ENSENADA WAS ALREADY A DISTANT DREAM to Keith and Matao. The beach town lay only 70 miles (113 kilometers) behind them down old Mexico 1, but it might as well have been another universe. The week of vacation with Matao’s relatives at their little trailer, with the fish, the fireworks, Matao’s first kiss, the scorpion they captured in a jelly jar, the sea, the cliffs, the pirate beaches, that breathtaking blowhole, the sunsets …now it was all sucked up and exhaled in a squalid breath of exhaust, car horns, and dry July heat. The highway along the edge of Baja’s glossy sea had given way to a desert dotted with the rusting hulks of Ford Fairlanes and VW Buses abandoned among the ocotillos, and then to the electric, dirty, smoky, scary chaos of Tijuana’s panting streets, full of loud, smelly traffic and sweaty vendors hustling velvet Jesuses, or a cure for cancer, or unspeakable acts nobody should see.
But Keith and Matao were just little boys and hadn’t seen anything yet.
Although he was twelve, Keith Thomas had never had a friend like Matao Herrera. They shared a little boy’s passion for toy soldiers, drawing fantastic pictures, baseball, Star Wars, and pretending to be heroes on magnificent quests in the backyard.
Keith’s mom and dad had been divorced for years, and his mom worked hard to keep her son fed and clothed, but she was gone a lot. She’d already been married three times before Keith was in fifth grade. And there were boyfriends, too. Keith was on his own much of the time until his mom took a new job as a telephone operator in the little Los Angeles suburb of Orange. On his first day of second grade in a new school, the teacher assigned the blond and freckle-faced Keith to show this playful little half-Mexican kid wearing a Yoda T-shirt around. Keith knew he’d like any kid who’d wear a Yoda T-shirt. They bonded instantly and became inseparable, two halves of the same whole.
MATAO AND BLYTHE HERRERA, SHOWN HERE IN A FAMILY SNAPSHOT, HUNKERED IN FEAR BENEATH THEIR TABLE WITH RON HERRERA AND KEITH THOMAS ON JULY 18, 1984, WHEN AN ANGRY JAMES HUBERTY OPENED FIRE ON DOZENS OF INNOCENT DINERS IN A SAN YSIDRO, CALIFORNIA, MCDONALD’S.
Courtesy of Keith Martens
Before Matao, Keith’s existence was a blur. He moved around a lot. He remembered a goldfish dying, and some of the men, good and bad, with whom his mom fell in love. There was an imaginary friend, a cricket. And he recalled getting his first picture Bible as a gift and asking a lot of questions about God, but not much more stuck.
Matao’s parents, Ron and Blythe Herrera, were just thirtysomething hippies who had fallen in love in high school. He worked as a precision inspector for an oil company, and she was the consummate earth mother. They came to treat Keith like their own kid, feeding him and including him in everything they did. Their little bungalow was small, but they knew Keith’s house was empty. Keith loved Blythe’s alfalfa-sprout sandwiches so much that he’d trade his hot school lunch to Matao for them. If he loved Matao like a brother, then he loved Blythe like another mother.
For four years, they spent so much time together that Matao’s parents, Ron and Blythe, had invited Keith to tag along with Matao on this Mexican vacation and family reunion. It was a brilliant trip: For a week, the boys made their own adventures in the old fishing village of Ensenada, and everybody was happy. Now heading north toward the border, they were crawling through Tijuana, lining up to go through the tiny gap between Mexico and California, the always-clogged U.S. port of entry at Tijuana’s San Ysidro Transit Center, the busiest border crossing in the world. It was midafternoon on a Wednesday, so the traffic was already congealing at the gates as north-bound travelers scurried to get to California before rush hour on San Diego’s swarming freeways.
In the stinking stop-and-go, Keith pulled his Ensenada visor lower and studied the shining bracelet Matao had given him. It was a chain with a small silver plate bearing Matao’s name, his school ID. Keith’s mother had moved again, so they would be attending sixth grade in different schools in the fall, and the bracelet was a reminder of their friendship.
Keith felt like part of a family, and it made him smile so much his face ached. But although the holiday had been magical, Keith wanted to see his mother and ride his bike and just be home.
After what seemed like a lifetime in the mid-July heat and dirty air, the American border guards eyed Ron Herrera’s car, asked a few questions, and finally waved him through. The Mexican asphalt suddenly blossomed into a sleek, six-lane interstate freeway in the poor San Diego suburb known as San Ysidro, a stepchild district of one of the nation’s most prosperous big cities. Still, San Ysidro was a few steps up from Tijuana, and the sunlight softened into the pastel shades of California, like waking up on the other side of the rainbow. The roadsides were suddenly familiar again, with American hotel marquees, franchise brake shops, and billboards in English.
It wasn’t hunger as much as a craving for American food that made them want to stop somewhere for a late lunch.
About a mile up I-5 from the border, they spied the golden arches of a McDonald’s and got off the freeway onto San Ysidro Boulevard, the main drag. It was just before 4 p.m., and the restaurant’s parking lot, between a doughnut shop and a post office, was already crowded with the early dinner rush, everyone apparently deserving a break today at the same moment. The place was packed with about fifty people.
Inside, Ron and Blythe took the boys’ orders—Keith loved these new things called Chicken McNuggets with sweet-and-sour sauce and fries—before they scampered into the PlayPlace, where other children were already cavorting. A few minutes later, carrying their loaded trays of fast food, Ron and Blythe took a corner booth inside the restaurant near the play area, where the hungry boys quickly joined them. Blythe sat beside Matao on one side, Ron beside Keith on the other, with their backs to the kitchen and counter area. As they tore into their burgers and fries, they laughed and talked about their dreamy days in Ensenada.
A YOUNG BOY LIES DEAD BESIDE HIS BICYCLE OUTSIDE THE SAN YSIDRO MCDONALD’S, ONE OF TWENTY-ONE PEOPLE KILLED BY GUNMAN JAMES HUBERTY.
