Playground Tragedy’s Other Victim

She is hiding, not just from the television reporters but from memories, and from guilt. She goes for long drives and discreetly leaves sunflowers at a Costa Mesa preschool.

She knows the man accused of plunging his Cadillac into the preschool’s playground last week, killing two children and injuring five other people, did it for her: 39-year-old Steve Abrams told police he was expressing frustration over a failed relationship with the 26-year-old Costa Mesa woman.

That relationship never was more than neighborly friendliness, said the woman, whose name The Times is withholding to protect her privacy. But although Abrams is in jail charged with murder and has been ordered to stay away from her by a court that convicted him in 1994 of stalking, she still feels horribly bound to him.

“There is an association that will always be there,” she said. “Why did it happen? Why? I don’t know. I have to live the rest of my life knowing somebody did this because I exist.”

*

It all began about five years ago, when the woman and her new husband moved in next door to Abrams in a Costa Mesa apartment building. Her husband and Abrams had been friends since they were youngsters, and Abrams had helped the couple find the apartment.

He seemed boyish, and often lonely. He was divorced. Abrams was raising his daughter Stephanie, now 19, alone. He worked as a salesman at a ticket shop in Costa Mesa.

With only a wall dividing them, Abrams and her husband grew to become even better friends, she said. Abrams began spending time in the couple’s apartment. He would come over through a loose slat in the tall fence that separated their patios, gnawing on a handful of sunflower seeds, looking for company: Her husband and Abrams would sit on the couch and play their guitars into the night.

She liked him. He was a good man. He was trying to raise his daughter right; he was attentive to her, loyal to his work. “He was actually an OK person. He was quirky,” the woman said, laughing a little as she remembered the sunflower seeds. “He was fun to hang out with. He worked at the Ticket Shack and we’d get tickets for different things. . . . Things were fine.”

They were friendly enough that she thought it was no big deal when he offered to lend her about $200. She now figures the loan, which she said was long ago repaid although he told police otherwise, was part of an effort to get a hold on her.

In fact, things didn’t even become strange when Abrams first mentioned that he was falling for her. Abrams’ loneliness had blossomed into a crush.

Separately, he told both her and her husband. Neither knew how to respond, but they were close enough friends that they felt they could safely ignore it. It was something else that Abrams said that bothered the couple more: One day, he mentioned that he could hear them through the walls, talking about him. The woman increasingly was uncomfortable with Abrams in their apartment. He seemed distant, and his gentle demeanor was eroding, fast, into something the couple didn’t recognize.

He seemed strangely still and quiet one moment and hyper and talkative the next. His speech slurred and his thoughts were incoherent. And also, the woman figured, he began mentioning strange thoughts that seemed like caricatures of paranoia: Sprinkled through everyday conversations about everyday things, Abrams said that he thought the government watched its citizens through television screens and that “neighborhood watch” groups monitored the public through churches.

Abrams Threatens Husband With Gun

More and more, he made suggestive comments to the woman, watching to see how she would react, and repeatedly told her husband he was attracted to her. The woman ignored him, passing him in the hallways without a look. “Things were getting bad,” the woman said. “He seemed really messed up.”

He even bought a gun and threatened to kill the husband, the couple said later in court documents. Her husband one day found Abrams sawing a hole through their wall, and the couple worried he was trying to tap their telephone line.

Things broke down entirely after she tried to nail the fence slat shut, provoking him to shout at her and kick the fence. After that, the woman went to court to get a restraining order. The couple broke their lease and moved out of the building.

Shortly after, Abrams told a mutual friend how much he missed her, and how, once, he looked into the sky and saw her name.

He asked workers at her bank and anyone else who knew her where she was living. Eventually Abrams found their new home in Garden Grove and began waiting outside for hours at a time, always at night, she said.

The woman had found another job, where she answered phones for a small Costa Mesa company that trained people to use heavy machinery. One day, the woman and her co-workers found empty sunflower seeds sprinkled on the front steps of the office.

After eight months of this, in May 1994, she complained that he had violated his restraining order. Abrams pleaded guilty to charges of stalking and making anonymous harassment calls to the woman, and was sentenced to 90 days in jail and three years’ probation, court records show.

