Steve Herr told police the same thing that he told everyone else: he knew Sammy was innocent of the crime. He was sure of it because he and his son were as close as brothers.
“We were the best of buddies,” Steve said. “Sam and I confided in each other about everything. Everything. Up until the day he was murdered, we worked out at least once a week together. I worked twelve miles from where he lived, so after work, I’d go over there, and then, we’d go to Twenty-Four Hour Fitness, go out to dinner, and just hang out together.”
The relationship was starkly different from the one Steve had with his father. He was born in the Bronx, the son of a clothes cutter in New York’s Garment Center.
“My dad loved me,” Steve said. “I knew that. But he never shared much with me, and he died at a young age, so I didn’t get to know him further. And I remember swearing—making a note to myself—that my son would know me backwards and forwards.”
Although Steve’s parents had both been born in the United States, their home had an immigrant flavor. All four of Steve’s grandparents were Yiddish-speaking immigrants—from Ukraine on his mother’s side and Austria-Hungary on the Herr side of the family. When the adults wanted to exclude the children from the conversation, they’d switch to Yiddish.
“If it was in Yiddish,” he’d recount, “it usually wasn’t good.”
By the time Steve was a teenager, the family had relocated to Freehold, New Jersey, close to the oldest racetrack in the United States. There was a familiarity in the way everyone’s father struggled to support his family, and Steve remembers the blue-collar spirit bonding the students at Freehold High School. Of everyone he knew, though, the one person who expressed the mood best was a fellow pupil named Bruce Springsteen.
“He was a year behind me in school,” Steve said. “I knew him well.”
Sometimes, Bruce was among the group of kids who cut school with Steve. Other times, Steve watched Bruce perform with his band, the Castiles, alongside other friends such as George Theiss, Vince Manniello, and Bart Haynes, who’d later be killed by mortar fire near Quang Tri in South Vietnam.
Reportedly, Haynes hated the scenes of horror he’d witnessed in Vietnam. But Steve was excited when he joined the Marines in 1967; he attributes his enthusiasm to “John Wayne syndrome.” Unlike Sam, Steve never saw active combat but gained a great deal from the valuable life experience of being around the other servicemen.
“I wasn’t as screwed up as I thought I was,” he said. “When you’re out of your hometown, and you meet guys from all over the country, you realize you’re not as bad as you thought you were, that you have more potential to accomplish things in your life. It was an epiphany for me.”
Upon his release in 1970, he took advantage of the GI Bill and attended college, first Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, New Jersey, then Monmouth College in West Long Branch. While in the Marines, he’d experienced the West Coast while stationed at Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms in California and become fond of its slower pace. After initially teaching in New Jersey, he relocated to the LA area and began a junior high school career that lasted a quarter century.
It was at Olive Vista Junior High School in Sylmar that he met a Spanish teacher named Raquel.
The two shared a similar background. Raquel’s parents were Jewish refugees from Germany who’d charted the rise of Adolf Hitler and tried gaining admission to the United States. When Argentina accepted them instead, they moved to South America.
In 1960, Raquel picked up a newspaper and examined a photo on page 1. It featured Adolf Eichmann, the SS lieutenant colonel charged with being one of the chief engineers of Hitler’s “Final Solution”—the total extermination of European Jewry. Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, had recently found him in a Buenos Aires suburb and smuggled him back to Jerusalem, where he was eventually tried and hung.
Raquel studied Eichmann’s benign smile, long nose, and large ears and instantly recognized him. In Buenos Aires, he’d painted her house. Eichmann always claimed that he never had a personal issue with Jews and was simply following orders. Certainly, no one in Raquel’s family sensed that, had they remained in Germany, the polite housepainter would have shipped every member of the clan to the death camps.
Like many Argentinean Jews, Raquel studied in Israel. But after a year or so in the Holy Land, she opted to immigrate to the United States rather than return to South America.
In 1979, eleven months after their first conversation, Steve and Raquel married. It was the second marriage for both.
Sam was born on May 29, 1983. Raquel was thirty-five at the time, and both teachers were established in their careers. Very quickly the two decided that Sam would be an only child. “She said her childbirth was miserable, and she literally screamed, ‘No más. No más.’” It was the same phrase boxer Roberto Durán had shouted at the conclusion of his rematch with Sugar Ray Leonard three years earlier. “If you’re a boxing fan, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.”
From the beginning, Steve felt an unconditional commitment to his son. “I could never understand how fathers, after they get divorced, can ever leave their children and not be part of their lives,” he said. “To me, that is the lowest kind of person, the lowest kind of man.”
Although Sam lacked siblings, there were close relatives willing to fill the void. His cousin Leah Sussman, the daughter of Steve’s sister, was eleven and a half years older and had grown to view the Herrs as a second set of parents. But that was the way the family was structured. Steve and his two sisters talked twice a day. And Raquel and her twin sister, Miriam, spoke even more.
Every other weekend, Leah and her brother spent time with her uncle Steve and the aunt she called Raqi, sometimes hiking in Newhall, a vast rustic area on the northern edges of Los Angeles County. “I can’t even explain the importance of my uncle Steve in my life,” she said. “He was the coach of my T-ball teams. He was the coach of my football teams.
“When Sammy came into the picture, I was, of course, a little jealous. But I was grateful to have a little cousin. He was always ‘Sammy’ to me, never ‘Sam.’ And as he got a little older, I could see that he was a lot like my uncle Steve, a very friendly, very silly, very macho but kind of a big teddy-bear type of guy. I think that’s why he joined the military, as well. Both of them have a sense of duty to family, to country.”