Associated Press
A blast shattered their reverie into a million pieces.
There had been many fireworks in Ensenada, and Keith thought someone had set off a big firecracker. He turned to look toward the front of the restaurant where the sound had erupted but only saw frightened people ducking down as a deep and angry male voice boomed, “Everybody down!”
Keith slid down beneath the table with Matao and his parents as the room exploded in an endless shudder of deafening bursts. Blythe screamed and began to cry. Keith had never heard anything as horrifying as the earsplitting rake of semiautomatic gunfire, much less in the confined, peaceful spaces of a neighborhood McDonald’s. Everything was upside down.
Under the seat and against the wall, shielded by Ron, Keith couldn’t see anything except parts of other terrified people hiding under the next table and the camouflaged pants of a man walking deliberately, just feet away. The thundering continued amid shouts and screams.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Be still!” Ron commanded him. The fear in his voice scared Keith. “Don’t move!”
Blythe screamed again. She hunkered at Keith’s feet, and Matao was balled up beside her, next to the aisle. She could peer between the seats and the table.
“He’s coming down the aisle shooting everybody!”
Keith turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes.
He no longer wanted to see what might be coming. He already knew.
He was about to die.
Just before 4 p.m., a balding man dressed in camouflaged jungle pants, combat boots, a dark maroon T-shirt, and sunglasses pushed a mother and child out of his way as he entered the San Ysidro McDonald’s, set his canvas bag on the floor, and unzipped an ungodly arsenal of weapons and ammunition. James Oliver Huberty calmly fired a shotgun into the ceiling to get people’s attention, then set to the task of killing everyone he saw.
Fresh from shopping and hungry for a fish sandwich, Jackie Wright Reyes—pregnant and cradling her eight-month-old baby, Carlos, in her arms—stood at the counter with a friend and some children. They had just gotten their order when Huberty fired and commanded everyone to get on the floor. Huddled on the cold tile with everyone else, Jackie shielded Carlos and her eleven-year-old niece, Aurora Pena, the best she could, but the man just looked down on them and started shooting.
A SAN DIEGO COP HELPS A BLOODIED SURVIVOR OF HUBERTY’S SHOOTING SPREE TO AN AMBULANCE AFTER THE KILLER’S ASSAULT WAS ENDED BY A POLICE SNIPER.
Associated Press
First, he killed Jackie’s teenage friend María Elena Colmenero-Silva with a single shotgun blast to the chest. Then he shot Aurora’s friend, nine-year-old Claudia Pérez, several times with his semiautomatic Uzi.
Aurora was hit in the leg by one of the Uzi bullets and curled herself against her aunt’s body, her eyes closed tight, except for the split second when she saw the man aim his little black machine gun at her aunt.
Jackie’s body jolted and shuddered as it absorbed the long, slow fusillade of bullets in her shoulders, breast, back, buttocks, left arm, legs, neck, and head. The coroner would later count forty-eight separate wounds.
Baby Carlos, splattered in his mother’s gore, shrieked. Unable to walk, he simply sat in the pooling blood and wailed.
Huberty shouted angrily at the child in a red jumpsuit to be quiet.
When the baby wouldn’t stop screaming, Huberty aimed his pistol and put a slug in the baby’s back.
“I’ve killed a thousand, and I’ll kill a thousand more!” he shouted.
The madman shot at everything as he prowled back and forth through the restaurant. He had weapons in both hands. He screamed profanities and talked to the people he was about to kill. He told them he’d been in Vietnam and it didn’t bother him to kill everyone. He fired his handgun, shotgun, and Uzi into windows, walls, and lamps; at pedestrians on the street outside; at passing cars—at anything that moved or cried. He kicked bodies to see whether they were alive or dead, then shot them anyway.
With the Uzi, he lit up the dark corners where diners took refuge, firing under tables and chairs.
Some corpses still held hamburgers. Others had tried to stem their bleeding with McDonald’s napkins but couldn’t save their own lives.
The kids behind the counter hid wherever they could in the steaming kitchen. Some fled into a stale basement closet after the manager and three young servers were shot point-blank. In time, a woman with a baby joined them, and then a wounded man.
Huberty stood at the drive-up window and fired at anything that moved outside. He blasted through the windows at anyone who came close. He listened to a portable radio, waiting to hear the news that would make him famous. The berserk shooter took out the flashing lights on a police cruiser in the parking lot, sending the lone cop scurrying for cover. Then he shot at an ambulance on the street until it sped away. There’d be more soon, he knew.
Huberty just kept shooting and reloading, spewing vulgarity and murder, stopping only to sip a cup of soda pop. The acrid stink of gun smoke and burning food filled the place.
A wounded woman on the floor looked up at him, and he saw her. He swore and threw food at her, then sprayed her with the Uzi again.
Three boys on bicycles rode up outside to get ice cream cones. They were still on the sidewalk when Huberty bellowed at them and then cut them all down with his shotgun. Two died instantly. The other was gravely wounded but played dead.
An elderly Mexican couple, Miguel and Alicia Victoria, had come to buy hamburgers to take home to Tijuana. Even at seventy-four, Miguel doted on his beloved sixty-nine-year-old wife, but as he reached to open the door for her, Huberty met them face to face.
The first blast from Huberty’s shotgun hit Alicia in the face and knocked Miguel backward. Staring in shock at her bloody body on the ground, he screamed at Huberty.
“Goddamn it, you killed her!”
Miguel collapsed to the ground and wiped the blood from his wife’s face as he cursed Huberty.
But Huberty didn’t take shit from Mexicans. He cursed back at the old man, then put the shotgun barrel to his head and pulled the trigger.
From what he could see, he had killed them all, and it had only taken ten minutes. So he just paced the killing floor and waited for the world to learn what he’d done.
And he waited for the cops.
It took a while.
The first 911 call came at 4 p.m., but cops and paramedics mistakenly went first to a different McDonald’s 2 miles (3 kilometers) away from where a frenzied Huberty was killing people.
