Crouched behind the Long Beach aquarium, a foghorn moaning off the coast, the three Franklin Middle School boys waited.
The Aquarium of the Pacific now deserted, the 13-year-olds climbed the wall and began dragging docile sea life from darkened pools, prosecutors allege.
They stabbed three sharks and a ray with pipes and left all but one to suffocate out of water. They lobbed small sharks into tanks of bigger predators. They slashed a shark's translucent egg sac and severed the embryos. Then, they slid back over the fence.
So, authorities claim, went last month's bewildering attack on harmless creatures that has shocked Long Beach and places far beyond.
More than 1,000 people, some from as far away as Hong Kong and Nova Scotia, have contacted the aquarium, which was visited last year by 200,000 children on field trips. Some have attributed the attacks to youthful foolishness and felt sorry for the young suspects, but others have demanded harsh punishment: life in prison, or even that they "be cut up and fed to the sharks."
More than 1,300 students wrote essays to express grief or outrage or to speculate on what had caused peers to commit such violence. Other Long Beach students held bake sales to raise money for new sharks.
Yet the question the schoolchildren ask, that everyone asks, goes unanswered.
Why?
"It is the answer the aquarium wants, it is the answer the schoolchildren want, it is an answer that I want," said deputy district attorney Sheila Callaghan, who is prosecuting the case. "But I'm not sure the boys can articulate why.... I'm not sure we'll ever know."
Four boys were charged -- three who broke in the first night, and a 14-year-old who joined them the following night when they tried to reenter the shark lagoon area and were arrested.
Two of the four have offered emotional apologies. One has pleaded guilty, and the other three will have a hearing in juvenile court next month.
"How do we save these kids?" aquarium President and Chief Executive Officer Jerry Schubel said. "If we come out of this and these kids are sociopaths cruel to animals, we have as a society failed."
As juveniles, the boys have not been identified. Their court proceedings are closed to the public, so only the briefest of detail has been revealed. All four attended the same school in a working-class residential neighborhood at the eastern edge of downtown Long Beach.
