A mother, following the dictates of her religion, prepares food three times a day and places it on an altar in case the spirit of her dead child should grow hungry. A sister, once a sweet and gentle child, now swears at her family, dresses in men's clothes and brandishes a toy machine gun.
A brother, constantly haunted by the memory of gunfire, jumps every time the tetherball chains clang outside his classroom window. His friend refuses to drink Coca Cola; the color reminds him of blood-spattered dirt.A father, unable to talk about his pain, sits in the corner of a room saying nothing, week after week, month after month. A teacher, crippled but determined, has left her nightmares behind and now is on the road lobbying for gun control.
These - and many more - are the legacies of Patrick Edward Purdy, a young white drifter with a history of mental problems who shocked the United States last year when he slipped onto an elementary playground here, gunned down five Southeast Asian immigrant children and wounded 29 other students and a teacher.
The victims left behind - the mothers, the sisters, the brothers, the fathers, the friends, the teachers - are still, one year later, struggling to cope with the trauma in ways that reflect their own separate cultures and private religious beliefs. By American standards, some of these reactions have been normal and predictable. Others are foreign and unsettling. A few may even portend a life of recurring mental illness.
Although it will be years before the full impact of the massacre is known, doctors and counselors here already have reached some startling conclusions about the limitations of the American mental health system to cope with violence in an ethnically diverse population.
"Many of us thought the American way of treating and preventing mental illness" - that is, taking drugs to alleviate symptoms and talking about underlying fears and conflicts with trained counselors and therapists - "was the only way to heal emotional wounds," said Marci Massei, one of the many psychologists here studying the psychological needs of the survivors.
"What I have learned and what I think many people here are learning," Massei said, "is that we do not always have all the answers in a world where we are becoming even more desperately in need of answers.
"We have learned that folk medicine and religious rituals may be just as effective" as the best therapy a psychologist can offer or the best medicine a psychiatrist can prescribe.
"We have learned that talking about problems does not always solve them any more than ignoring problems makes them go away," Massei said.
Outwardly, life in Stockton has gone on much as before. Businessmen still dash to and fro on the freeways. Farmers still get in their pickups at dawn and return home at dusk. Dock workers continue to unload barges on the San Joaquin River.
But there is a certain fragility about the people's perception of their community now. The Stockton Record described 1989 as "A Year of Killing." Sixty-nine homicides in a town of 190,000, about one killing every five days, the newspaper reported. Not a record, but worthy of a lengthy two-part series.
People have been troubled by other events as well. In the fall there was an earthquake. Right before Christmas, a passenger train collided with a truck in Stockton's seemingly ever-present fog, killing three people and injuring 64 others. And just after the new year - two weeks before the anniversary of the Cleveland School massacre - teachers throughout the city's school district went on strike in a dispute with the school board over wages and health benefits.
Yet what has continued to preoccupy doctors, counselors and social workers are the long-term emotional consequences of the violence that struck on Jan. 17, 1989. More than 500 of the students and an undetermined number of their relatives have been getting psychological care.
City, county, state and federal governments have spent several hundred thousand dollars on medication and psychotherapy for the victims and their families. Over the past 340 days, hundreds of state workers have focused most, if not all of their attention on the psychiatric and psychological needs of the community. Private doctors and therapists have donated untold hours to the task as well.
A major scientific study, the first of its kind, is also under way to assess the long-term psychological effects of the massacre. Though they have had trouble locating some families who have moved away and difficulty persuading others to participate, researchers hope the study will be completed no later than next summer.
The results may one day help other communities cope with the shock of mass killings or natural disasters, said Dr. Elizabeth Gonggui, a University of California, Los Angeles psychiatrist who designed the study. "Because the study of violence and trauma is a relatively new field, these are questions to which we as professionals simply do not as yet have clear answers," Gonggui said.
But for many in Stockton, healing will not come from medical interviews or psychological profiles, but from ancient religious rituals, explained Dr. Steven Shon, a psychiatrist with the state's Mental Health Department who is overseeing the study and much of the counseling.
One little boy, for example, complained of seeing ghosts on the playground of the school. Although that might have been interpreted by psychotherapists as a potentially dangerous hallucination, his parents and other members of his community knew better. He did not need drugs or counseling, they insisted. It was the playground that needed exorcising.
With permission from school officials, the Venerable Dharmawara Mahathera, a 100-year-old Buddhist monk, came to the Cleveland School several weeks after the shooting to chant Scripture and sprinkle holy water on the spots where the children were gunned down.
The ghosts disappeared.
"As I understand it," explained one school therapist, "the problem was that the spirits of the children were somehow joined with the spirit of the evil gunman. They could not rest in peace or be reincarnated until they were separated from him."
Similarly the mothers who provide food daily for their children's spirits, know that their children will stop being hungry when they are reincarnated. And when the children find new lives, the mothers know they at last will be free of the terrible pain they are now feeling.
One father whose child was killed spends his days bundled in a heavy coat in his sparsely furnished apartment in a squalid complex that is home to hundreds of Cambodian refugees. People come and go, but he seems to take no notice. His only apparent interest in life is replaying a video of his daughter's funeral.