Shooting doesn’t discourage Catholic educator

Stacy J. Willis

Friday, Aug. 10, 2001 | 4:24 a.m.

People don't ask about his scarred cheek.

They shake his hand and carry on the conversation, talk about Las Vegas schools, about growth in the valley, about how the Catholic school system is growing and how he, as its superintendent, is trying to manage it. Soon, people forget about the scar -- it's nothing really, a slight deformity.

But sometimes conversation winds around to talk of ethics, of how Catholic schoolchildren are expected, fairly or unfairly, to possess higher moral standards than their public school counterparts by virtue of their daily religious education. Someone inevitably asks about gangs, about weapons in school. And then he points to the scar.

"That's how I got this. An eighth grader shot me," he says, "with a sawed-off shotgun."

Just like that.

Las Vegas Catholic Diocese Schools Superintendent Richard Facciolo, who quietly assumed the position a year ago, had nearly half of his face blown off by a student at Sacred Heart Catholic School in Redlands, Calif., in 1995.

He was sitting in his office after school -- he was the principal -- looking at paperwork. He didn't see the 13-year-old gunman walk in. The teenager, John Sirola, blasted a hole the size of a grapefruit in Facciolo's left cheek. Facciolo fell to the ground.

"I didn't know I had been shot," Facciolo recalls. "I just knew I couldn't breathe. I thought maybe I was having a stroke or a heart attack."

Sirola had been in Facciolo's office earlier that day for violating the school's uniform requirements -- an untucked shirt, oversized pants. After the shooting, Sirola ran out, slipped in the hallway, and fell on his gun. It discharged in his chest and killed him.

Facciolo's secretary Jackie Hoar called 911 and used a sweater to apply pressure to the principal's wound. He stayed conscious, although in shock, all the way to Loma Linda University Hospital.

How can a person talk about this so calmly? What makes him able to sit in his diocese office and show a stranger 8x10 color photos of his mangled face, buckshot stuck in his bloody flesh, a gaping hole between his chest and nose where his chin used to be?

Facciolo looks at the photos, which were taken by surgeons at the hospital before they began what would turn out to be groundbreaking surgery. He says, "I didn't know the magnitude of it at the time. When I look at that, it doesn't seem like I'm looking at myself."

His jawbone was shattered. His teeth were gone or broken, lips torn or missing, collarbone broken.

It would take more than 30 surgical procedures, first to save and then reconstruct Facciolo. He would end up allowing doctors to remove his fibula to make a new jaw, and take a strip of skin from his calf to make a new cheek. The surgery left him with slightly limited use of his left leg.

"But of course, I am lucky," he says, habitually covering his scarred cheek with his left hand.

The community was upscale, the school private and the gunman a golfer. Sirola, a child of divorced parents, allegedly took the shotgun from his mother's friend, sneaked it into his house in his golf bag and sawed four inches off it. On Jan. 23, 1995, he went home after school, had a snack and went back to shoot his principal.

"I knew him. I knew of him," Facciolo said of Sirola.

Facciolo said he knew the boy was somewhat troubled. "His mother had sent him to live with his dad in Arizona, but the dad had sent him back," Facciolo said. Sirola's mother then asked Facciolo to re-admit the student into Sacred Heart specifically to help him be more disciplined, he said.

After the incident, Facciolo and police put together a picture of a young man far more troubled than anyone knew. Police theorized that Facciolo was actually meant to be a "trophy killing" that would allow Sirola entry into a gang. Facciolo says, "I also bear a striking resemblance to photos of his father."

Eight months after being shot, Facciolo returned to Sacred Heart, to the same office in which he was shot.

"I enjoyed my job," he said. "I wasn't going to allow this incident to be barometer by which the school was measured. I wanted the students to see the consequences, to see me come back. It was therapeutic."

Two years later, he accepted a position at a school district in Palm Springs, Calif., and in July 2000, he came to the Diocese of Las Vegas.

That both Facciolo and Sirola were Catholic seems of little importance. But it was precisely because Sacred Heart offered a more disciplined, more character-building educational experience that his mother put him in the school.

Facciolo attended Catholic schools himself, in the "nuns with rulers" days, he says. After deciding to be an educator, he had no plan to work in a Catholic school system, but the opportunity arose. After rejoining the Catholic system, he came to believe it offered a better, and safer, opportunity for education.

So is the Catholic school system safer than public schools? Does religion in school make for a more moral environment? Simplistically, does prayer stem violence?

"We work to promote Catholic values within each individual child," Facciolo says.

Nationwide, despite the higher profile of school violence in recent years, the rate of violent incidents on campuses is down. Clark County School District reports that the number of guns confiscated in schools has declined in the last four years -- from 66 in 1997-98 to 45 in 1999-2000.

Connie Gerber, principal of Las Vegas' only Catholic secondary school, Bishop Gorman High School, says that in 36 years on campus she can remember only four incidents in which a weapon was confiscated.

"I don't want to be Pollyanna here," she said. "But I think it is related to the more ethical upbringing our kids have."

Facciolo once believed that, too. And he still believes that the student body at Catholic schools is, generally, a more ethical bunch than at public schools.

"But you never know," he says, laying down a photo of his bloody face.

"Since the incident, I've been trying to intervene earlier. I've been trying to teach teachers to identify some of the characteristic or traits a child will exhibit when they are troubled, and to get licensed, mental health professionals involved.

"These are emotional or psychological situations, not necessarily spiritual. It's not something a priest can necessarily solve."

Today he has a crucifix above his desk. He attends Mass just as he always did. His office is down the hall from the bishop of Las Vegas.

"How did the incident affect my faith?" he says. "It didn't.

"I've become a little more in touch with my mortality. I am thankful to the doctors at Loma Linda. I do have a strong faith, but whether it's from the institutional religion, I'm not sure."