Within short walking distance of the home in Granada Hills, California, where I was raised — no more than 3 blocks away — was St. John The Baptist De La Salle Catholic Parish. The parish had a elementary school, so my brothers and I were always seeing those girls in white blouses and grey, plaid skirts in the neighborhood.

This morning, the school put on an annual school festival:

Religious events calendar

International Festival, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. today and noon-7 p.m. Sunday, St. John Baptist de la Salle Catholic Church, 16555 Chatsworth St., Granada Hills. Free admission.

Well, apparently just as the event began at 11:00 AM, a man with a rifle came in and wounded three people. From the Associated Press/San Francisco Chronicle:

A man with a semiautomatic rifle opened fire at a festival outside a Southern California church Saturday, wounding three people, one of them critically, police said.

Shots rang out shortly before 11 a.m. outside St. John Baptist de la Salle, a Roman Catholic church in Granada Hills, Officer Norma Eisenman said. Bystanders tackled the man and held him until he was taken into police custody, she said.

“He was tackled by an off-duty Burbank police officer” and taken into custody by Los Angeles police, she said.

The gunman wounded three people, including a female who was shot in the elbow, Eisenman said. Two people were taken to a hospital in stable condition and one was in critical condition, she said.

And, I just heard on the TV (from a KTLA reporter) that the shooter apparently was the father of one of the Catholic School’s children. KTLA reports:

[More after the fold, including why my Dad liked that neighborhood for his children.]

Los Angeles City firefighters reported that a man in his 30s or 40s was hit, and taken to a nearby hospital in critical condition.

A 14-year-old boy was hit in his leg, and suffered a serious injury. Los Angeles Police spokesperson Norma Eisenman said a third victim was also hit, but firefighters could not immediately locate that person in the panicked crowd.

Back when I was in the twilight of my Navy career, and heard about the 1999 shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center — that was a hate crime that injured three young boys, a teenaged girl, and a sixty-eight-year-old female receptionist. That shooting happened at a facility that was about a mile-and-a-half from that same Granada Hills home where I grew up.

In the late sixties and in the seventies, Granada Hills seemed a safe little bedroom community. At least it felt safe to me. Yet today, when shootings happen at a Catholic Church near my childhood home, and within past years a shooting occured at the Jewish Community Center near my childhood home — and children/youth were the victims of these two crimes — somehow it’s hard to see that community in which I grew up as still being a safe community for that child I was. The old neighborhood just doesn’t look safe for minority groups members, and my then being a femminine acting, pre-out transsexual child would have left me feeling like a vunerable minority group member.

Ironically, before my Dad died he told me we moved into that neighborhood in large part because it was a mixed race and faith neighborhood — my Dad didn’t want his children to grow up prejudiced against minority groups. To see this latest shooting in my childhood neighborhood is pretty disconcerting.

~~~~~Update~~~~~

Turns out, per KTLA again, that one of the three wounded people was the shooter’s ex-wife. The motive for the shooting hasn’t been released as yet, but just on the surface it doesn’t look like the motive is going to be something anti-latino, anti-immigrant, or anti-Catholic. My gut fear that this shooting was motivated by predudice doesn’t look like it’s going to be born out with the later facts. On one hand that’s a relief to me — on the other hand, it’s likely no relief for the shooting victims.