‘I’ll always miss her a lot, but it gets easier’

It has been 15 months since Michael Long lost his grandmother, the woman he called “Mom,” the woman who had loved him and taken care of him all of his life.

It has been 15 months since his uncle, Edward McGee, was arrested for the elderly woman’s murder, 15 months since Michael went to live with his cousin Marva Scranton and her family in their South Los Angeles home and 15 months since that family became his.

Slimmer and a head taller than the stocky, straight-A student who brought an audience to tears when he stood up only three weeks after the murder to deliver his sixth-grade graduation address, Michael said his memories of 74-year-old Clara Stone are still vivid.

They are good memories, the kind of recollections that are warm enough to overshadow the horror of the June night when he returned home from the movies to discover that Stone and two others in their home had been stabbed to death. That night, Michael cried a bit, and then summoned the courage to give police information that helped lead to his uncle’s arrest in the triple murder.

“I’ll always miss her a lot, but it gets easier,” the curly-haired 13-year-old said recently as he sat in Scranton’s comfortable living room. “I always think about her . . . think about hearing her say, ‘Michael, I love you. Michael, are you home from school now?’ I think about her giving me a hug and a kiss and I miss that. . . . But with everyone helping me, it’s not painful anymore.”

Last year, for the first time, Michael brought home report cards with Bs and Cs on them, a drop in grades that his teachers at Audubon Junior High School believe is only temporary. The setback was not surprising, Scranton observed, considering everything that has happened in Michael’s life.

The boy had lived with his grandmother ever since he was a baby. His father, one of Stone’s two sons, left when Michael was just a toddler. Nobody is quite sure where his mother is.

But Stone tried to make it all up to her grandson by teaching him a special kind of love. She gave him an understanding of life that made it easier to go on when she was gone. When it came time to move in with the Scrantons, Michael said, “It was like I just mixed right in.

“It’s the only home I know now . . . I’ve experienced a lot of new things by being in a family environment. Before it was always me and my grandma. Now I have a mom and a dad, brothers and sisters. It’s just fun.”

In the last year, there have been a wealth of other experiences as well--many of them provided by strangers who were touched by Michael’s story and wanted to help. There was a week at the Los Angeles Lakers’ basketball camp from one benefactor, an extra week at a Catalina summer camp from another. There have been donations toward Michael’s college education--at last count totaling almost $25,000.

There have been comforting letters and words of admiration, enough to fill the pages of a 4-inch-thick scrapbook that Scranton put together during the nights her fretting about Michael kept her awake.

“I always worried,” she said. “I had times when I just cried. Michael comforted me . He told me everything is going to be all right. He’s an amazing kid.”

Still to come for Michael is the prospect of testifying at his uncle’s murder trial. It’s an ordeal he knows he will have to face one day soon.

Michael said that last summer McGee wrote him a letter saying he was sorry for what he did, that he didn’t mean to kill his own mother.

“He said he wanted me to come and visit him,” Michael recalled of the note. “He told me I could bring money if I wanted to. . . . I thought he had a lot of nerve.”