One reckless moment, a lifetime of emptiness

A 12-year-old boy's parents struggle to fill the void after he was accidentally shot and killed by a classmate.

[Times photos: Kinfay Moroti] Jeanne and Sean Caroline draw comfort from one another as they mourn the death of their son, shot accidentally last month by a schoolmate.

The elder Sean Caroline is comforted by his father, Pete after the sentencing hearing for 14-year old Louis Mevec. From left are stepmother Tobie, brother Todd and sister-in-law Cindy.

On Jeanne Caroline's nightstand, a baseball cap rests on the box holding her son Sean's ashes.

LARGO - Sean's ashes are in a small wooden box next to the bed. His Little League baseball cap sits on top of it, surrounded by smiling photos and a remembrance card from the funeral.

His mother hugs the box to sleep. Already Jeanne has cried so much that the box's surface is stained with the salt of her dried tears.

She sleeps with Sean's pillows. She can still smell him on the pillow cases, which she has not washed. Her sleep is restless and stirred by nightmares.

One night she awoke to his 12-year-old voice. She could hear him somewhere close. "Aw, c'mon," he was saying. Jeanne thought he was there, he was back, he was home.

It was a dream.

"It made me smile," she says. "And then I realized I was awake. And I started crying again."

The house is quiet now. The phone rarely rings. No one goes upstairs to Sean's bedroom or his playroom except to feed the cats. No one has touched anything. The last pair of boxer shorts Sean changed out of still sits on his bed.

"I want it to stay like that. Then he's here," says Jeanne Caroline, sitting in her darkened living room, the blinds shut against the sun. Her voice is flat and empty. "It makes me feel like he's still here with me."

She and her husband, also named Sean, tend to stay home now. Jeanne, 43, doesn't like to venture out much anymore. Sean, 41, has quit his construction job so he can be closer to his wife. Together they wander the days, remembering how alive the house was when their son was here.

They called him Seanne - they pronounced it like Shawnee - patterning its spelling after his mother's name. He was a seventh-grader at Largo Middle. At home, he and his friends splashed in the pool, glided through the kitchen on Rollerblades, raided the snack cabinet for Oreos. They played air hockey up in Seanne's playroom. Jeanne often sat on the stairs and secretly listened to their conversations about girls and teachers and baseball.

All that went away on the afternoon of Sept. 5.

It was raining that day. Jeanne remembers that she and her sister were sitting down to grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Then the doorbell rang. A uniformed Largo police officer and two other people she didn't know were standing outside. One turned out to be a minister, the other a victim advocate.

They said there had been an accident. Sean was involved.

"My husband?" she asked.

"No, your son."

When they told her he was dead, she didn't believe it. She led the officer inside to the kitchen and pointed to pictures hanging on the fridge. See? They had the wrong boy.

The officer looked at one of the photos and told her there was no mistake.

"Blond tips," he said, noting Seanne's hair.

Jeanne didn't understand. She said her son was in school. No, the people in her kitchen explained. He had skipped that day with some other boys. They had gone to an apartment. There was a gun. Someone was playing with it, and it had fired accidentally and shot Seanne in the head.

As the news sunk in, Jeanne retreated to the back yard, onto the deck in the far corner. She couldn't talk to the strangers anymore. She told her sister to send them away.

Jeanne tried to call her husband, who was working at a construction site in Tampa. The phone shook in her hands. She kept dialing the number wrong.

Sean had left his cell phone in his truck and wasn't picking up. Other members of the Caroline family were calling over and over. Finally his brother drove to Tampa and tracked him down. Sean, who was filling in as foreman that day, was handing out paychecks to other workers when his brother drove up.

"You need to go home," Sean recalls his brother saying.

"What's the matter?"

"Sean, you need to go home."

"Tell me what's the matter. Is it Seanne? Is he hurt?"

His brother couldn't look him in the eye. He was crying.

"How bad is he? Is he hurt bad?"

When his brother told him, Sean dropped to the ground and wept. Refusing his brother's offer to drive him home, he climbed into his burgundy Ford pickup. He drove alone across the bay, breaking down at red lights.

Pulling up to his home, he saw family members' cars in the driveway. He put the truck in park and left the engine running. He sat there for a few minutes in the rain, afraid to go inside.

All her life, Jeanne has had a thing about butterflies. When she was a girl, one landed on her hand, and she has been fascinated with them ever since. Inside the house she has butterfly wall hangings and butterfly trinkets. In her back yard, she likes to watch them flying among the flowers that line the porch.

Sitting in the yard, she and her husband talk about Seanne. In the months before he died, he was undergoing a metamorphosis of his own. He was asking his mom about sex and dating. Lately he had been thinking about the military and eventually raising a family.

"Mom, do you think I would be a good dad?" he asked. She told him he would.

In school, Seanne occasionally made the honor roll. His dad says he was the kind of student who sloughed off at the beginning of the term, then made great strides, often transforming C's into B's. His parents and school officials say he had never before skipped classes.

He always had girlfriends. They were drawn to his deep brown eyes, his gel-spiked hair, and his goofy charm. Still, he was self-conscious about his slightly stocky build and looked forward to trading his baby fat for a six-pack abdomen, which he wanted more than anything. He couldn't wait until his 13th birthday, when his dad had promised they would start lifting weights together.

He hurled a mean fastball for his Little League team, the West Pinellas Indians. He had already celebrated a hole-in-one in golf.

In many ways, though, he remained a little boy. He still liked his mother to tuck him into bed. He would ask her to scratch his back and his head, then tickle his ear, making his eyes water. He was scared of the dark. He hated sleeping in his bedroom upstairs because he swore he had once seen the closet open by itself. It wasn't uncommon for his parents to wake in the morning and find him asleep at the foot of their bed.

