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Not for lack of trying. Jeff's life came apart in adolescence. "I don't know what happened," says Bonnie. "He was such a beautiful child. He still is my beautiful child. But he got so angry." After he was kicked out of Monroe Junior High for misconduct, Bonnie sent him to Boys Town for three years. But Jeff grew more rebellious. He got his first gun, a .25-cal. semiautomatic, in his mid-teens. A year later, he dodged his first bullet; after a fistfight, his opponent returned with a rifle and opened fire. That same year, he did his first drive-by. "We shot at a house, just to let them know that the games were over," he says. Although he doesn't believe he ever hit anyone, he confesses that "one time we almost hit a four-year-old girl by mistake."
Two years ago, Jeff paid $50 to a friend for the stolen .32-cal. pistol he used in last summer's shoot-out. After the gunfight, he tossed it in a lake and bought a 12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun. "You feel invincible with a weapon," he says. In April he was arrested for possession of a .410-gauge shotgun, and now faces felony charges.
All in all, Jeff doesn't consider himself a violent guy, notwithstanding several broken noses. "I don't have a quick temper, but if I'm mad, I'm mad for three weeks," he says, which is a long time in the life of an armed youth. He graduated from Benson High School last year, and works digging fence holes while awaiting trial. "I'm trying to stay away from guns now, but it's like everybody has them. Guys will be like, 'I've got a 9-mm, and you've only got a peashooter.' Or they'll brag that 'my brother has a MAC-10.' As crazy as it's getting, I think it should be illegal to have a gun," he says.
* Bonnie didn't realize that her son was involved with guns until last summer. In June, after Jeff and some friends were shot at in a drive-by, they jumped into a Jeep and went looking for the assailant's car. When they found the car parked in front of a rival's house, Jeff's friend jumped out and pounded on it with a wooden club. But just as they were about to leave, someone crept up and fired a shotgun blast through the back of their Jeep. Jeff ducked, and his friend was hit in the back and shoulder.
It was the shoot-out in August that really got Bonnie's attention. She decided to fight back, and formed the Benson Youth-Parent Association, which chaperones parties and patrols the streets. "There are drive-bys all the time," she says. "They don't even make the newspaper." Bonnie patrols Benson with a police scanner, banking on her belief that mothers still enjoy some diplomatic immunity on the streets. "If I won a million dollars tomorrow, I'd buy a few buses, fill them with kids and flee Omaha," she says. Flee where? "I hadn't thought of that," she responds.