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Life & Times Transcript

4/17/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

A tragic bond is uniting more and more southern California families, the loss of a loved one in Iraq.

Gail Farnsworth>> I don't wish this pain on anybody, but to tell you the truth, freedom is not free. It comes with a price. My son believed in what he was doing.

Val Zavala>> And then, questions remain, but students at Virginia Tech start to deal with the aftermath of a campus tragedy.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> It's the moment every parent with a child in Iraq dreads, the sight of two servicemen walking up the driveway. They know even before the knock on the door that the news will change their lives. Toni Guinyard went to the town of Hemet where they've lost five young people in the war and she speaks very personally with the families who've made the ultimate sacrifice.

Toni Guinyard>> Their faces stare out from the newspaper pages, photos of United States soldiers killed in action accompanied by words that struggle to tell their stories. They are casualties of the war in Iraq, men and women whose families fight through grief to keep their memories alive.

Gail Farnsworth>> I miss my son terribly.

Toni Guinyard>> Gail Farnsworth's son, Army Specialist Jason Chappell, was killed January 2004. He was a newlywed. He was only twenty-two years old.

Gail Farnsworth>> It's been rough, but we're going to survive. We're survivors.

Toni Guinyard>> Survivors, families who, in many cases, are compelled to share their personal loss publicly and later mourn privately. Each passing day becomes an exercise in balancing the need to move on with the overwhelming desire to hold tight to every memory.

Gail Farnsworth>> I know we have to go on and it's hard. I exist. I don't really live. Even now, I have to say that I basically just exist. I have no fight left in me and I don't know if I ever will again.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> A videotape detailing Jason's life from birth to the battlefield gives his mother and stepfather some comfort. The good times at a theme park, at school and graduation day.

Gail Farnsworth>> Jason was a brilliant student, straight A's through most of high school. He was on the academic decathlon. He had so many choices open to him, Toni, that he just thought, "I don't know what I want to do." He was overwhelmed, so he decided that he would join the Army and help him get an education, the money, and he joined in July of 2001 right before 9/11 and that's when everything went downhill.

Toni Guinyard>> Farnsworth remembers the exact moment her life changed. She and her husband arrived home. A car was parked outside. It was the Army notifying her that Jason was dead.

Gail Farnsworth>> All I could say at that time was, "My God, no. My God, no" and all I wanted to do was go to bed and wake up and have the nightmare over, but it wasn't a nightmare.

Mitchell Farnsworth>> I keep telling all these people I know that are saying their kids are going into the service that I hope they come back because mine never made it back home.

Gail Farnsworth>> I'm constantly asking why, just as I'm sure many of the other mothers and everyone else. Why? Why him? He had so much going for him.

Mitchell Farnsworth>> If I stay working, I don't think about it as much. But I'm reminded every single day. I got people saluting me, I've got people stopping me on the freeways and everything, just to say thank you.

Toni Guinyard>> They see the back of your truck?

Mitchell Farnsworth>> Right.

Toni Guinyard>> You smile.

Mitchell Farnsworth>> Oh, yeah. I'm proud of my son. I'm very proud of him.

Toni Guinyard>> Their pride is reflected in the flags flying outside their Hemet home and in the decals placed on the windows of their cars. They want the public to know about their son, what he accomplished in life and the impact of his death.

Mitchell Farnsworth>> I think it's lasted too long now, the war, to tell you the truth. I don't know. I'm getting second thoughts now. Maybe we should get out of there before we lose any more people total, not just from Hemet.

Gail Farnsworth>> I don't wish this pain on anybody. I don't want to see any more Hemet grads sacrificing, but to tell you the truth, freedom is not free. It comes with a price. My son believed in what he was doing.

Toni Guinyard>> Chappell was the first of several Hemet high school graduates to die in the Iraqi War. Corporal Michael Estrella was the second.

Maria Estrella>> There are children that we're losing and it's hard to hear every time there's another casualty that another family is going through what we're going through.

