Minutes after he heard a POP! POP! POP!—and just before JonMichael Ginoulias, a high-school junior with a featherweight's stature, spoke his final words while lying immobile across from his house—Todd Shelly grabbed the digital camcorder he had bought three years earlier and began filming.
A recreational hunter, Todd had known the succession of pops that shattered the placid Sunday morning air in Peccole Ranch on January 22 was nothing other than gunshots, and it was almost as if he himself had been hit by the bullets, for their explosive emission left him momentarily paralyzed and breathless by his bedroom window, from where he saw three teens running, and then one of them fall to his knees.
His first thought was with his son, Thomas, 12 years old and as unaccustomed to neighborhood gunfire as anyone else living in the region between Sahara Avenue and Charleston Boulevard, just west of Fort Apache Road. After ensuring that his son was okay, Todd phoned the police, and that was the last sign of his instincts.
He headed back to his bedroom window. He saw a teen prostrate on the grass across the street, his life seeping out of him, and in the interminable moments that passed before the police and paramedics arrived, Todd thought that he might be able to help; that maybe, if he documented the scene unfolding before his bedroom window, it could be of use to someone.
And so he pointed his camcorder toward the godforsaken scene and hit record. But he was still too disturbed by the events to hold the camcorder still. Uncontrollable shaking had overtaken him since he recovered from the paralysis of hearing the three pops. Therefore he set the camcorder on the window seal, and this is what it captured:
Stretching across the picture, a street. One that had seemed so safe to Todd during the two years he and his son lived there that he, like parents from a generation past, had allowed his son to explore it on his skateboard day and night without any apprehensions. Now it's filling up fast with Peccole Ranch security guards and police officers and ambulances, and intermittent and abominable shrieks of terror.
To the right, a two-story house. It holds a reputation in the neighborhood for hosting historic parties—one of which, held the night before, had been broken up after a fed-up neighbor, Don Schuster, called the police. Now it's buzzing with a different kind of clamor; that of teenagers freaking out.
Straight ahead, a single-story house. It belongs to Don Schuster, who along with his brother is surrendering to police on the south side of his driveway.
Also straight ahead, but on the north side of the driveway: a teenage boy lying on the grassy ground, his life fading fast, and a teenage girl squatting over him, listening to his final words.
Believing he had seen enough, Todd stopped the recording after officials draped a white sheet over the boy confirmed by friends to be JonMichael Ginoulias, and determined by police to be dead for some 30 minutes after Todd began filming.
Like the rest of his neighbors, and the general public, Todd knew nothing of the events that preceded the nightmare he had caught on film. But like everyone else, he would be fed the story piecemeal, as it was recounted by participants and eyewitnesses.
Reports state that on the morning of January 22, Don Schuster woke up to find that a tire on his girlfriend's car had been slashed. His natural reaction was anger. Soon thereafter, he and his brother, Mark Strycharz, were engaged in a physical fight on their front porch with several teenage boys, one of whom was Brad Franklin, a neighbor who'd had an indiscreet and ongoing feud with Schuster; another of whom, Nick Erichetto, was a 17-year-old football player who would suffer gunshot wounds to his legs after Schuster retrieved a gun from his house; and the most unfortunate of whom, JonMichael, would collapse and die in Schuster's front yard from a bullet to the chest. Schuster, a convicted felon, and Strycharz emerged from the altercation with palpable injuries, and they were submissive to authorities. Everything else is ambiguous as of now, and all those details that comprise the story will not be clarified until the conclusion of Don Schuster's trial for murder with a deadly weapon. If they ever are, that is.
"This is how small this town really is," said Todd, a sales manager for the Aflac insurance company who moved here in 1989, when he was 19 years old. "My mortgage broker has an office in Don's place, so I always used to walk to the house and see Don in passing. Brad: I know him well—we talk all the time; he's a respectable kid; and one time he even gave my son a little gift for his go-ped that was real nice. I talked to his mom three days after the shooting, and she was still freaked out. She was still breathless when talking about it. And the boy who died—well, the son of one of my associates at Aflac slept over at his house the night before. They watched movies and played video games. He left to go to church Sunday morning, and so JonMichael, I guess, went over to Brad's. My associate's son today says he deeply regrets not inviting JonMichael to go to church with him."
In this way, the events on Sunday stirred Todd sick, and the footage of the aftermath that remained on his digital camera exacerbated his uneasiness.
He looked to get it off his hands. He downloaded onto DVD the raw footage, with its clear documentation of the boy's last moments, and handed it off to a photojournalist from Fox-5 news—thus presenting the station with an ethical dilemma: to show the teen or not to show the teen. But, as one Fox-5 representative told me, it was not a difficult decision for the station's editors: "You don't show blood, you don't show bodies; all you want to do in that case is offer a visual depiction of the news event." And that's what they did. They used several clips from Todd's amateur video in their Sunday night broadcast, and not one of them showed either blood or JonMichael's body. The only problem was, Todd still had the footage on his memory card. Right along with his ex-wife's wedding, one of his skiing trips and one of his son's little league baseball games.
When I spoke to Todd five days after the incident, he had recovered from shakes that had gripped him on Sunday, kept him awake all that night at his mother's house and wouldn't permit him to return to his home until Tuesday. He recounted Sunday's events with admirable poise and steadfastness, but when I asked him, "So what does one do with a tape like that in his possession?" he reclined deep into his seat, and then further down into a troubled silence.
"I've haven't thought of that," he said. "Well ... I haven't even looked at it since Sunday ... and ... maybe ... I don't know. What do you do with that tape?"