'I want to teach at your school'

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Cleveland School teacher Rann Chun reflects back to shooting incident when he was a student at the school, his sister Ram Chun was killed on the playground.Cailxtro Romias/The Record

As children line up for a playground game or joke around with their friends, 28-year-old Rann Chun stays alert.

He is staring in the distance at the fence at the back of the playground at Cleveland School, making sure nothing unusual is going on. He knows what can happen.

"I'm always looking at every direction and always scanning and just making sure that I look out at every direction," said Chun, a third-grade teacher at Cleveland. "I think it's not a bad idea."

Twenty years after his 6-year-old sister, Ram, died at Cleveland - one of five children killed by Patrick Purdy on Jan. 17, 1989 - Chun is in his fourth year as a teacher at the school.

It is his first full-time teaching job. He got the position after graduating from University of the Pacific in 2004.

He never told himself, "No, I won't come back to Cleveland School because of any incident in the past."

Instead, Chun told himself, "Well, that is my place. I used to be there; my teachers are there. I respected them. ... There's lots of bad memories, but there are also lots of good memories."

Principal Pat Busher, who retired in 2006 after 22 years at Cleveland, makes it clear she was thrilled when the boy who had lived through the tragedy wanted to return to the school as a man.

"I knew his family well because he lost his sister," Busher said in an interview with former Record reporter Dianne Barth. "I visited the family frequently out of concern. ... Rann was just a wonderful, wonderful little boy, so very bright. And he grew to be this handsome young man who came back and said, 'Mrs. Busher, I want to teach at your school.'

"It was one of our proudest moments."

His calling

Chun wasn't thinking about teaching when he started his course work at Pacific. He wanted to be a computer engineer. But in his spare time, he tutored the children of Cambodian immigrants at Stockton's Park Village Apartments, where his family lived. Soon he discovered that teaching was his calling.

Tall, lean and studious, he spends his mornings teaching English to third-graders in the same classroom where he sat so many years ago.

"What strategy are we using right now to figure this word out?" he asks his students. "If you read on, you can use a context clue."

His voice is serious but gentle. He is devoted to his students. In what free time he has, Chun pursues a master's degree designed to help him incorporate technology into the elementary school classroom.

Unless they ask, Chun doesn't tell his students about that day when he was 8 years old.

"I just need to isolate it from what is reality today, what I need to get done and what I need to do," Chun said. "Things like that are in my control."

But it's not as if the memories ever go away.

Born in a refugee camp in Thailand in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia, Chun moved to the United States with his family when he was about 3 years old - first to Texas, then in 1986 to Stockton.

He is the second of eight children. Ram was born next.

Staying put

Chun was playing tetherball when the shooting began. His sister was playing with her friends, maybe 25 feet away.

The words of Chun's father may have saved his life. Having seen so much inhumanity in Cambodia, Chun Keut raised a cautious son. While others ran unknowingly toward the noise from Purdy's assault weapon and burning car, Rann stayed put.

Physically unharmed that day, his wounds are psychological. He remains haunted by an offhand comment he made to his mother, Chan Im, as they waited in the cafeteria for word of Ram's condition.

"Your sister has been shot," his mother told him.

"Well, let her get hurt," Rann Chun responded.

"If only I knew better at that moment, I wouldn't say such a word," Chun said. "But I said it in a way thinking more so, 'Well, she's OK. Where is she? What's going on?'

"I still didn't have a clue until my mom really set the tone that this is serious."

He understands today his insensitive comment. Ram was more outgoing than he. She made friends more easily. Chun's father paid more attention to her.

"There's a sense of, 'I want to be like her. I mean, she's younger, but I wish everyone likes me like you,' " Chun said. "Thinking about that. ... It could have been jealousy about that moment to make such a statement. It wasn't right."

He has learned to live with the regret of that rash childhood remark.

Pain never goes away

The aftermath of the shootings brought more pain. Chun said his father developed a drinking problem. According to published reports, Chun Keut attempted suicide within three months of his daughter's slaying. He died at 54 of kidney and liver disease in 1998, when Chun was a junior at Stagg High School.

Chun's mother and six surviving siblings moved a few years ago to Providence, R.I., which also has a large Cambodian community. Chun has remained in Stockton.

But he is hardly alone. Chun and his wife, Kim, also Cambodian, have plenty of children to fill their lives in Stockton - the dozens of students he teaches at Cleveland and the ones she teaches at Parklane Elementary in the city's northeast corner.

"It doesn't ever go away," Chun said of the pain from what happened 20 years ago, "but it doesn't stop me from what I'm doing today. It made me who I am, but at the same time, it doesn't change the fact that now I am an older person, I am a man, and my responsibility is a teacher. ... That moment, it will always stay there, but it didn't stop me from doing what I had to do in life."

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