Teen-Ager’s Success Story Cut Short : Tragedies: John Holden, 19, had turned around his life of delinquency when he was killed by a robber at a Porter Ranch pizza parlor.

At 14, John Holden was a house-breaker and drug abuser who gulped eight-ounce bottles of Robitussin when he couldn’t find a better high.

At 19, he was dead with a bullet in the chest.

It would be a mistake, say those who knew him best, to connect those two events and assume John Michael Holden’s life story was another empty tragedy played out on the wide and increasingly mean streets of the San Fernando Valley, where the gang turf is growing faster than the Bermuda grass.

In between, John Holden remade his life with the help of a group of caring adults and proved that not every boy who goes bad is doomed, and that sometimes society’s safety net isn’t full of holes.

He died young, and needlessly. But his is a success story, insists his mother, Carol Holden.

“This kid had been to hell and back,” she said.

John Holden’s life ended the night of Jan. 14. He was working the night shift as assistant manager at Ameci’s In & Out Pizza & Pasta shop in Porter Ranch when two young men, one wearing a cap that said Cowboys, walked up to the red, white and green counter.

Holden stepped up to take their pizza order, but when he opened the cash drawer to take their money, the young man without the cap pulled a gun.

Holden at 19 looked innocent with his wavy blond hair and delicate features, but he knew about people like these, had once been not so different himself. So he didn’t fool around. He quickly handed over $450. He had a girlfriend, a new car and plans to turn a latent artistic talent into a career. He was not going to play the hero.

Carol Holden can’t fathom why, but the boy with the gun, for he was little more than a boy, raised his weapon and fired.

A $25,000 reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of the killers, and two teen-agers, 16 and 17, were arrested in late January, said Detective Adalberto Luper. Both have appeared in Juvenile Court and denied killing Holden. A third suspect, who was waiting outside the restaurant in a small mall on Tampa Avenue, is still being sought.

Today, Carol Holden, 51, an evidence handler at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division, is getting by on “rage, nicotine and caffeine” while she waits for the outcome of the Juvenile Court proceedings.

She has not been able to grieve yet; she’s too angry. “I thought when they were arrested I would relax,” added Holden, a slender woman with short, dark hair and an intense manner. “But I’m still so numb.”

John Holden’s life was one of extremes, and the arc of it was parabolic, descending from the giddiest highs to the lowest of lows and sweeping back up again at the end.

His mother remembers him as one of the happiest babies she had ever seen and family photographs bear her out. They show a baby with a smile wide and broad and the eyes wrinkled up in excitement.

He was quick-witted and curious about everything. But the joy vanished when he went to school and was diagnosed with dyslexia so severe that he had to be placed in a special class. Taunting by other students left scars.

One day in the fourth grade, he came home from school particularly dejected. Carol Holden remembers his exact words: “Mom, I’m tired of being treated like a freak.”

Carol Holden thinks her divorce from John’s father when the boy was in junior high school contributed to her son’s downward spiral. She said she and her ex-husband, who now lives in Connecticut, did their best to assure John and his two older sisters that they did not cause the breakup.

“I have a sneaky feeling that deep in his head, he was thinking, ‘If I didn’t have dyslexia . . . .’ ” she said.

When Carol Holden had to go back to work and she was inevitably home less often. For whatever reasons, John developed into a manipulative young man. “He was real good at guilt trips,” she said. “He would say, ‘You don’t understand me, you don’t know my problems.’ When you’re a single parent it’s easy to be conned.”

He was also a sad young man. A talented skateboarder, he found a shop in Simi Valley that wanted to sponsor him in competition. Somehow, it never worked out, and his mother believes he deliberately failed because he could not believe himself capable of success.

By the ninth grade, Carol Holden began seeing people she did not like hanging around, sneaky kids who were excessively polite to adults and then disappeared with John. He began skipping school and sneaking out his bedroom window for nightly adventures. He smoked marijuana and drank alcohol when he could get it. When he couldn’t, he swigged medications high in alcohol content. His mother begged the family doctor to prescribe only alcohol-free cough suppressants.

He talked vaguely about suicide. Not that he would ever do it, he said, he was just thinking about it.

