Sandy Kenaga used to go to a deli next door. But since her favorite place closed six weeks ago, she wandered every day to one restaurant or another. On Tuesday, she chose McDonald’s.
Bruce Bojesen went to Pershing Plaza to run some errands for his ailing mother, who had asked him to exchange a dog collar for her pet. That accomplished, he stopped for a bite to eat nearby. The closest place to grab a hamburger and a cup of coffee was McDonald’s.
Kirk Hauptmann had just filled a prescription for medicine to soothe the shiner he had gotten on his left eye during a football game. Out of habit, he went with a friend to their usual summertime hangout: McDonald’s.
They were strangers with little in common beyond their chance choice of where they would eat lunch that day.
In a matter of seconds Tuesday, they were irrevocably linked by a stranger’s gunfire.
The three names will linger in this town’s collective memory whenever anyone here recalls the McDonald’s rampage.
Sandy Kenaga, 42, ran a hair salon two blocks east of the restaurant. She died of a gunshot in the abdomen.
Bruce Bojesen, 50, a self-employed carpenter, lived in Silver Lake, a recreational town 20 miles west of Kenosha. He died of a shot in the head.
The lone shooting victim to survive is Kirk Hauptmann, 18, a sophomore in pre-medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who was home in Kenosha for the summer and living just a block away from the gunman, Dion Terres. A bullet grazed his right forearm.
On Wednesday afternoon, Hauptmann thanked dumb luck for saving him. At the same time, friends and family of the other two cursed it and the impulse that led Dion Terres to aim at their loved ones before pointing the gun at his final target: himself.
You would remember Kenaga. Always dressed like a million bucks. Jewelry just so. High heels, even though she spent most of the day on her feet at Lords & Ladies Styling Salon, the beauty shop she had run for more than a decade.
She kept candy and toys in the shop to occupy customers’ children. She made a habit of sending deli trays whenever a customer had an ill family member. She was the kind of woman to casually tell customers she would no longer be spending so much time styling hair herself because her feet couldn’t take it anymore, when in fact she recently had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“I haven’t ever met anyone as smiley as her,” said Sharon Dimitrijevich, a Libertyville nurse who went to school with Kenaga. “I don’t recollect ever seeing her down.”
Kenaga and her husband, postal worker Kenneth Kenaga, 45, recently bought a powerboat and had begun taking their 12-year-old son, Kyle, on trips to the area lakes.
On Wednesday evening, Kenneth Kenaga stood in front of the home of his in-laws, Leon and Ann Mardoian, to speak publicly about his family’s tragedy. Fighting back tears, his hands shaking, Kenaga held a family photo.
“This is a picture of a family that was extremely happy and is now torn apart,” he said.
Reading from a statement, he said, “This is an extreme tragedy, uncalled for, and senseless.”
He described his wife’s accomplishments, among them being named Parent of the Year by the Somers Elementary School. And he said that the word that best captured her was “vibrant.”
“Sandy was not a drinker, but to be around her was intoxicating,” he said.
Before turning back into the house, he said, “It is not easy, because I don’t have her by my side.”
Other Kenosha hairstylists recalled that if they ran out of supplies, Sandy Kenaga was the one they would call. Inevitably, she would say, “You want somebody to bring it over?”
Lisa Salsbury, a Kenosha hairstylist who knew Kenaga, said, “It’s the wrong ending for somebody like this.”
On Wednesday, Dennis Nudi rued two days: Tuesday afternoon and June 23, when he closed the deli he had run for 11 years next door to Kenaga’s salon.
Every morning she had breezed in for three chocolate fudge cookies. And every day, she came back for lunch. That ritual stopped on the June day when Nudi closed the place, getting ready for a move to the Southwest, where his children and grandchildren live.
Nudi said Wednesday, “I felt like maybe if I hadn’t closed it, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Running some errands
Bruce Bojesen still lived in the area where he had been born and raised. He sat in the same corner booth at the Silver Lake Grill every Saturday morning, where he ordered a Western omelette and talked waitress Betty McCarthy’s leg off. When he wasn’t pounding nails on some new home, Bojesen likely was to be found on the local golf course.
Or he might be seen about town, taking care of errands for his mother, Rosemary, 83. Five years ago, after his father’s death, he moved in with her.
Divorced, Bojesen was a father of a 17-year-old daughter, who lives in Detroit.
On Wednesday, family members who remain in the Kenosha area tried to piece together the chance course of events that led Bojesen into a bullet’s path.
“He just had to do some errands. That’s it,” said his sister-in-law Sue Bojesen. “He stopped for a hamburger and a cup of coffee.”
He went into Kenosha to exchange a dog collar that was the wrong color. After Tuesday’s shooting, the new collar was found in a shopping bag in the back of Bojesen’s green pickup truck.
Friends and neighbors in Silver Lake, a town of 1,839, were stunned by Bojesen’s death.
Judy Kluender, the bartender at the American Legion, remembered him as an easy-going man and a hard worker. A few years ago he had refinished her kitchen.
“He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said.
Laughing through the fear
The summer had been just as Kirk Hauptmann had wanted: all play and no work. After a rough freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, he had planned for a summer of hanging out and playing video games.
Tuesday’s trip to McDonald’s, one of his haunts, gave the summer a different character.
On Wednesday, Hauptmann joked about the event, trying to deny the seriousness of the afternoon before.
“This has been the strangest, most bizarre event of my life,” he said. “I do laugh about it, because if I stop to think, I’ll just get worried.”
On Wednesday afternoon, he dabbed an antiseptic cream on the wound and applied a new bandage.
“I don’t want nobody to see it because it looks like a girly wound,” he said.
He and a friend had been clowning around with their food. Hauptmann said he was waving french fries in his friend’s face when he heard a shot.
“I got up leisurely,” he recalled. “I assumed the guy was just robbing the place and wouldn’t shoot anybody.”
His friend hid under a table. Hauptmann headed for the door.
He did not realize he was wounded until after he had run to the nearby grocery story. When he raised his arm to dial 911, he saw blood.
He remembered that children had been sitting near him, and that the bullet could easily have hit them.
But he tries not to think about such things.
He said he was determined to show he was over it. He talked about the story he will have to tell when he gets back to school. And he talked about where he went to eat dinner hours after the shooting: another McDonald’s.
“I didn’t get to finish my lunch,” he said.
