A little help?

I have a student, let's call him, um, John. He's in 3rd grade. He has fine motor skill issues, barely writes legibly unless he tries, and is hyperactive and pretty darn lazy. And that was before.

Friday, January 18th, John lost both his parents. He was at home, before school, playing on the computer in his room. Sponge Bob. His father and mother were in their bedroom. His father's mortgage company was on its way to bankruptcy, and rumor had it, his mother was having an affair. Just lovely, huh. According to good a friend and neighbor who knew them well pieced it together from regular contact w/ their family, it went like this: Dad found out one way or another about mom's affair. Dad flew off the handle, and beat Mom over th e head with a heavy ceramic coffee carraffe. Blunt trauma to the head. Mom's dead. Dad "calmly" tells John that it's time to leave, and instead of school, he takes his son to grandma's house, and calls him out of school that day. Makes arrangements for the older son not to go home on the bus later, but get sent to Grandma's too. After dropping John off at his mother's house, Dad drives south to the Delaware-Memorial bridge, stops the car, gets out, and jumps. They found his body about 3 weeks later.

Yes, this is the stuff of a horrible TV movie. Doesn't end there.

John and big brother (half-brother, not belonging to Dad) are kept out of town for a week. When they come back to school, after much school counselor sessions here and many fearful tears from the younger kids who think their parents are going to die too, all is WEIRD. John was told his parents "died in a tragic car accident". H e knows nothing of how his parents died. His mother's family, who is closer to the school and I believe have custody, want him told. His grandmother doesn't want him to know (I guess until he's older?) and because the father left him in her care, she has a partial custody claim as well. They fight, in and out of the school counselor's office. Vicious. They get the courts involved, and until it's settled, there's a gag order - nobody can say anything to him about how his parents died (keep every kid at school from telling him on the playground, though, I dare you to try!) But so far, supposedly, he knows nothing.

Meanwhile, John is a mess. He's gone from pretty darn bad before this whole event, to very near uncontrollable. On recorders, he blasts air through it, throws it in the air, smacks it on desks, jumps, dances, throws pencils, and screams in class. He has moments of calm, but you look at him and see it all bubbling in him, just under the surface. He's a pressure cooker. He knows his parents are dead, he knows something worse happened, and he knows everybody else knows but him. He also knows that we all can't touch him.
What are we going to do? The kid lost his parents, his world, everything! What do you do, threaten to call home? Take away recess? For weeks, the rest of his class would gasp and give you dirty looks if you so much as suggested that John follow directions. Meanwhile his disruptions don't stop, and they're always JUST this side of violent. He knows where the line is, and he spits on it, but that's it. His class is way behind, and now they're starting to mind his behavior. Their concert is in a month, and they all know who it is that's squeaking, wailing, and otherwise sucking it up big-time.

I meet with his teacher - poor Kate, how she comes to school every day is beyond me. The guidance counselor just says to treat him "carefully" but that he's still supposed to function as a 3rd grader. Ok....how, exactly? Seriously, what do I do with this kid? If a 'normal' kid acted like this, he'd be in the principal's office, kicked out of class, and kicked out of the concert. I don't have that option.

My only consolation is that he already told me that he's not coming to the evening concert for the families because he "doesn't feel like it". PLEASE let him keep that promise, the one day he was absent that class sounded absolutely fabulous. What's worse, we're all sure that some day soon, John is going to blow. He's seething. He's also calculating. Some outbursts he looks like he planned carefully, some it looks like the pod people took over his body. His eyes are blank, he can't speak, he flails and falls off his seat. Then he looks around to see who saw him. Then he throws a pencil to punctuate it all. Your teacher instincts kick in and you go to rain down fire and brimstone on the misbehaver, and then you remember, it's John. Right now, he hasn't hurt himself or anybody. But we're all scared that he'll do worse.

But what can we do? You can't suspend a kid whose parents were the murder/suicide story on the front page of the paper for over a week. What do you do to discipline a child who 1) doesn't care, because why care about anything anymore, and 2) knows full well that you can't do a thing to him anyway, and that you don't really want to. You send him to the guidance counselor for the umpteenth time, taking him out of instruction he sorely needs, but he sits there, refuses to talk about anything, refuses to admit that his behavior was even the least bit questionable, and gets sent back, untouched. Why should it help? Nobody can give him his mom and dad back, nobody matters anymore.

A lovely parent from PTA who was good friends with the mom told his teacher this, and she passed it on to his other teachers: "I knew her, and how much she loved her boys, and she would be horrified if she knew he was like this now. For her sake, please don't let him act this way. She wanted better for him." Yeah. *sniff* I've toughened up on him lately, but even that doesn't have much effect. It's just me yelling at him more, rather than letting behaviors go. He's still exactly the same.

The little girl he sits next to is terrified of him. I can't keep moving him around, either. Too obvious. Oh, and I swear to God his best friend, who previously wasn't much of a problem, has decided to start acting out as a distraction from John's behavior. They almost compete. Now what?

So what do I do? Anybody? Got anything?