Toni Guinyard>> Estrella survived a tour of duty in Afghanistan, but was killed in Iraq in June 2006.

Maria Estrella>> It's hard. The attention we get here in the community, everyone cares. You can tell that everyone cares. Flags are half-staff and it's to recognize these boys as a person and not as a number.

Toni Guinyard>> Estrella's death received a lot of media attention because of a number. He was the 2500th United States military casualty in the Iraqi War. The number has significance to his family.

Maria Estrella>> His birthday is on the 25th, August 25, twenty-five. His death was 6/14/06. Six is the six children that I have. And it was scary. It was weird the way everything just matched. But his number, the 2500th, it stood out.

Toni Guinyard>> It means something to you.

Maria Estrella>> It meant something.

Toni Guinyard>> So does his Purple Heart, his gloves and hat, his uniform, his shoes. Michael's belongings are now treasured and displayed in the family's home.

Maria Estrella>> We have his high school class ring, his bracelet and necklace that he wore.

Toni Guinyard>> There is one thing his family almost lost for good. Michael was stationed in Hawaii. Before leaving for Iraq, he shipped his car home for safekeeping.

Maria Estrella>> We buried him on a Saturday and on Monday morning when he woke up, his car was gone. It was like them taking him all over again because that was something he sent to me to take care of. When he passed, he had his car keys in his pocket, so it was very hard for me to know that his car was gone.

I called 9-1-1 and I told them it's not the value of the car, but it's what it meant. It was his. For someone just to take it is not right. They found it that evening and it's missing some parts, but we're getting it fixed slowly for him. As soon as it's fixed, we're going to Riverside National and taking it to him.

Toni Guinyard>> Michael is buried at Riverside National Cemetery because of something he said during the family's last outing together just four months before he died.

Maria Estrella>> We decided to stop at my grandfather's house. My grandfather is also a veteran of war. Both he and Michael were chit-chatting about war and their goals and stuff. My grandfather was dying of cancer and he told Michael, "I'm going to be buried at Riverside National" and Michael said, "Me too."

Toni Guinyard>> He was her oldest child. He was their big brother, a Marine Corporal who was more than just a number. He was a young man with dreams and goals.

Maria Estrella>> It's been difficult. Still expecting him to walk through that door, still expecting the calls, still thinking he's still in Iraq, that he'll be coming home.

Toni Guinyard>> She knows he won't be coming home, but by wearing his dog tags --

Maria Estrella>> This is something I want to wear because he was wearing them.

Toni Guinyard>> Even in death, Michael is with her every day. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> You can see this and other stories about families who have been impacted by the war on our Life and Times Blog. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> We know a lot more than we did twenty-four hours ago. The shooter at Virginia Tech University was a twenty-three year old student from South Korea who had come to the United States when he was only eight years old. But scores of questions remain. NewsHour's Ray Suarez recounts the day's events.

Ray Suarez>> Twenty-four hours after the shootings, Virginia Tech's police chief revealed the identity of the gunman.

Chief W.R. Flinchum>> "That person is Cho Seung-Hui. He was a twenty-three year old South Korean here in the United States as a resident alien. Cho was enrolled as an undergraduate student in his senior year as an English major at Virginia Tech. Cho was in the United States with a residence established in Centreville, Virginia and was living on campus in Harper Hall."

Ray Suarez>> Harper Hall is adjacent to Ambler-Johnston Hall where the first shootings took place yesterday. Two people died there. Authorities believe that Cho returned to his dorm room to reload following the first shootings, which occurred just after seven a.m. He then proceeded to Norris Hall, the engineering building, where most of the killing was done two hours later.

Cho, a South Korean immigrant, had permanent resident alien status. He was a green card holder. Cho's family lives west of Washington, D.C. in Centreville, Virginia. He had graduated from high school in nearby Chantilly in 2003. Both communities are about two hundred twenty-five miles from Blacksburg.