Ten minutes after the first call, police established a command post two blocks away, and within ten more minutes, the restaurant was surrounded. Life Flight helicopters were standing by, and urgent pages were sent to the San Diego Police’s SWAT commander, but there was no answer.
Huberty kept them all at bay, shooting through doors and windows at any movement outside. He had 175 cops pinned down all around him. The nearby interstate was closed, and six city blocks were locked down.
From what little they knew, the police suspected several gunmen were inside; too many different guns were fired for it to be just one guy. But they also couldn’t see much because the restaurant’s safety-glass windows had been broken in a semiopaque web of tiny cracks.
A half hour into the slaughter, somebody finally found the SWAT commander at a reception in Mission Valley, 20 miles (32 kilometers) north. Within fifteen minutes, SWAT snipers encircled the restaurant.
In the meantime, Huberty’s wife had seen the shooting on TV, and her daughter told her that his car was parked in the McDonald’s parking lot, which they could see from their cheap apartment. She called police and told them everything she could about him, including that her husband owned armor-piercing ammo and could shoot accurately with either hand. They quickly brought her to the perimeter to coax her husband out, but it didn’t work.
A STUNNED KEITH THOMAS SITS DAZED WHILE A POLICEMAN CHECKS HIS WOUNDED ARM IN AN AMBULANCE OUTSIDE THE SAN YSIDRO MCDONALD’S MOMENTS AFTER GUNMAN JAMES HUBERTY WAS KILLED BY A POLICE SNIPER.
Associated Press
At 5:05 p.m.—more than an hour after Huberty’s first shot was fired—the SWAT commander was speeding toward San Ysidro when he heard sharpshooters given the green light to shoot the gunman if they had a clear shot. He immediately countermanded the order until he arrived at the scene nearly ten minutes later. He couldn’t be sure the proper precautions had been taken for the safety of his officers and people inside the restaurant. He worried that the gunman might have hostages or had traded clothes with one of the innocent people inside.
Moments after a second green light was given, Huberty shot out the restaurant’s front window along San Ysidro Boulevard. Cops fired two shots back, but they missed him.
He had fired 247 bullets and shells. Twenty-one people were dead or dying, and nineteen lay wounded all around him. Thirteen of the dead were shot in the head, seven in the chest, and one—little Carlos Reyes—in the back. Only a handful survived physically intact, and nobody escaped without psychological wounds.
Seventy-seven minutes after it all began, SWAT sniper Charles Foster, perched on the roof of the post office next door, saw his chance. Huberty was standing alone at the front counter, a clear kill-shot in Foster’s sights.
He squeezed the trigger on his Remington .308.
The bullet hit James Huberty dead-center in the chest and exploded his spine and smashed his heart into bits.
Throughout the ordeal, Keith Thomas huddled under the booth and listened to the cacophony of death all around him.
The alarms of the deep-fat fryers incessantly bleating.
Babies crying.
Glass shattering.
The wounded choking and gasping for air.
Guns booming.
The metallic jangle of empty bullet casings hitting the tile floor.
The shooter cursing at the living and the dead and at nobody at all.
More shots.
Then silence.
A small child lay next to a man’s legs near Keith’s head. He didn’t know whether either one was alive or dead. He peeked up through a hole in the bench above him and saw the gunman lurking near the front counter, lifting his gun. Firing at someone.
That’s when Keith noticed his own left arm was bleeding. It must have been cut by flying glass, he thought. He surely wasn’t shot because he never felt any impact, just a slight burn.
He didn’t want to run. He wanted to see Matao. He wanted to know what was happening. He wanted to do something. He wanted to fight back. Oh God, how he wanted to fight back. But how? He was a twelve-year-old kid with nothing more than a plastic fork, no match for the shooter. He thought of his mother. If I die, she’s gonna lose it.
Keith felt Huberty’s dark presence the whole time. It terrified him to teeter at the edge of death, but he was powerless to do anything else.
He found out later that every time he twitched, every time he moved his leg or his head, Huberty fired and hit Ron Herrera, who still curled protectively around Keith.
Keith drifted in and out of consciousness. Time got all mixed up. Minutes dragged out forever as he floated between waking and blackness. Had it been an hour? Two?
Suddenly, from his hiding spot, Keith saw more camouflaged pants just a few feet away. Were there more bad guys? He grew even more confused when he heard Ron Herrera talk to the combat-booted men who were budging bodies on the floor.
They were cops.
Keith wriggled around. Matao and Blythe were slumped under the bench, both seemingly asleep. Blythe was disarrayed, stained with blood. Matao had blood all over him, too, seeping from some holes on his bare legs.
Keith slapped Matao’s leg.
“Wake up!” he yelled.
Just then, a cop with a mustache grabbed Keith from behind and pulled him from under the table. Keith fought him as he was hustled to the curb outside, where the cop left him sitting alone. He watched the chaos unfold around him as other wounded people and survivors were hurried to waiting ambulances, wailing and bleeding. Everything became a blur of uniforms and bloodstains. And he had never felt more alone in the world.
He also saw a bloodied Ron Herrera out there, sobbing as he tried to go back inside, seemingly unaware he’d been shot eight times. It began to dawn on him that maybe Matao was not asleep at all.
Another cop tried to remove Matao’s bracelet from Keith’s arm, which was streaming blood onto his shorts and legs. He refused to give it up and started to cry. A paramedic walked him to an ambulance where medics were treating a woman who’d been shot in the breast and a teenage McDonald’s worker who was shrieking over a leg wound; the paramedics quickly moved him to another ambulance. He sat there with a little girl about his age whose mother and sister were wounded, too. They talked to each other as if they had not just come within an inch of dying.
The ambulance took them all to the hospital. There, doctors found one 9 mm bullet had grazed Keith’s right wrist, and another had entered his left forearm and burrowed into his shoulder, where it ricocheted back down his arm and exited near the crease of his elbow.
