O.C. Youngsters No Strangers to Crime : Retrospective: They dominated the news this year as both victims and perpetrators of terrible incidents.

Linda Tay and Kathy Woods have never met, but they have an awful lot in common.

Both immigrated to the United States as young newlyweds, Tay from Taiwan and Woods from Great Britain. Each chose a quiet Orange County community for its strong schools and safe streets: Tay’s rambling house is in the hills of Orange Park Acres, Woods’ condo is perched on the San Clemente coast 30 miles away.

Last New Year’s, each woman had a popular young son making good grades and looking ahead to college. Stuart Tay loved to show off his cherry-red Nissan sports car; Stephen Woods was forever offering friends a lift in his brand-new pickup.

As New Year’s dawns again, Stuart and Stephen are both dead. They were killed savagely at age 17, senseless youth tragedies repeated all too often in Orange County in 1993.

“I’m like most people, I guess, I never thought it would happen to me,” said Kathy Woods, whose son was speared through the head with a paint roller rod at a beach parking lot Oct. 15. “I believed that if you’re a certain kind of person, you don’t attract problems. Obviously, that’s not true.”

It has been nearly a year since Linda Tay’s son was brutally beaten and then buried in a Buena Park back yard, but still she is desperately searching for answers about how this tragedy befell her family.

“I ask myself what I could have done differently. I think about this every day, I think about it every hour . . . (but) the problem is not me as a mother because I’ve done my best,” Tay said tearfully during a recent interview, anger and sorrow mixed in her voice. “Who has failed us? Is it the schools? The schools alone cannot take care of these kids. Is it the parents? These parents tried. . . .

“What the heck happened?”

What happened in Orange County this year, over and over, was tragedy involving youths. Children and teen-agers consistently dominated the news as both victims and perpetrators of violent crime. Each incident seemed more horrible than the one before.

All told, 40 people 18 or younger were murdered in Orange County this year. And more than half of the county’s 212 homicide victims were 25 or younger. Not a weekend passed, it seemed, without one teen-ager shooting another, in lovers’ spats, gang disputes or random drive-by attacks.

*

Children died at the hands of their parents. Others died from neglect. Teen-agers who became parents too young abandoned their babies. Students, even at the elementary-school level, brought semiautomatic guns, knives and, in one case, a machete to school.

Gang membership climbed to 17,000, and cities and schools tried to crack down: no more late-night parties on beaches, strict anti-gang dress codes for students, severe punishments for graffiti vandals--and their parents--zero tolerance of weapons on campus, with metal detectors at schools in Buena Park.

Yet throughout the year, studies showed the plight of Orange County’s children getting worse.

In anticipation of the county’s first summit on children in May, advocates prepared a report that showed teen-age pregnancies soaring, child abuse and juvenile crime at all-time highs and a growing number of youngsters living in poverty. Half the county’s homeless people are children, the report showed, and nearly 70,000 local youngsters have no steady source of nutrition beyond school lunches or government assistance programs.

Then a survey released in August showed that the number of homicide victims in their late teens tripled from 1981 to 1991, and a September report revealed that 8% of juvenile delinquents commit 55% of youth crime, with some individuals arrested as many as 14 times in the past six years.

“Orange County has to move from denial to acknowledging that we have problems,” said Sharon Paul, director of human services for the county’s Department of Education and an organizer of the summit on children. “There’s no singular solution to the problem. We all have to help, because it takes a village to raise a child.”

None of 1993’s local tragedies was more horrifying, perhaps, than the death of Steven J. Giguere Jr. The 4-month-old baby was eaten alive by his family’s pet rat, Homer, as his parents and sister slept in the filthy station wagon where they were living.

Steven’s body was discovered in August with 110 rat bites on his hand and forearm. The rat apparently had not been fed for two days; the baby had not eaten for 24 hours. The boy’s parents, Kathyleen and Steven Giguere of Anaheim, tested positive for drugs after the incident and now await trial for involuntary manslaughter.

Speaking from her jail cell, Kathyleen Giguere told The Times: “I am not a monster mother.”

In other violent incidents this year, parents died alongside their children.

A decorated U.S. Marine who served in the Persian Gulf War was charged in the shooting deaths of Kristina and Amber Gibson, his ex-wife and 5-year-old daughter, in their apartment 17 days after the couple’s divorce became final in May. Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Steven Gibson, 32, awaits trial for the murders and could face the death penalty if convicted.

Three months later, 25-year-old Jennifer Ji was stabbed to death and her 5-month-old son, Kevin, suffocated in their Mission Viejo apartment. No arrests were made in that case.

In scandals scattered throughout the year, teachers, clergy and foster parents were accused of abusing youngsters.

George Melvin Fairchild, 53, a teacher at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, was charged with molesting three female students and sexually harassing two others. In Huntington Beach, a judge ordered Joe Espinosa--who resigned from teaching at Ocean View High last spring after being accused of inappropriately hugging and kissing a female student--to stay away from anyone under 18 without another adult present.

Father Richard T. Coughlin, 68, a prominent Orange County Catholic priest who founded an internationally known choir, was suspended from his church duties after being accused of molesting five youths decades earlier.

Four former members of the All-American Boys’ Chorus alleged that Coughlin kissed and fondled them during chorus events between 1970 and 1983, and a fifth said Coughlin molested him in Boston in 1965. One of the alleged victims filed a lawsuit in June against Coughlin, the chorus and the Diocese of Orange.

In separate lawsuits, three men accused Brother Gregory Atherton of fondling them and coercing them into oral copulation between 1967 and 1985. The men said the incidents occurred at Servite High School in Anaheim and St. Philip Benizi Church in Fullerton, where Atherton worked, and on trips to Northern California and to various church offices.