Police said that two handguns, a nine millimeter and a twenty-two caliber, were found with Cho's body. A receipt was found in his backpack for a Glock nine millimeter pistol like this one purchased in March. Green card holders are permitted, under federal law, to purchase firearms if they have no felony convictions.

A crush of national and local news media descended on the gunman's neighborhood today, but there was little in the way of definitive information on the young man or his family.

>> "Can you describe the family as you saw them throughout the years? Friendly? Connected?"

Marshall Main>> Well, they were very quiet. I didn't know them at all. I don't even know their names.

Ray Suarez>> That seeming anonymity initially perplexed investigators and officials as well.

>> "The guy was a loner and we're having difficulty trying to find any information about him."

Ray Suarez>> Two English professors were surprised they didn't know the gunman.

>> "Did you know the student?"

>> "No, no, he wasn't known to me."

>> "Does that surprise you that you wouldn't know a senior English student?

Tony Colainne>> "Yes, I find it surprising. Our department is this pretty tight-knit community, you know, so we know our students fairly well. So this person was on the periphery as far as I know."

Ray Suarez>> I talked earlier today to Marc Fisher of The Washington Post. Marc Fisher, welcome. This morning when authorities and the university identified the Virginia Tech student involved in the shootings, had they already established that he was the gunman in both attacks?

Marc Fisher>> That seems to be the case. They at least know that the same weapon was used in both attacks and they're trying to piece together the other pieces of evidence that would conclude that he was the sole gunman.

Ray Suarez>> Is there any information on a motive?

Marc Fisher>> Well, there's just a rambling note that he left behind which is very angry against rich people, he talks about debauchery and generally wealth, which he seems to be upset by. He also signed it with the same name that he wrote on his arm, Ismael Ax, and the police don't seem to know quite yet what that means.

Ray Suarez>> What has emerged through the day about Cho Seung-Hui and his life in the United States? When did he come to this country?

Marc Fisher>> He came with his parents. He was just eight years old. His parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea in 1992. They run a dry cleaners in suburban northern Virginia, the town of Centreville about forty minutes outside of Washington, D.C. His older sister is graduated from Princeton University just a couple of years ago and they live in a townhouse in a very new development in a part of the suburbs where many of the streets are not yet even on the maps yet.

Ray Suarez>> Were there signs of emotional problems before yesterday?

Marc Fisher>> There seemed to have been, especially at Virginia Tech. Some of the kids who were in classes with him referred to him as "question mark man" because, in a British Literature class, when all the other students introduced themselves to the professor by writing their name down on a sign-in sheet, he only listed a question mark. When the professor asked him about that, he remained silent.

Ray Suarez>> Did his teachers see in his work anything that bothered them about this young man?

Marc Fisher>> Indeed, one of his English professors was very disturbed by a piece he did in a creative writing assignment, so disturbed that she referred him to counseling because of the content. We don't have the content, but it must have been quite extreme for a professor to take such a step.

Ray Suarez>> You mentioned that he comes from Centreville, Virginia and that's near Dulles International Airport. Last night, the police made a visit to the Cho residence. What was that like?

Marc Fisher>> Well, a number of police cars, both marked and unmarked, arrived late last night and police went into the house and gathered up a bunch of materials and came out with a number of boxes. The family either left with them or had been escorted away in the hours right before that and they've gone into hiding since then.

What I found fascinating about this is that one neighbor after another told me about this and having witnessed this. I asked them if they'd spoken to the police or if they'd found out anything more. They said, "Oh, no." Every single one of them had stayed inside their townhouse watching all this through an upstairs bedroom window or a living room curtain or even cracking their front door open a bit.

But it's a neighborhood where people generally do not know one another well at all and not a single one of them felt bold enough to go outside to observe or to ask a question.

Ray Suarez>> Has it been established yet how Cho Seung-Hui got the guns he used in the attacks?

Marc Fisher>> One of them was purchased at a Roanoke gun store within the last weeks. The other one, the derivation is not quite clear.

Ray Suarez>> And they're using the evidence of what was in his pack and so on as signs of premeditation so far?