His mother was late getting to the hospital, posing a horrible scenario in the little boy’s mind: Was she dead, too? To him, the possibility that anyone could die at any time without any reason or explanation had suddenly become all too real.
His grandfather later told him what had happened in McDonald’s, at least as much as anyone felt he should know. Blythe and Matao were dead, he said. But he didn’t tell the poor kid that they’d both been hit several times, apparently as they tried to crawl toward a nearby door. They were slaughtered when they retreated back under the table.
Matao was the good one, Keith always said. He was a gentle soul. And now that he was dead, Keith began to wonder what kind of God would take the good one and leave …him? In those first days, he began to think he should have died instead of Matao.
Keith spent a week recovering from his wounds. When he could sleep at all, he heard the sound of gunfire in his vivid nightmares.
After he was released, his mother took him to Matao and Blythe’s funeral. It was an open-casket affair; Matao’s sweet little face looked swollen, which bothered Keith, but none of his wounds showed. Keith cried, but he was in a stupor through most of the service and barely spoke. Afterward, some reporters came up to him and asked to see his wounds, and he obliged them by removing his sling and exposing his healing holes.
Soon after the funeral, Keith visited Ron Herrera in the hospital, where he was still recovering. He took off Matao’s bracelet and gave it to Ron, and they both cried.
Despite the incredible horror he’d endured, the worst was yet to come.
And there was a good chance he wouldn’t survive his survival.
In the days after the massacre, the portrait of James Oliver Huberty developed slowly, like some sinister Polaroid in all the violent colors of grief.
He was born on October 11, 1942, in Canton, Ohio. His father, Earl V. Huberty, worked in a steel mill in nearby Massillon, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) west of Canton, and was well liked by his neighbors in the rural farming community where he and his wife raised their kids in a devoutly Methodist home. After he was hurt on the job, Earl retired to his family farm, which he sold off over the years, piece by piece, to keep the family afloat.
At age three, James contracted polio and wore braces on his crippled legs for several painful years while children teased him about his awkward gait and crooked knees.
When he was seven, his mother abandoned the family to become a Pentecostal missionary to an Indian reservation. James was crushed.
Although he was a good student, James was distant and quiet growing up. Before he became the most prolific mass shooter in American history, most of his public school classmates would have barely remembered him, even though his graduating class of 1960 in Waynedale, Ohio, had only seventy-four students.
His family was so fervently religious that some believed James would go into the seminary. But while many of his classmates dreamed of being doctors or lawyers or taking over the family farm, James dreamed of being an embalmer. He took funeral-science classes at Malone College in Canton, and then his father sent him to the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science in Pennsylvania. He came home to Canton for his final internship at a local funeral parlor, where he quickly proved to be far better with the dead than the living. He enjoyed embalming and the other morbid but solitary pursuits of a mortician’s back rooms, but he was clumsy and abrasive with customers.
“He was intelligent, but he just couldn’t relate to others,” Canton funeral director Don Williams, Huberty’s mentor, said shortly after the shooting. “He simply wasn’t cut out for this profession. He acted like he just wanted to be left alone.” Despite the bumps, Huberty finished his internship, and the Ohio embalming board licensed him in 1966.
During that time, James met Etna Markland, a California girl who was a substitute teacher at a local grade school. They married in a private religious ceremony, moved into a small, tidy house in Massillon, Ohio, and started a family. They eventually had two daughters: Zelia in 1973 and Cassandra in 1977.
But even then, James didn’t seem right. Coworkers, neighbors, and even the pastor who married James and Etna saw a man shadowed by inner demons that were clawing at his guts. Even in calm moments, he seemed barely able to control his anger at the world.
He kept snarling German shepherd guard dogs and hoarded food in his basement in fear of a coming holocaust. He forced his two little girls to take karate lessons because he feared the people around him.
In 1969, not long after earning his license, James quit the funeral business for good and became a welder at a Canton power plant, piling up overtime and taking night courses at Malone College until he earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1976.
JAMES O. HUBERTY GREW INCREASINGLY FRUSTRATED AFTER LOSING HIS JOB AS A WELDER IN OHIO. HE MOVED TO MEXICO, THEN TO SAN YSIDRO, CALIFORNIA, IN SEARCH OF RICHES, BUT ONLY GREW ANGRIER.
San Diego, CA, Police Department
Etna kept the Massillon house in pristine order and, at least in the early years of the marriage, was generally considered a good woman raising two fine girls. James was another story. Neighbors often grumbled about the thumping they heard coming from the Huberty house at night. They didn’t know for a long time that James had built a shooting range in the basement.
James’s fascination with guns started in childhood. Neighbors said guns were displayed in almost every room of the little house, and James often sat just inside his front door with a shotgun on his lap. Just sat.
Local cops came to the house more than once, sometimes because the Hubertys were complaining about the neighbors, sometimes because the neighbors were complaining about the Hubertys. Twice, the Hubertys were hauled in on minor charges.
In 1980, police charged James with disorderly conduct in a dispute at a service station. The reporting officer said a belligerent James simply wouldn’t calm down, even after police intervened. He pleaded guilty and was fined only court costs.
A year later, Etna was charged with four counts of “aggravated menacing” for waving James’s Browning 9 mm semiautomatic pistol—the same gun he later used in the McDonald’s shooting—at neighbors during an argument. The charge was reduced to disorderly conduct.
In 1982, James Huberty’s fragile world began to crumble.
He was laid off from his welding job of thirteen years when his employer, Babcock & Wilcox, closed the plant.
“I got no job or anything,” he told Etna. “I’ve got nothing to live for.”
A coworker recalled even more chilling words. An embittered James talked about “shooting somebody.”
“He said that if this was the end of his making a living for his family,” the coworker said later, “he was going to take everyone with him.”
Etna believed James had a nervous breakdown after the layoff. His politics became frighteningly radical as he blamed irrational enemies—capitalism, secret government initiatives, America’s rich, former President Jimmy Carter, minorities, or the shadowy darling of 1980s conspiracy theorists, the Trilateral Commission—for his ruin. Voices in his head urged him to kill himself. He told people he was a German, even though he wasn’t. He feared a nuclear war was only days away.
