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Weapons caused her greatest pain

Jimmy Breslin

July 15, 2007

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The moment she saw the car pulling up on her street, 229th Street in Rosedale, on this summer night in quiet Queens, she stood at the dark screen of her two-story attached house and watched the car, with one man inside, without any feeling at first and then she felt the beginnings of anxiety.

Inside the car, the lone man put on an Army officer's hat. Then he stepped out and stood in the street and pulled his officer's jacket down. In his right hand was full of death. But while she could not see this, there was a dark loss in the air, and it added to the rising disturbance of her nerves.

"I hope he's not coming here," Simona Francis remembers saying to herself. She is a pretty 42-year-old who had spent the day assisting the handicapped.

The man in the Army uniform now was walking from the car. When he got on the sidewalk, she called out, "Keep on walking."

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He did not hear her, and he could not see her as she stood in the darkness of the front room of her house with her face behind the dark screen door.

The man in uniform only had to take a few steps to be at the walk leading up to her door. "Keep on walking," she said.

Of course she was seized with terror. Her, son, LeRon, was an Army private in Baghdad. This was all the boy ever had wanted, going into the Army with guns. To his mother he was still a boy, only 17 and a half. He told her that if she didn't sign his enlistment papers he would simply wait the months until he was 18 and then enlist anyway. She signed.

In her house yesterday, the mother took out a baby picture of him, in diapers in Trinidad, sitting on a big bed and aiming his finger out as a gun. There is another picture of him at age 2, kneeling at the side of a bed, holding a red water pistol straight out.

"I don't know where he got it from," the mother was saying about her son's love of guns. "We never had a gun in our house. You were not allowed to have toy guns in Trinidad. He came up here for these." She took out pictures of him in Rosedale, Queens, in Army camouflage, holding a BB gun, and then a toy rifle. Now he was in sunglasses, down on one knee and aiming the toy rifle.

"He loved the Army clothes, but he never had them in Trinidad. Somebody stole a shipment of camouflage uniforms and the police banned anybody from wearing them."

Guns, which consumed him, seem unnatural and dangerous and kill the innocent, but in LeRon's life they came to his imagination as marvelous, exciting machinery that caused the breath to catch. He never wanted to shoot. He wanted to repair and polish and have them work with wonderful precision.

When he got into Thomas Edison High School, he spent hours looking up weapons on the Internet, of which there seems like a thousand sites, and calling to his mother, "Here. Look. Colt."

"I didn't know what Colt was," the mother said. "Then he researches bullets and tells me what they can do. He researched everything on guns. He took the Army exam and he qualified as a weapons repair specialist."

She remembers that while she was at the screen door the other night, she pictured the son joyously waving an Army test score to show that he was going to make it with weapon repairs.

Suddenly, her breath was chill. "I hope he's not coming here." The Army man was at the walk leading to the house.

Only weeks ago, when he graduated from Thomas Edison High School, LeRon barely had time for a lunch before he had to be at the Army recruiting office in Jamaica. He walked in, the mother said goodbye, and the recruiters had him on the bus to Fort Knox, Ky., to start his Army training.

When he was transferred to Aberdeen, Md., for weapons repair, he called his mother and enthused about being supremely happy. He had his first love. Smooth, well-put-together, exquisitely manufactured, extraordinarily expensive, firearms.

LeRon had something he thought he wanted to do, work at weapons of war, and his country held out these dark arms to give him the war he needed.

He was sent to Iraq in a hurry, working on these sleek good big weapons when he was in a truck going along a road in a town just outside Baghdad. A homemade bomb, crude, unpolished, unmade, with no symmetry, with nothing to make the user proud of his weapon and his army, with nothing that a young man could pose with and have the picture sent to excited families, this dilapidated metal exploded on the roadside. LeRon and another soldier were killed.

And now in front of the house where he lived, his mother was behind the screen door when the Army officer made a turn off the sidewalk and onto the walk leading up to LeRon's mother, who stood at the screen door and called out:

"Don't come here.

"Don't come here."

He was a lieutenant colonel named Hargrove whose job made the heart sink. He brought the news of LeRon Wilson's death, at barely 18 years of age, to a mother who went, so immediately, so rightfully into hysteria.

Her son will be buried Tuesday.