Costco shooting is worst nightmare for families of emotionally disabled children
LOS ANGELES - Anytime there's a shooting in the news, dread floods Lillian Vasquez.
"Please," she thinks, "let the victim not be someone with autism."
Vasquez, whose 25-year-old son is moderately autistic, was dismayed to learn Sunday that a young man with a cognitive disability was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer in a Costco in Corona, half an hour from her home. The man who was killed, Kenneth French, pushed the officer while waiting in a line for samples.
"I fear people are going to be afraid of people with autism when things like this happen," said Vasquez, vice president of the Autism Society Inland Empire.
While developmentally disabled