Marc Fisher>> It does appear that this was well-planned. There is some evidence that he had practiced at a shooting range. The guns had been purchased some time before. The statement was lengthy and had been written before the events, so this does not appear to have been a crime of immediate passion.

Ray Suarez>> Do we know if his troubles go back further? You mentioned signs of emotional upset during his time at Virginia Tech. Did anybody have anything to say in Centreville?

Marc Fisher>> Well, they seemed to find him -- the neighbors, that is -- seemed to find him the mysterious person in the family. They described the parents and the sister as quite polite and quite friendly, willing to engage with neighbors, but they described the son as someone who did not respond even to the most routine of greetings and generally stayed to himself. They did not recall any friends ever having been at the house.

Ray Suarez>> Marc Fisher of The Washington Post, thanks for joining us.

Marc Fisher>> Good to be with you.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> We don't need these anymore and this one hasn't been working for years, yet nothing says San Pedro more than the lighthouse on Point Fermin Kristin Childs is the historic site curator at Point Fermin Lighthouse.

Kristin Childs>> The Point Fermin Lighthouse was built in 1874. It was first lit on December 15 of that year by our first lighthouse keeper, Mary Smith. Point Fermin is not your typical lighthouse. When you see it, you expect first to see that tall tower that you see as most lighthouses. We're actually a very beautiful Victorian house that includes the keeper's quarters, the oil room in the basement and then, of course, the tower access, the tower for the lighthouse, and all the keeper's functions are in the tower.

Very little of it has changed over time. A few changes during World War II with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, our lights were all blacked out on the coast here. We no longer had a light in there. They removed the light during the war, so for many years, the lighthouse just functioned as a house basically for the local supervisor. Until 2002, we had somebody living in the house. That's when our last person lived in the house retired.

So today, we are now open to the public. The entire building is open to the public. You can go on a tour through the building, see all the floors where the keepers lived their daily lives and also into the tower where the lighthouse keepers functioned and where the light was originally. It's a beautiful view. You can see all of Palos Verdes hills around here and the San Pedro hills.

My hope for the lighthouse is that it becomes a center for the community. I'd kind of like that to broaden and become a symbol of Los Angeles. We're connected to Los Angeles, we're connected to the Point, we're connected to the history of Los Angeles. We're one of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles. I think the lighthouse lasting a hundred thirty-one years here on the Point, it should last a hundred thirty more.

Val Zavala>> He's been called a creative genius. He's part artist, architect, inventor and designer. His name is Gregg Fleishman and he's come up with a whole new concept for shelter, one that he thinks could revolutionize the housing industry. But his work is kind of hard to describe. You just have to take a look at it.

For the past eleven years, his combination gallery and workshop has occupied a prime corner in the heart of Culver City. Inside you'll meet Gregg Fleishman, a renaissance man who was here long before Culver City went through its renaissance. In the front is a spacious gallery, but just behind the white walls is another world, a workshop, a cluttered studio where creativity is king.

Gregg Fleishman>> "This piece fits in here."

Val Zavala>> Everything Gregg Fleishman sets his restless mind to, he transforms. For example, furniture. These chairs are cut from just one piece of wood, then assembled by hand. No nails, no screws, no glue.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Oh, my gosh.

Gregg Fleishman>> Now you can sit down.

Val Zavala>> That is fabulous. Okay, this is the brakes? This is a tricycle he designed for kids and adults. I got to give it a whirl. Oh, this feels weird (laughter). You barely touch the steering and it turns. That's great.

But Fleishman's most difficult, most prolonged and most important project is this: housing. Shelters all made from beveled cubes. His mission is to revolutionize the way we build. The key, he says, is to find the perfect basic building block or module, one that's strong and versatile, versatile enough to build a structure of any shape or size, something akin to working with life-size Legos.

Gregg Fleishman>> The basic point is that all of this stuff is onsite assembly.

Val Zavala>> Have you gotten any interest from actual home builders?

