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.
She asked where he was going.
“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 bl
eak ripples.
And Keith Thomas was one.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
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.
DRAGGING OUT THE DEMONS
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.
Delivered from Evil Page 9