A Chance Encounter at Office Supply Store

She did not see him again until one month ago. Now divorced, she was raising three kids by herself and was lost in thought one day when she was returning some items to an office-supply store in Costa Mesa.

He stood there a few feet from her. She could see him from the corner of her eye. He looked different; he had gained, it seemed, 200 pounds. The two did not move until somebody said “Hi” and they descended into a strange politeness.

“I didn’t recognize you,” she remembers him saying.

“You look different.”

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Do you work around here?”

Silence.

“Maybe I shouldn’t ask you that.”

“Maybe you better not.”

They walked away from one another. The encounter seemed innocuous enough, according to the woman. She said to herself later: “I guess he’s OK now. I guess he’s better now. That was great. He must have gotten his wits about him,” she said.

By the time Abrams crashed into the playground, three weeks later, she had long forgotten about it, and it didn’t come back to her until she sat in a chair and muttered the words, “This is not happening to me. This is not happening to me,” over and over.

It was about 5 p.m. on May 3 that Abrams smashed his car into the front play area of Southcoast Early Childhood Learning Center, which is about two blocks from where the woman’s own daughter goes to preschool. As the playground transformed into something horrible, and helicopters hovered overhead, Abrams remained seated inside his Cadillac Coupe DeVille.

Three children were pinned under his car. Sierra Soto, 4, and Brandon Wiener, 3, were killed. Victoria Sherman, 5, and Nicholas McHardy, 2, both suffered head injuries. Three others suffered other injuries. Police said Abrams drove past the school, made a U-turn and drove full speed at the school’s play yard.

Earlier he had been traveling north in the carpool lane of the Costa Mesa Freeway when a green Toyota cut him off. Police said Abrams suddenly became enraged, accelerated and smashed into the green car. Abrams’ daughter, Stephanie, later told The Times her father reacted badly to the accident and that he just “snapped.” Abrams later would tell police that he did it because the neighborhood reminded him of the 26-year-old woman, that “I was going to execute those children.”

She Can’t Get the Crash Out of Her Head

When the woman returned home from work Monday night, the phone already was ringing. It was her mother, asking if she had heard about the crash, and if her 4-year-old daughter was OK. The woman said: “She’s fine, Mom. What happened?” Her mother didn’t tell her any more. Then the police, homicide detectives, came.

What they told her, in their police jargon of suspects and perpetrators, was like lead in her belly: Police told her Abrams said, as he sat in the car among the screaming: “This is not an accident.” Somebody else called her that night, a friend, and put it more succinctly: “I think he did this because of you.”

On Friday, the woman sat on a bench outside a coffee shop, sipping coffee and tucking her hair behind her ear. She is pretty, with blue eyes that approach aquamarine, and has an analytical mind that is just as piercing. She looks tired, though, not from lack of sleep, but from an abundance of thought.

Indeed, over the last week, the image of Abrams has flitted in and out of her mind, like a wraith, at unsuspecting moments--when she is driving, when she tucks her children into bed. She cannot, she said, stop thinking about him.

Friends call her and tell her things they had avoided saying before, how Abrams couldn’t stop talking about her, even in the years she never saw him. And the guilt, from the fruitless idea that she might have seen it all coming, and the hideous one that she is somehow to blame, is merciless.

She said she has not attended funeral services for the children who were killed because she figures parents might blame her. “What an awful thing for the parents. To see me,” she said.

She left the area for a few days, trying, she said, to do something she now thinks is impossible, trying to make sense of the irrational, and of what kind of demons turned Abrams into something more than a man who fell in love too hard.

“If the harassment is against myself, that’s one thing. Why does he want to pin my name on such a crime? Why my name?” she said.

To be sure, she tries to resist the idea that Abrams drove into the preschool to get her attention, to say, “Look, see what I can do,” she said, but the idea also never leaves.

“This is something he has finally done that will live forever in my heart. I will never forget him again. He will always be there with me . . . . It is like he sacrificed those children. It’s like he sacrificed them to the gods in his head.”

And to her.