While he was stationed in Afghanistan, Sam and Leah remained close. Every morning when she woke up, there was usually an e-mail from her cousin. When he couldn’t communicate that way, he’d tell his German fiancée to send Leah a message on Facebook. “That’s just how he was,” Leah said.
At home, Steve encouraged Raquel to teach their son Spanish. But after instructing a room full of unruly pupils all day, Raquel had little patience to begin yet another Spanish lesson. Plus—despite Raquel’s ability to also converse in German and Hebrew—the family communicated in English, except when she had something private to convey to Steve.
“I guess I understood enough Spanish to get the gist of what Raqi was trying to say,” he recollects. In some ways, Spanish was used the way Yiddish had been employed in Steve’s childhood home.
Because of his background as a coach, Steve tried introducing Sam to a number of team sports. Although the boy liked roller hockey, his favorite competitions involved contests in which he could thrive independently: track, jiujitsu, and weight training.
“He was very sort of macho, even as a child,” Leah said. “We’d wrestle and he’d like when I’d beat him up. He’d ask me to beat him up. But when the day came when he was clearly able to beat me up, he never really did. He knew he was stronger, but he would just tickle me and stuff.”
At that point, Sam would occasionally ask his cousin to intercede with his parents when they appeared to be intractable on a particular issue. “I remember he wanted a Stone Temple Pilots tape,” Leah said, “and he asked if I’d talk to my aunt Raqi, and see if I could persuade her. She’s a bit conservative, and she didn’t like the vulgar language. He’d always come to me because he knew how close I was with her. But his parents’ rules were his parents’ rules and I told him, ‘Nope. There’s no persuading her.’”
By and large, Sam followed his parents’ directives. At school, though, he bristled when confronted by authority. “Most of us guys, we become teenagers, our horns sprout out, our fangs grow,” Steve said. “We tend to break off. When he got to be sixteen, he didn’t want much to do with us.”
Despite the affection that they had for one another, the Herrs faced the same challenges as any family. According to a psychological report later introduced in court, Sam had been treated for bulimia and obsessive-compulsive disorder since age twelve but stopped both his medication and psychiatric treatment at sixteen years old.
At five foot ten and a muscular two hundred pounds, Sam was not someone who backed down from physical altercations. Although he was never in a gang himself, he had friends with gang affiliations. One was reportedly Byron Benito, a Guatemalan immigrant with a reputation as a street fighter. In January 2002, after an apparent rival of Benito’s was shot to death, authorities said that Sam helped lure the nineteen-year-old to a deserted business park on Soledad Canyon Road on the eastern edge of Santa Clarita. There, police said, he was set upon by a mob that beat and punched him. The assault was so vicious that court records said that some of the attackers accidentally knifed each other.
Benito was also hit with a crowbar, prosecutors said, and stabbed thirty-three times. He died of a stab wound to the lung.
Authorities called it the bloodiest gang fight ever in Santa Clarita, home to the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park, some thirty-five miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. As it turned out, there was no evidence linking Benito to the earlier killing.
Eighteen people, including five juveniles, were accused of participating in the murder. Sam was eighteen at the time. He was close to Benito, police said, and knew his family. Along with another friend, Sam was accused of persuading the victim to come to the crime scene, under the pretense of smoking marijuana. Sam never struck Benito, a witness told prosecutors, but attempted to deceive him about setting up the ambush by pretending to fight with someone else.
When Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies heard that Sam was the one who drove Benito to the industrial park, they began staking out his home. Sam drove by but didn’t stop. He was followed by deputies, who reported that he was driving 37 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone and failed to signal before he made a left turn. He was immediately pulled over and taken in for questioning.
His attorney later claimed that, during the twelve-hour interrogation, Sam’s request for legal assistance was ignored while Steve and a lawyer were deliberately stalled outside the station. Furthermore, Sam should have never been pulled over, the attorney stated, because he’d been “driving prudently.” A judge eventually agreed, ruling that the fingerprints, fibers, and other contents taken from Sam’s car—as well as the statements that he made in police custody—should be excluded from the jury trial.
He was acquitted and cleared of any wrongdoing in the case.
But in between, he sat in a jail cell for the better part of a year, waiting for the wheels of justice to turn. About six months after his arrest, he was interviewed by Dr. Kaushal K. Sharma, a psychiatrist specializing in diagnosing criminal defendants. Sharma wrote that Sam was wearing a suicide prevention suit and spoke about thoughts of harming his parents—even though he professed to love them. To the psychiatrist, Sam appeared to be “mentally ill and in need of continued medication and treatment.”
But was the assessment really accurate? Sam was a teenager from a loving family who was now locked up in jail, isolated from his parents, relatives, and other positive influences. That he felt hopeless should not have surprised anybody. Because of some bad choices, he’d reached his lowest point and shared his pessimistic sentiments with a mental health counselor—never imagining that the information would later be made public.
This was the one aspect of their son’s life that Steve and Raquel were most hesitant to discuss. “We’re kind of hedging between the two of us because it’s a sore point,” Steve said. “He was acquitted, totally acquitted. You’ve done your research on this. You know the past.”
Yet Steve admitted thinking about the case later when he’d enter court for a hearing involving the man accused of murdering his son. “I’ve done both sides of this. You know what I’m saying? Sam was implicated with a gang, and got acquitted of that. We all knew he was innocent. And now, I’m sitting on the other side, so it’s tough. No parent should have to go through that.”