In the days after the shooting, they still expected to find their son there, sleeping peacefully. Instead, they found themselves preparing for his funeral.

The day before the service, Sean and Jeanne went to the funeral home so they could have a few moments alone with Seanne, already laid out in his coffin. Though he had been shot in the head, they had decided on an open casket so they could see him. Approaching the coffin, Sean was worried how Jeanne would react. But when that moment came, it was Sean who took a step back. Jeanne walked right up to her son.

Reaching out, she caressed him as best she could without disturbing his makeup. She touched his hands, his face. There was only one part of him that felt familiar - his hair. She ran her fingers through it like she was tucking him in.

"That was my baby," Jeanne said later. "I know it's his shell and his soul was gone. But I got to hold him. And I got to rub his hair like we always did."

More than 600 people came to Seanne's funeral. That same day, the boy who had shot him turned himself in at the Largo police station. The boy, 14-year-old Louis J. Mevec, was joined by his father, Louis S. Mevec. The son was charged with manslaughter, the father with culpable negligence for leaving a loaded .357-caliber Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver under his couch.

From detectives, the Carolines learned that on the day of the shooting, Seanne had gone to the Mevec apartment along with several other boys. Louis Mevec and Seanne were in a bedroom, away from the others. Seanne was playing a video game, Grand Theft Auto 3. Thinking the gun was unloaded, Louis pointed it at Seanne and pulled the trigger. Moments later, Louis called 911 screaming.

The Carolines, who had never met the Mevecs, were pleased to learn of the arrests. But before they could think about the impending court cases, they had to finish saying goodbye to Seanne. Because his parents knew he was claustrophobic and would be afraid of being underground, they decided to have their son cremated. They wanted him home.

"I didn't want him to be in a cemetery," Jeanne says. "I wanted him to be here with me."

But the cremation itself was heartbreaking.

"To have to take your son to the crematorium," says Sean, thinking back to that day. "Do you know how impersonal that is? It's in an industrial park. It's a cinder-block building with two overhead rollup doors with this big incinerator in the middle. And he's sitting in a box waiting to go inside this incinerator.

"He looks exactly like he looked when he was at the service, or at the funeral home. And he's cold. His body is cold. The only thing that feels like him is his hair. And you gotta watch them roll him inside that incinerator box. And they shut the thing. And all you think is, "I hope I get his ashes.' "

Though Jeanne has a 24-year-old son from her first marriage, Seanne was the only child the Carolines had together. Without him, they don't know what to do with themselves.

"We're not the same people," says Sean. "Everything in your life is geared around children. Your schedules, your dinners, what you do at night. You don't have that glue or cement there anymore."

Jeanne avoids the cereal aisle at the store, as well as the Halloween displays. She tries to make herself smile a couple times a day. Still, she struggles with thoughts that life isn't worth living anymore.

"The closest thing is when you lose your child in a store," she says. "You know, they walk away when you turn your head for a second. Or they don't come home when they were supposed to at 6 o'clock for dinner, so you've got to go out rushing and looking for them. Frantic. The fear and the anxiety you feel. And your gut hurts so bad.

"It's that times a million. When you find them, it's okay. But when they die, that feeling never goes away. It's never going to go away."

Last week, the Carolines prepared for court. The Mevec boy was set to admit his guilt in Seanne's death during a hearing Wednesday in a juvenile courtroom. A judge then would sentence him.

Sean had already written a letter to a judge regarding Louis' father, whom the family truly blames for Seanne's death. The father is still awaiting trial. But Sean and Jeanne were having a more difficult time with the son. He was just a boy who made a terrible mistake, they knew, but he also had fired the shot that killed Seanne.

The night before the hearing, Sean sat at his dining room table and tried to write a letter to the judge presiding over the younger Louis' case. He wrote a few words before crumpling the paper. He tried again and again with no success.

After arriving at the courthouse and meeting the prosecutor, Sean and Jeanne sat in a tiny waiting room. Jeanne was nervous not only about seeing Louis, but his father, who would also be in court that morning. Jeanne shook and cried, her thoughts swirling.

"I promised God I wouldn't hate," she says. "But I can't help it. I hate right now. I hate them so much. They didn't give me a chance to save my son."

Minutes later, inside the courtroom, the judge listened as the Carolines told of their loss. When they were done, he ordered that Louis Mevec be sent into a youth program, such as a boys village or a boot camp, where most kids spend between six and nine months. After the sentence was passed, Louis' father and mother approached the Carolines and offered a tearful apology.

"We still hold him responsible," Sean said, referring to Louis' father.

To Jeanne, the hearing was cathartic. She needed the chance to tell the Mevecs all that had been taken from her. She also wanted to read the face of the person who had shot her child.

As she spoke before the judge, Jeanne turned to Louis, who sat at the defense table with his face lowered. She asked him to lift his head.

"I wanted to look in your eyes, baby," she said quietly.

When Louis met her gaze, something inside Jeanne softened. His brown eyes were filled with tears. She saw that he was sorry and had never meant to hurt Seanne.

"I saw a little boy," she said afterward. "I saw a scared little boy."

Jeanne is looking for a sign. Something to tell her Seanne's okay and she will see him again.

"I still don't accept my son's gone," she says. "I get out of bed every morning thinking it's a nightmare. And then I see that box. That stupid box."

Sometimes she walks out to her back yard, among the flowers and the butterflies. She talks to herself, talks to Seanne. She believes that if a butterfly lands on her hand, that'll be her son's way of answering.

She stands there, arms outstretched, waiting.