Also accused of sexual abuse were James and Carol Fox, a Garden Grove couple stripped of their foster-care license in July after five teen-age girls said the Foxes tried to recruit them for pornographic movies, showed them nude photos and sex toys, inappropriately touched them and coerced them into sex with their son. The Foxes also were accused of operating the facility illegally.

Young people, though, were not just victims. Often they were the aggressors.

About one week into the new year, two young men who police believe were on a gay-bashing spree with a carload of South County teens beat a man nearly to death as he walked the coast of Laguna Beach.

Loc Minh Truong, 55, of Costa Mesa, was kicked and bashed against rocks until his face--even his race--was unrecognizable. Jeff Michael Raines, 19, of San Juan Capistrano and Christopher Michael Cribbins, 22, of San Clemente, pleaded guilty in August to charges in the beating, which was classified as a hate crime. They are scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 7.

Six months later, a gregarious high school sophomore who loved to play soccer and had “tons of friends” at Mission Viejo High was shot dead. Police said Melissa Allyson Austin, 16, was killed by her former boyfriend, 20-year-old Richard Kenneth Nunno, whom she had been forbidden to see.

Then, as the year drew to a close, another South County girl, Angela Lynn Wagner, a 15-year-old from Dana Point, was fatally shot once in the chest as she sat in a car waiting for her boyfriend to run an errand. Police believe her attacker was a 16-year-old acquaintance and that the shooting was accidental.

*

In another accident, a 4-year-old boy shot his 3-year-old cousin in the face with a handgun his father had left atop a baby stroller in March. The boy’s father, Richard Granados, 24, was charged with felony child endangerment under a year-old law designed to punish people who leave weapons accessible to children.

Children armed themselves throughout the year, prompting increased concern about safety at local schools.

A 13-year-old brought a semiautomatic handgun to a middle school in Laguna Niguel. Police said three junior high-schoolers planned to take a classroom hostage with a machete, a knife and two guns that one boy had stashed in his backpack. A high school junior accidentally fired his father’s semiautomatic Beretta into the floor at Woodbridge High School in Irvine. All were expelled.

Educators, elected officials, community activists and business owners made a collective cry for help against youth violence, as more than 1,000 people gathered for the county’s first anti-gang summit Nov. 30. In a cavernous hotel ballroom, they swapped stories of how gangs had touched their lives, and they brainstormed about solutions.

“We are at a crossroads at this point in time,” County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez said at the summit. “We can ignore the problem (and) suffer the long-term consequences. The turnout today is a clear reflection of people’s concern and desire to do something about it.”

The brutal murders of Stuart Tay and Stephen Woods sounded the alarm on what is now seen as an “epidemic” of youth violence plaguing Orange County. Both cases shocked affluent, relatively crime-free corners of the county, and both left bright, vibrant young men dead of gruesome injuries.

The two killings serve as bookends on a year of youth-related tragedy.

Police allege that Stuart was killed on New Year’s Eve by five Foothill High School students with whom he was planning a computer heist. According to court documents, the five youths--led by Robert Chan, now 19--lost trust in Stuart when they discovered he had given them a fake name. Detectives say the boys lured Stuart to one of their homes to buy a gun, and then beat him with a sledgehammer and baseball bats for 20 minutes.

Stuart was still not dead, police said, so the youths poured rubbing alcohol down his throat and taped his mouth shut before burying him in a shallow grave.

One of the five youths, Charles Choe, 18, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, was sentenced to eight years in the California Youth Authority and is expected to testify against the others in a trial next year. Chan and the other three--Abraham Acosta, 17, Mun Bong Kang, 18, and Kirn Young Kim, 18--will all be tried as adults for first-degree murder.

“If our community and our society are not going to wake up to the fact that our kids are totally out of control, then a lot more people are going to lose their kids,” said Linda Tay as the first anniversary of her son’s death approached.

“People say you’ve got to put it behind you, you’ve got to get on with your life, but you can’t do that,” she said, sobbing. “You look forward to them growing up and going to college, and (then) you can move on, but when something like this happens, you can’t move on. You’re stuck in a spinning wheel that never ends. . . . People ask you how you cope. You don’t cope, because it consumes you.”

*

Looking back over the year, Kathy Woods vaguely remembered hearing the ugly tale of Stuart Tay’s murder, but even as a mother of a boy the same age, she had not responded with worry for her own family. “I have never had any concerns about safety,” Woods said. “It has never been a part of my life.”

Until October 15.

That evening, Stephen Woods skipped work at a local restaurant because he was feeling sick. But his friends persuaded him to go to the San Clemente High-Mater Dei football game, and then to cruise down to a local park to hang out afterward. That’s what teen-agers do on Friday nights, after all.

The beach party turned violent when a band of local gang members clashed with Stephen’s group as they left the parking lot in a rush. Stephen sat in the passenger seat of the first of four cars heading out of the lot; during the melee, someone rammed a metal rod from a paint roller into Stephen’s head.

Juan Enriquez Alcocer and Arturo Villalobos, both 20 and San Clemente residents, were arrested along with four juveniles and charged with murder.

Stephen lay in a coma for nearly a month, then died Nov. 9. He was the third child Kathy Woods has lost: a 6-week-old daughter died of kidney failure in the 1960s and a 4-year-old son died during open heart surgery in the ‘70s.

“There are so many accidents that can happen with children, there are so many medical problems with children. Anything can strike you,” Woods said, strolling the beach where Stephen loved to surf. “Any one of those things are difficult enough to overcome without us having barbarians to deal with.”