Gregg Fleishman>> I haven't really looked for that yet. For now, I'm happy enough to keep working inside the studio. I keep finding more pleasures to go with it.

Val Zavala>> The modules, he said, would be pre-manufactured in a factory, then taken to a construction site and assembled on location. It would be a lot less expensive and less wasteful than traditional construction and the result would be a lot more interesting than a lot of dull, boxy apartments.

Gregg Fleishman>> I can see, you know, a whole magical world of crystal and jewel-like housing complexes sprouting up everywhere.

Val Zavala>> That are affordable?

Gregg Fleishman>> Well, you know, affordability is something that doesn't relate to materials and stuff. You can have affordable ones and you can have, you know, excessively opulent ones together. There's some ways of making large plastic parts nowadays that's quite inexpensive.

Val Zavala>> This could be made out of plastic?

Gregg Fleishman>> Absolutely, yeah. That's my thought on it.

Val Zavala>> The modules could also be packed and transported easily, then literally snapped together, a godsend for emergency housing.

Gregg Fleishman>> You know, disaster relief and, you know, Iraq and rebuilding all of that. Those things keep coming up every year. There's another disaster somewhere and every year there's another million homes needed here and there.

Val Zavala>> So where did all this unconventional thinking come from? Here's a hint.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> This is the gallery's home video of visiting day. Students from a nearby school are invited regularly to explore the gallery.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Here, touching and sitting is allowed, but they aren't just from any school. These children are from Play Mountain, a nonprofit alternative elementary school that stresses humanistic values and imaginative play. It was the school that Fleishman himself attended as a child, which makes sense since it was his own forward-thinking mother who founded Play Mountain back in 1949.

The bike is a favorite among the kids, but Fleishman also designed the playground equipment on the campus. You often get the impression that, for Fleishman, the boundary between work and play is a blurry one.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> The Los Angeles Times article they describe, they have no hesitation in calling you a genius.

Gregg Fleishman>> Well, yeah, I don't feel that smart myself.

Val Zavala>> Fleishman earned a degree in architecture from USC. Although he's an expert with a router, he's never actually built a structure from start to finish. So, so far, really all of this is theoretical. There's not a real life building somewhere that incorporates your ideas?

Gregg Fleishman>> Right. No, there's not.

Val Zavala>> Do you imagine there will be at some point?

Gregg Fleishman>> Well, I imagine the whole world will be full of these soon.

Val Zavala>> Really?

Gregg Fleishman>> Absolutely.

Val Zavala>> Fleishman prefers the theoretical world of geometry, Plato and Buckminster Fuller to bricks or plumbing and, when he starts explaining the math behind the modules, it sounds like this.

Gregg Fleishman>> And eighteen squares are six squares related to the six spaces of a cube which is, oddly enough, one to the square root of two, which relates to the forty-five degree slope of the roof panels. And eight triangles relate to the eight corners of the cube. These are at the corners of the cube right here. These are at the edges of the cube. . .

Val Zavala>> Well, I pretended to understand. Fleishman has worked for over a decade perfecting his modular construction. He's getting pretty close to completion, but when it comes to applying the concept --

Gregg Fleishman>> -- I in no way think that I have the capability to take this stuff around the world and, very clearly, I need other people to take it and run with it in order to, you know, house the world and use it in other ways.

Val Zavala>> So, hopefully, someone will come in here and go, oh, I can make a whole subdivision based on --

Gregg Fleishman>> -- people will have to use a little imagination, but it might happen.

Val Zavala>> Even when he achieves his goal, this architect, artist, mathematician, carpenter, inventor and designer will never get bored. He'll, no doubt, move on to new and bigger things. So you've got bicycles, you've got cars, you've got furniture, you've got houses. What's next?

Gregg Fleishman>> Well, you know, I figure I could do an airplane.

Val Zavala>> You could do an airplane? Why not?

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Gregg Fleishman has made progress on his designs and you can see them on his website at greggfleishman.com. That's Gregg with two G's. Or you can visit his gallery in Culver City. And that's our program for tonight. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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