Then he had a brainstorm. They would sell their house for a big profit and move to Tijuana, where they had once vacationed. There, James said, they would “make a lot of money,” although he never truly had a plan.
“We’re going to show them who’s boss!” he crowed.
Unfortunately, the neat little Massillon house sold at a $69,000 loss, but in October 1983, they moved to the grubby little Mexican border town anyway. James, the Rust Belt refugee, hated it. It was polluted, and the cops often stopped him on his motorcycle. Distrusting Mexican schools, they drove the girls across the border every day to a San Ysidro school. It was too much. Within three months, he uprooted the family again and moved across the border to a $610-a-month, two-bedroom apartment, where the Hubertys were the only Anglos in a mostly Latino complex. And they were running out of cash quickly.
Then James saw an ad for a program that trained low-income, unemployed men to be security guards. He ranked near the top of his twenty-seven-student class but made no real impression on his trainers. In April 1984, he got his license, and a few months later, since he had no serious crimes on his record and a check of his FBI fingerprints didn’t raise any red flags, he received a gun permit that let him carry a loaded .38 or .44 Magnum pistol on duty.
But the voices in James Huberty’s head grew louder and his delusions more twisted. Once, he approached a police cruiser on foot and surrendered himself as a war criminal. An FBI check showed nothing, so he was simply told to go home.
The voices in James Huberty’s head grew
louder and his delusions more twisted. Once,
he approached a police cruiser on foot and
surrendered himself as a war criminal.
In June, the Hubertys moved again, this time to Averil Villas, a dowdy, stuccoed apartment building a block off San Ysidro Boulevard, a stone’s throw away from the McDonald’s.
A month later, on July 10, he was fired from his job as a security guard because his bosses were troubled by his skittishness and odd behavior. James was again crippled by his disappointment at yet another failure in his life. On July 17, Etna finally convinced him to call a mental health clinic, but because of a clerical error, his message was never delivered.
The next day—the last day of his life—James Huberty took his wife and daughters to breakfast before appearing in traffic court on a routine citation. Afterward, they ate lunch at a McDonald’s in San Diego and visited the zoo. They came home in the early afternoon and James took a nap.
Etna grumbled that the mental health clinic hadn’t called back, but James shrugged her off.
“Well, society had their chance,” he said.
Before 4 p.m., the forty-one-year-old unemployed security guard got up, dressed in camouflaged fatigues, black combat boots, and a maroon T-shirt, then kissed Etna good-bye.
“Hunting,” he said. “Hunting humans.”
The ominous comment didn’t faze Etna. James was always saying weird things. He could have walked to the McDonald’s in less than a minute—it was that close. But Huberty got in his black Mercury Marquis and drove. In his duffel bag were his Browning P-35 Hi-Power 9 mm pistol, a Winchester 1200 pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, and a semiautomatic Uzi, all legal weapons, all legally purchased. He also had more than five hundred cartridges and shells.
Slowly, the missed signs began to emerge.
After the massacre, Etna told a reporter that she regretted thwarting her husband’s futile suicide attempt a year before. Or wished that she had killed him herself, which she tried to do during one of their many arguments thirteen years prior, but her gun jammed.
Neighbors and coworkers remembered moments that, in light of the killings, took on new, ominous meaning.
“He always did comment on how he wanted to go through a lot of people,” his ex-foreman at the plant told the Canton paper the day after the rampage. “He had a lot of guns in his house, and he always said he wanted to kill a lot of people. We watched him a lot. We believed him. It was just a question of when.”
An autopsy found no drugs or alcohol in Huberty’s corpse but did discover elevated levels of the metals nickel and cadmium, likely remnants of his days as a welder. Two years after the shootings, Etna filed a $5 million wrongful death lawsuit against McDonald’s and James’s former employer, Babcock & Wilcox, claiming her husband’s killing urges were triggered by a combination of monosodium glutamate in the chain’s food and the poisonous metals. Together, she said, they caused delusions, kidney failure, and uncontrollable fury. The case was thrown out.
It had been almost twenty years since the nation’s attention had been so viciously grabbed. The last time was Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from the Texas Tower in Austin, which left fourteen dead and thirty-one wounded. (See chapter 6.) Americans had grown complacent in the intervening years. Now they were shocked all over again by the latest record mass shooting.
Neither of those slaughters clings to the cultural memory like an unbeatable cancer simply because of the body count. In both cases, place matters significantly.
Whitman’s rampage was made even more frightening by the looming tower in which he perched above everyone like some bloodthirsty angel of death. And Huberty chose a place where every American had been, a shared space where children played, where Little League teams went after the game, where people stopped to satisfy cravings. Every town had a McDonald’s. Walking through the door, people knew exactly what to expect. It was always a safe choice. But suddenly, Americans everywhere could imagine themselves under fire in PlayPlace.
Just days after the rampage, Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, seeded a fund for survivors and victims’ families with $100,000 of her own money; the corporation added another $1 million. Keith’s mom eventually got $10,000 for his wounds. The company even took all its upbeat advertising off the air for a time, costing untold millions.
One night, a month after the tragedy, even before James Huberty’s ashes were secretly buried in Ohio, crews leveled the darkened restaurant completely. McDonald’s donated the property to a local community college and built a permanent memorial to the victims on the spot where they died.
The horror was not in vain. Of course, anti-gun politicians seized the moment, and others demanded to know why Huberty’s call to the clinic went unanswered. But many American police departments quickly rewrote their tactical manuals to make faster life-and-death decisions, and the now common practice of rapid-response mental health teams evolved.
James Huberty “had a lot of guns in his house,
and he always said he wanted to kill a lot of
people. We watched him a lot. We believed him.
It was just a question of when.”
