Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (11 page)

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.

SLAUGHTER

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.

Then Huberty fired.

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.

A CLEAR SHOT

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.