THE face of 12-year-old Michael Smith had the look of the living dead.
Living because he was breathing, and his blinking eyes were feverishly trying to hold back the tears he wanted to spill on the sidewalk for his beloved stepsister Anita Smith, who was gunned down inside Wendy’s.
Dead because the kid didn’t know what to do with himself – it was the first time he’d experienced graphic death firsthand.
Dead because the bullet that killed his stepsister killed a part of him, too.
“They were very close,” said Thomas Corrigan, a city high-school counselor and family friend. “You could see the emotion he has in him.”
At 11:30 a.m. yesterday, across the street from Wendy’s, the living Michael paced back and forth like a caged panther inside the zoo.
He clutched a basketball-leather, accordion-style book bag as if it were his stepsister. His right hand fidgeted, frantically darting in and out of the pockets of his baggy black jeans.
From behind the yellow police tape, he watched as cops walked in and out of Wendy’s – just like he frequently did after school when his stepsister would hand him a free hamburger, fries and soda.
He would occasionally put the book bag on top of his gray baseball cap and walk in circles. He watched the sidewalk traffic jam that had formed on busy Main Street as pedestrians arched their heads to catch a glimpse of the massacre scene.
His face was pensive, sad and angry.
“Mikey!” his mother would scream after noticing that he wasn’t standing near her. The boy would walk toward her, let her know he was still living, then go back into his grief-filled cage.
Michael’s mother stood out in the pedestrian traffic jam because of her 6-foot frame and the bouquet of flowers she held in her hand. She wanted to place the flowers at the restaurant’s entrance, but investigating cops didn’t let her.
She also had the living-dead look on her face. She loved Anita for the bond she had with Michael.
It was her job at 6 a.m. to wake and tell Michael that Anita was dead.
“He just said it must be a dream,” Michael’s mother said. “We both just cried and held each other.”
She decided to keep the kid’s mind occupied by sending him to school at IS 137 in Flushing. She later relented and called her friend Corrigan, who went to Michael’s 10 a.m. math class.
The teacher privately told Corrigan that Michael was distraught, occasionally breaking down in tears. Corrigan discreetly observed the classroom – to avoid alerting other students to Michael’s pain – and determined the kid was too “traumatized” to remain at school.
Corrigan said the boy was silent as they waited for his mother to pick him up.
Michael’s mother left work, picked up her son and headed for Wendy’s – where they encountered more people bearing the look of the living dead.
A woman stood trembling in tears in the arms of a friend because she was one of the last customers to leave Wendy’s Wednesday night.
“It, it, it could been me,” the woman said in a shaking voice.
The half-dozen workers at a McDonald’s two storefronts away sat on an empty wooden fruit stand thinking that it could have happened to them – and they earn only $5.50 an hour.
At 1 p.m., Michael’s mother walked to the nearby Sheraton Hotel where a suite on the 16th floor was being used as a grief center.
Michael, as he had done since arriving at school, remained dead silent.
He plopped his body onto a love seat, clutching his book bag for security. He opened his mouth only to sip water. Corrigan explained Michael’s agony to a counselor who was last seen making an attempt to draw words from the boy’s living-dead mind.
It was the counselor’s job to explain to Michael that the living feel like dying when the person they truly love is dead.