—a former coworker
A few months later, Etna Huberty announced she planned to sell the movie rights to her story so she could raise her two daughters. Several TV networks passed on the movie. Eventually, in 1987, producers released Bloody Wednesday, loosely based on the massacre, but it was poorly received and disappeared from theaters quickly.
Huberty still had fans, however. One was an angry ex-seaman named George Hennard, who was fascinated with the McDonald’s massacre. He watched videotaped documentaries of it again and again. And seven years after James Huberty set the grim standard for psychotic mass murderers, Hennard plunged himself into another family restaurant more than a thousand miles away to raise the bar one more time. (See chapter 4.)
One hideous event had sent forth a thousand bleak ripples.
And Keith Thomas was one.
Although a normally outgoing boy, Keith stopped talking altogether in the days after the massacre.
While his wounds healed, he withdrew into himself. And he began to get angry. At first, it was with the people who kept telling him that Matao died because God needed him and stupid shit like that. He couldn’t imagine God needing a little boy so badly that he would allow him to be murdered, punctured a dozen times by a madman’s bullets.
After he was released from the hospital, he went to his mother’s house, where she lived with a boyfriend whom Keith hated. The man abused Keith’s mom and was an unpleasable authoritarian. Keith’s anger welled up every time the guy talked, and he became verbally abusive toward both his mother and her boyfriend.
Nobody had ever really talked to Keith about faith, but he remembered God from the picture Bible he had been given years before. He still sensed there was a God or something bigger out there, but now it suited him to be angry with this God. He believed God was there, but Keith was pissed off at Him.
Not long after the McDonald’s shootings, his mother took him on a Mexican cruise, just the two of them. She thought it would be good for her damaged son. The nightmares hadn’t subsided, though, and he couldn’t sleep. One night on the ship, during an argument with his mother about what to wear to dinner, she reached out and touched Keith’s leg. He kicked her across the room.
In school, Keith felt like a freak, as if he didn’t belong there, didn’t fit in. One day in school, an annoying classmate pushed him too far. Keith beat him ferociously, and it felt good every time he hit the kid. Afterward, as he realized what he had done, Keith wept.
Anger became a drug. Living mad felt good.
But once, just one brief moment, he felt peace. He was recuperating at his grandparents’ home when the television set came to life on its own. The tube hissed with snow. He hadn’t touched it, and he didn’t know why he asked out loud, “That you, Matao?”
The set went off.
Keith sat mesmerized.
“If it’s you, come back.”
The set whispered back to life, then just as quickly went off again.
It was the first time Keith believed Matao might be watching him.
But things just got worse after that. When his mother couldn’t handle him any longer, she sent him to live with his biological father, a former Army Ranger and Vietnam veteran living in Washington State and dealing with his own postwar nightmares. His father tried hard to restore the best parts of Keith, but they had burrowed too deep inside.
YOUNG KEITH THOMAS DEVELOPED A FASCINATION WITH GUNS AFTER HE SURVIVED JAMES HUBERTY’S 1984 MASSACRE AT THE SAN YSIDRO MCDONALD’S.
Courtesy of Keith Martens
KEITH MARTENS HAS LEFT BEHIND THE HORRORS OF THE 1984 MCDONALD’S MASSACRE AND THE DARKNESS OF THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED—EVEN THE LAST NAME OF “THOMAS”—TO START HIS OWN FAMILY AND A CAREER IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, BUT THE MEMORY OF HIS BEST FRIEND WHO WAS SHOT TO DEATH BY KILLER JAMES HUBERTY IS NEVER FAR FROM HIS MIND.
Ron Franscell
He spent much of his time in school staring out the window. He fell in with the kids who skateboarded and liked punk rock music. The first time he heard the Sex Pistols, the band’s rage spoke to him. Like them, he was angry at everything—authority, heaven, the way life used to be, the light. The dead.
Keith lived with his dad for about eight months, and then he went home to California to continue his agonizing slide into madness. At thirteen, he was a full-fledged skate punk. He carved a circled A—the symbol for anarchy—in his own forearm. He still jerked at loud noises or an unexpected touch. Once, a teacher grabbed his arm, and he slugged her.
He started running away, spending long nights in abandoned trailers or empty pool houses, living on shoplifted food. He developed an interest in guns. He smoked flattened cigarettes he found on the sidewalk. He stole beer from open garages and hid in ditches or alleys to drink himself into the perfect illusion that he was worth a shit. Sometimes he went back home on his own. Other times they had to drag him back.
As he pushed more people away, he grew more lonely, more disturbed.
That’s when Keith dropped the surname Thomas and adopted his biological father’s name, Martens. He was reaching for something solid in his liquid world, where his name had already changed each time his mother remarried. He wanted so badly to have something to hold on to that he tattooed the name in big, ornate letters on his arm.
Less than two years after the McDonald’s murders, he wrote a poem to Matao. Why him, it asked in part. He had no sins, he never did anything to that man.
He fell in love with pot. It pulled a thin veil over his memories. At fourteen, he couldn’t get enough of it. His mother feared the worst—that Keith was insane and killing himself bit by bit. One day, when she found him after he had run away again, his mother took him straight to a mental hospital, where Keith was diagnosed with an ordinary personality disorder and locked down in a ward with other kids just like him—misfits, dopers, rebels, and freaks.
After a few months, no less depressed, he was transferred to a new hospital. There, he mostly slept and partied with the kids—they called themselves “inmates”—who cheeked their meds and pooled them for late-night parties on the ward. He even tattooed his right forearm—his scars—with a question mark.
Then he went AWOL for a while until his mother found him and took him back to the hospital. He escaped again, and this time he overdosed on a handful of NoDoz pills and PCP before he was taken back to the ward.
His mother was desperate. Nothing was working. She began to seek out specialists who might be able to reach Keith, and she found Dr. Robert Pynoos, a UCLA psychiatrist who was just beginning to investigate the unexplored mysteries of the effects of violence on children. Pynoos was intrigued by Keith, whom he believed had been misdiagnosed; Keith probably didn’t have a personality disorder, he thought, but was likely suffering from posttraumatic stresses directly related to the McDonald’s massacre.
