LAKE ELSINORE, Calif. — The shooting and killing of a intellectually-disabled man by an off-duty Los Angeles Police officer inside a Costco Wholesale store in Corona sent shock waves beyond that city.

In the same county, a woman who wants to be identified as “Jeanne” is worried something similar could happen to her son and people like him. 

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Kenneth French, 32, and his parents Russell and Paola French went shopping at their neighborhood Costco for their Father’s Day celebration when according to some witnesses, their son got into an altercation with an off-duty police officer which resulted in the officer killing Kenneth and seriously wounding his parents.

According to the French family, his parents told the officer not to shoot because their son wasn’t “well.” Kenneth was diagnosed with schizophrenia which caused him to become non-verbal. 

In Lake Elsinore, parents of a 33-year-old severely autistic man say that shooting hit close to home. 

“The first thing when we saw the pictures of the parents and the young man, my husband said just cut their faces out and put ours in there because that could be us. That could’ve been us,” said 70-year-old Jeanne. 

While many parents stop worrying about their children once they turn 18, Jeanne says she and her husband, who are both aging parents, don’t have that luxury. 

Tony, their 6’6 and more than 400-pound son, was diagnosed with autism when he was just two-years-old. Tony doesn't like to be around people and is non-verbal.

For the last 10 years, he's been attending an adult day care program in San Diego County because his home county of Riverside doesn’t have a program that would accept him. 

While Tony is out of the house, Jeanne and her husband prepare clean clothes for him, make his dinner, and charge his iPads. This is all on top of worrying about how their son is doing with his peers and caretakers when they’re out in public. 

“He’s very capable of running off and we’re not really able to really catch him. He’s a lot bigger than us. He’s a lot stronger than us,” said Jeanne. 

Jeanne says she’s been more worried lately since Kenneth French was shot and killed.

“It just really hit close to home and to be those parents, his parents, my heart just broke because that could’ve been anybody,” said Jeanne. 

Instead of letting her fears take over, Jeanne is prepared to calmly announce the fact that her son is autistic and that he’s not a threat if he has a meltdown in public. She even told her local fire and police departments to make a note of his disability in case they respond to her home. 

“The other side of the coin is we need to train our first responders and our law enforcement. It needs to be county-wide, not city-wide,” said Jeanne.

The concerned mother says she’s thought about outliving her son in hopes to be able to be there to protect him, but she knows that might not be possible. So she hopes and prays that more law enforcement departments will be trained on how to respond to a call that might involve someone like her son.