Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (12 page)

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.

“WAKE UP!”

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.

THE COMING HOLOCAUST

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.