Pynoos gave Keith a test. His Childhood Posttraumatic Stress Reaction Index was the first scale designed to measure the extent of a child’s damage from violence. A score of 60 indicated a “very severe” reaction to whatever original trauma the child had suffered. Keith scored 75.
Keith was so damaged, Dr. Pynoos warned,
that he was unlikely to live until
he was eighteen.
Pynoos immediately assigned one of his key aides, Dr. Kathleen Nader, to meet Keith. She was the director of UCLA’s Trauma, Violence, and Sudden Bereavement Program, which researched and provided counseling to innocent young victims of violence, disasters, and war.
But Pynoos told Nader not to get her hopes up. Keith was so damaged, Pynoos warned, that he was unlikely to live until he was eighteen. The first time they met, Keith looked much younger than fifteen.
Keith hated Nader and he hated the bullshit therapy. He cropped his hair closely and bleached it blond. He had inked a skull and crossbones with the words “Dead Kennedys Society” on the sleeve of his oversized, olive-drab jacket. He told Nader that he didn’t need whatever she was peddling and just wanted to be out of the hospital, on his own, with the motley crew of friends he was assembling among the “inmates.”
Nader quickly saw how extraordinarily complicated Keith’s psychological wounds were.
Even more than two years after the massacre, he was still having nightmares. Memories of the horrors still intruded at odd and all-too-often moments, yet sometimes he reenacted parts of the experience. He was unable to function in a classroom. Good kids avoided him. He was emotionally detached, seriously depressed, blamed himself for living, and couldn’t control his impulses. If he wasn’t lashing out at anyone who tried to talk about the massacre, he was literally beating his head against the wall until they shut up.
Nader saw Keith’s unresolved grief for Matao, whose death was all tangled up in the memory of that horrible day. Keith couldn’t properly grieve for his friend without reliving the whole grotesque moment and triggering a new series of horrifying symptoms.
The loving, intelligent, self-assured little boy Keith had been before the McDonald’s incident had been swallowed up by his own damaged, traumatized, angry, antisocial shadow.
Just keeping him alive—much less fixing him—would be more complicated than peeling back the layers one by one. Keith was an unfathomable tangle of survivor guilt, rage, depression, self-destructive behavior, hostility, drug abuse, pessimism, emotional detachment, feeble self-esteem, obsessions, poor impulse control, self-mutilation, nightmares, and identity problems—all traceable to that day at McDonald’s, all left untreated for more than two years, and all on the razor’s edge of a little boy’s adolescence. Worse, Keith’s unstable childhood before the massacre left him especially vulnerable to the horrors the massacre heaped upon him.
Under Nader’s care, Keith was released from the hospital and started seventh grade in an affluent school near the beach. He was the only skate punk, still doing drugs, still hanging out with old friends and skipping classes, still picking fights just to avoid being the victim again. He got high and listened to Black Flag, the Exploited, and other hardcore punk bands. In time, the school kicked him out. He went to a new school, where he still didn’t fit in.
Things continued to get worse, not better. He had sessions with Nader once a week, but he skipped many of them and then stopped going altogether. She was still trying to drag out all his demons, and he was still resisting. The fights, the school, the drug use—mostly pot—were getting worse.
Still in junior high, he graduated from huffing aerosol Scotchgard to dropping acid, doing speed, and then snorting cocaine. He held himself together by selling marijuana to buy booze and more drugs. He was still running away, sometimes sleeping under the piers at the beach. Each time, his mother brought him home, but he never stayed long.
As if his life had become some kind of psycho-drama, Keith began acting out various roles he had witnessed in the McDonald’s massacre. At different times, he wore the masks of the aggressor, the victim, the rescuer, even the information gatherer.
He became obsessed with books and movies about killers. Even as he tried on the parts of victim and rescuer, he always returned to the killer. He started dressing in fatigues and tight black T-shirts, like Huberty. He instigated fights and surrounded himself with kids who reinforced his aggressive behavior.
In one treatment session with Nader, Keith created a paper doll that looked just like him, down to his bleached hair and the green jacket with an inky symbol on the sleeve. He then proceeded to beat the doll, break its arms, slap it on the table, and hang it.
By the time he was sixteen, Keith was working dirty jobs for cash, partying constantly, and getting more violent. He loved to fight, especially bullies. He fell in with a punk gang, then with the skinhead underground, which embraced his violence with fiendish gusto. He quit working altogether and sold pot to make ends meet.
One dark night, while he waited in San Ysidro for a cab ride into Mexico, he started thinking about what had happened there. He started to cry, then started to drink just to numb himself. He blacked out.
During those days, the law was starting to catch up with him. In 1992, after a violent attack with some of his skinhead thugs, Keith did some jail time for misdemeanor assault and he spent more than a few nights in lockup on other charges, but it didn’t dampen the rage in him.
At a club one night, Keith—now playing the rescuer role—rushed to defend a buddy who was being trounced in a brawl. He was stabbed in the belly and the knife broke off inside him. Keith’s friends took him home, anaesthetized him with a bottle of whiskey, and dug around in his wound with a pair of needle-nose pliers until they found the broken blade, unwittingly carving up his intestines with their bumbling first aid. The resulting infection landed him in the hospital, where he quickly discovered the bliss of opiates.
Back on the street, he got into a garbage can of drugs, including a daily dose of heroin. He’d fallen in love with smack because it took away all feeling. He loved to stick his needles in the scars left by James Huberty’s bullets. He even got a kick out of sucking his blood up into the syringe, then downing the whole mess again.
Incredibly, Keith’s life would get even darker from there.
Although he had started seeing Nader again—mostly to mollify his mother and keep her on the hook for more drug money—he drifted in and out of jails, rehab clinics, and drug houses. He lived on the street or with other junkies. He tried detoxing a couple of times, unsuccessfully. He was busted for going into a bar with a gun. And he always went back to the junk.