His mother sent him to a counselor, but he missed appointments. Then one day, Carol Holden came home from work to learn her son was in jail. He had been arrested with two older boys for five residential burglaries in the upscale neighborhoods of the north Valley.

When his mother saw him in jail, he shouted: “You hate me, my dad hates me. I ought to be dead.”

As bad as he felt then, his mother is certain that he would have agreed that the arrest was “the best thing that ever happened to him.”

Carol Holden knows it would have been easy for her son to get caught up in the revolving-door justice system that has ground up so many lives of young men who start out with small, plea-for-help crimes. Getting none from an overburdened system, they commit more and more serious crimes until they wind up in state prison. But John Holden was lucky. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital and then transferred to the Pacific Lodge Boys’ Home in Woodland Hills.

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Holden said. “Somewhere there’s a plan for us. The lodge was exactly what he needed.”

The lodge is an attractive array of bungalows that sits on about 10 green acres of gently sloping hillside. There is a Los Angeles Unified School District high school on the grounds and the private, nonprofit facility serves 76 young men ages 13 to 18.

The lodge was opened in 1923 and still takes seriously its motto, “Building Productive Lives,” said Joan Huberman, a managing caseworker at the lodge and the person in charge of Neimeyer Cottage where John Holden stayed during the two years he spent at the facility.

The lodge operates on a set of old-fashioned standards for behavior. The residents must keep their rooms clean, make their beds, go to school every day and study for at least an hour every night. Lights are out by 9:45. Television viewing is restricted and in the dining hall each boy must put his napkin on his lap.

Huberman said the firm structure helps the residents feel safe enough to begin dealing with the problems that brought them to the lodge.

“Most acting-out kids are depressed,” Huberman said. “They are not feeling psychologically safe so they act out.”

The lodge provides individual psychotherapy, but the real work of changing behavior is often done by the residents themselves in peer counseling sessions. There, the young men confront each other with demands that they stop playing games and face up to their destructive behavior.

John Holden, Huberman said, initially resisted the program. He was used to using his mental agility to manipulate people around him. He much preferred advising other residents about how to solve their problems to working on his own.

The change in him was gradual and difficult. One of his counselors offered him a key piece of advice.

“Why don’t you learn to put out fires instead of starting them?” the man asked.

Holden began working hard on his art and graduated from high school early, although the dyslexia continued to slow his progress. He left the lodge in 1990.

He was considered such a success that when Huberman and other staff talked about bringing graduates back to give motivational talks to new residents, John Holden’s name was one of the first mentioned.

The lodge has since established a scholarship fund in John Holden’s name.

When he returned home, “we were terrified,” said his mother. But he soon proved himself. He got a job as a driver at Ameci’s and so impressed management that they promoted him to assistant manager, though he was only 18.

Later, Holden suspected someone of stealing from the till and began making up the shortage out of his own pocket. It angered him to think someone was trying to take advantage of his past.

Ameci manager Ahmad Abed, 23, remembers John Holden as “one of our top employees, a good person.”

Holden was making strides elsewhere as well. He had a girlfriend and was attending art classes at Moorpark College. With his mother’s help, he bought a small foreign car. “That was John’s trophy to himself for making it,” Carol Holden said.

Then came the night of Jan. 14. John Holden normally would not have been working that night, but he took the shift as a favor to a friend. He must have sensed trouble when the two young men walked in, because he stepped in front of his counter crew to help them.

The shooting was tragically ironic. “John made a choice not to be those people,” said his mother.

John Holden left behind his family and a much-loved dog named Dude, a shepherd mix known as Dud to the women of the house.

But he left much more outside the home than his mother ever imagined. It was only after his death that she discovered her son had been visiting Pacific Lodge regularly to counsel other troubled kids. He did the same thing with people he met on the job or anywhere else.

Carol Holden received a note last week from a boy who said that after he ran away from the lodge recently, John met with him for several hours and finally persuaded him to go back. “He was the first person I knew who cared for me,” said the boy, who has since graduated from the program and has a job.

John Holden had become, his mother said, a “guardian angel at large.”

That’s why Carol Holden was able to console one of John’s former counselors, who began crying when he heard about the killing. “Oh my God,” the man sobbed, “he was my shining success story.”

“I said, ‘He still is. He’s gone, but he’s still a success.’ ”