closed their tidy files on the cases, but in the heavy stillness of night mothers still hear their dead children’s voices and sometimes even feel them again in the womb like a legless soldier’s phantom itch.

Members of Parents and Siblings of Murdered Children, a support group, have come together on this night, as they do in groups of 10 or 12 every month, to talk out the pain, to say the things others long ago tired of hearing. For them, the final seconds of life for a long-gone child was the beginning of a lifetime of pain and grief and anger that will subside only when they themselves leave the ranks of the quick.

“My name is Vicki, and it’s been two years and four months since my son died,” says Vicki Alcantar, whose 18-year-old son, Francisco Cuellar, was gunned down as he bought movie snacks at the convenience store around the corner from his house.

“He didn’t die,” interrupts Eloise Luera, whose own son, Richard Davis, was shot and killed as he took two men for a test drive in a car he was trying to sell.

“He was murdered.”

There is a difference.

Death is a natural inevitability. Murder is deliberate, methodical, death’s spiteful henchman. Mourning death is one thing. Mourning murder is altogether something else. Aside from the grief, there is the sterile social process that trails after murder--interminable court appearances, detectives who don’t have time to investigate the list of murders that grows longer every day, attorneys who twist the system until there’s no justice left in it.

And then there are the killers, men who often live on in prisons that their victims’ families support only grudgingly, wishing for harsher, more final punishments. The men who shot Luera’s son and tossed his body from the car were sentenced to 26 years to life in prison.

“That is no time at all,” Luera says. “I believe in the death penalty, but the instant death penalty, not the charade we have here. I wish they had gotten one day and that would have been their day of execution.”

The men who were with Cuellar’s killer, they got four years. The man who actually pulled the trigger died later during another drive-by shooting, when he accidentally shot himself. Poetic justice, but small comfort for Alcantar.

“I wish it was me who did it,” says the diminutive schoolteacher in a cheery, floral-print blouse. “I think he got off too easy. I know it’s wrong, but he’s gone--he died instantly by his own hand.”

They are bitter, and they have a right to be.

Alcantar, who heard the shots that killed her only son, found him minutes later lying lifeless in “a big puddle of blood.” She never saw him graduate from high school or college or get married or have kids. Cuellar’s friends are passing into adulthood now, but he will be forever 18. The girlfriend he planned to marry is engaged to his best friend, she says.

“We had so many plans. But now the only change will be that I am going to be older. My life is going to be as empty as it is now. There is nothing there.”

It has been worse than usual in recent days for Alcantar. Easter Sunday, she visited her son’s grave and found a bouquet of flowers with a note attached: “How we miss you. Rest in peace. How we wish you could have seen your son.”

She was shocked. Who could have left it?

“Now I lie awake wondering, ‘Do I have a grandchild?’ ”

Unanswered questions spin through Alcantar’s head. Was it a joke? A mistake? Or is she a grandmother? Should she try to find out? Or is it an invitation to a new heartache she should just let pass?

“We don’t want to hurt anymore,” says Luera. “So we don’t get involved anymore. I don’t want pets. I leave my friends.”

Around the room there are similar tales. Oregon residents Phoebe Krevi Rose and her husband, Brian, rent a house in Southern California so they can attend court when their daughter’s killer appeals his sentence. Emily Jennifer Krevi was raped and beaten to death in her apartment.

Mike Carnow, whose 6-year-old son was sexually molested and murdered two decades ago, said few marriages survive the strain. He and his wife are divorced. “Only the people in this room know how we feel,” he says. “But you are going to survive. You are not going to forget it. That’s bull. . . that time heals all.”

Heads nod slowly, eyes focused on nothing and on everything. And as evening dissolves into night, the meeting breaks apart slowly with hugs and gentle reassurances. A touch on the wrist. A tiny smile.

So they disperse into the darkness, walking among the living, but living among the dead.