He was twenty-two—ten years after the McDonald’s massacre—when an odd pain developed in his legs. When he couldn’t ignore it any longer, he went to a hospital, where they told him he had endocarditis, a heart infection likely caused by his intravenous drug use. The prognosis was poor because he had waited too long and the infection was too advanced. His heart was literally falling to pieces. He could stroke out at any minute.
After a month of antibiotics, doctors repaired Keith’s damaged valves in open-heart surgery. Surprising everyone, he lived and was eventually released from the hospital—back to his angry, strung-out life. He picked up with the heroin where he had left off, pushing his limits even farther than before. His incisions were still fresh when he overdosed in a park and came close to dying again. He could feel the warm China White crackling in his brain cells.
He counterfeited money and stole tires right from under cars for cash to buy more heroin. He was a junkie who knew the stuff would kill him, and he was okay with that. Many of his relatives had written him off. He woke up every morning dope sick and went back out to hustle enough money to buy his next fix. He lived dirty and bloodied inside and out; even his underwear were perforated with little burns from nodding out with cigarettes between his fingers.
He wanted to die. At least, in the few times he prayed, that’s what he asked for.
Keeping up a habit is hard work, especially when the goal of dying proves elusive.
Keith wasn’t dying, and he was tired of merely being miserable.
Some tiny part of him, the child who survived the McDonald’s shootings, wanted to live, goddamn it. And that part of him finally spoke up. If he wasn’t going to die, he wasn’t going to live like this any longer.
In 1996, twelve years after James Huberty turned his world upside down, Keith decided for himself to come clean. He felt guided by an unseen hand.
Metropolitan State Hospital was an old insane asylum. He spent his first week of nonmedical detox—old-fashioned cold turkey—in the Spartan “wet room,” where they caged the worst cases who would puke, shit, and piss on everything in their delirium. When he was ready, he was sent to a halfway house where he met people just like him. Suddenly, he realized he was not a freak of nature. Everyone had his or her own demons.
Drifting through halfway houses for a year, his depression, insecurities, anger, obsessions—all his defects—were on full display. With the help of other addicts, he wrestled with each of them.
It wasn’t easy. He cleaned himself up, inside and outside, not in one grand sweep, but slowly, one day at a time. He clawed his way through frozen, polluted layers toward the child buried alive beneath. He fought the foul urges that came in weak moments. He still couldn’t let anyone come close to him, physically or emotionally. He retained some vestiges of the hostage-taker.
But he was clean and sober, had come to terms with God, and for the first time since that day at McDonald’s, he stopped being a victim. Victims were not responsible for what happened to them. To take responsibility for himself, Keith had to stop playing that role.
Three years into his sobriety, Keith met the woman he would eventually marry. They had a son, who focused Keith in a way he’d never known. But his problems were not behind him: The day his son was born, Keith was undergoing a second emergency surgery on his damaged heart.
He eventually went back to school and got his GED, then started taking some college classes.
The 9/11 attacks dealt a blow to his recovery, so he entered a new phase of therapy. Among his therapist’s first exercises was for Keith to list his resentments. James Huberty was there. One by one, Keith had to make amends with his resentments as a way to move forward, but Huberty always hung him up.
Keith began to imagine himself as an adult talking to the twelve-year-old boy who had been lost so long ago. Not Matao, but Keith. He felt an overpowering urge to save the child from James Huberty and everything that would follow. He reassured his younger self that everything would be all right.
The Rescuer.
He finally crossed Huberty off his list.
Keith was clean and sober, had come to terms
with god, and for the first time since that day at
McDonald’s, he stopped being a victim.
For many years, Keith wouldn’t set foot in a restaurant of any kind. When he finally did, he would sit with his back against the wall, facing the door. Today, he still won’t go inside a McDonald’s, but he often uses the drive-through window. Baby steps.
For a long time, he was haunted by two distinct moments at McDonald’s: his poking at Matao’s dead legs and his being snatched from his hiding place by cops who he thought might be killers. He no longer lashes out instinctively at people who touch his legs or arms, although some physical contact still reminds him of his near-death experience.
Keith now works as a project manager for a Southern California company that builds high-tech, high-end home theaters for wealthy clients. He also dabbles in oil painting, preferring themes of light and dark, inside and out.
These days, Keith still feels emotionally distant from most people except his son, but he’s working on it. He also still blanches at the sound of beeping deep-fat fryers in fast-food joints. He continues to discover who he is and wrestles every day with stubborn old demons, but he’s finally got the upper hand.
He has grown comfortable in the role of the rescuer and no longer endangers himself in violent situations. He counsels anyone who needs to hear his story and learn what he has learned.
And he still talks to Nader, his own rescuer, every couple of months, no longer as the patient but as a friend. A pioneer in childhood PTSD and a veteran of dealing with later school shootings, mass murders, the Gulf and Balkan wars, and even the World Trade Center attacks, Nader now lives in Texas and is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the long-term effects of catastrophic trauma on children.
Some days, Keith thinks about Matao. He still has some of his friend’s drawings, but he has never gone back to the cemetery where he was buried. He’s not there. Keith feels Matao watching him every day. An angel, no longer a ghost.
He hasn’t seen Ron Herrera since the day he handed back Matao’s bracelet. Keith often thinks about the man who saved his life, but he doesn’t know what he’d say if they met now, and he doesn’t want to revive bad memories for a husband and father who lost nearly everything. He knows the awful power of memory.
His mother never gave up on him, even when he lashed out at her, took her money, and failed her in so many ways. She was the one constant in a life spent on the wind. She remains his most ardent protector.
The McDonald’s massacre shaped Keith Martens. It’s still a part of his life that he doesn’t completely understand. But he knows this: James Huberty doesn’t own him anymore.
“I used to fantasize about pissing on his grave,” Keith says today. “But not anymore. I don’t care about him now.
“It’s just easier to get over it than it is to hang on to it.”
