Forty-five-year-old Tom Megill, his baseball cap matted with blood, lay dead in the dirt outside the chain-link fence that corners the house on Sycamore Road in San Ysidro. Towering over him, with gun in hand, stood his roommate Brian French. It was 3:30 p.m. on the first Sunday in March.

Within the hour, French was transported to the San Diego Police Department Headquarters downtown, where he waived his Miranda rights and confessed to the killing without an attorney present. He was booked into county jail.

At St. Charles Catholic Church near Imperial Beach, Mrs. French, Brian’s mother, went about her chores at the parish rectory, cooking and cleaning for the priests, as she had for the past eight years. She would not know for another day that the second oldest of her seven children had been taken into police custody.

On Monday morning, March 2, Larry French, Brian’s younger brother by eighteen months, had just gotten off work at Alpha Beta, where he stocked shelves in the dead of night. Larry returned to his rented house, three blocks from the beach in this working-class community, fixed something to eat, and turned on the television to watch the morning news. The announcer was talking about a Brian French who had been taken into custody in San Ysidro for the shotgun shooting of Thomas Warren Megill. French sat stunned on the sofa. Then he picked up the telephone, dialed the county jail, and asked if there was a Brian French in custody. “We have two,” the clerk replied. “What’s his middle name?”

“Richard,” Larry replied.

“Yes, he’s here.”

“What are the charges?”

“Murder.”

French hung up the phone and drove the few blocks to the house where he grew up on Citrus Avenue. The house was still and empty. His parents were out, his youngest sister was still asleep. He woke her, asking if she had heard any news about Brian. She said she hadn’t, and when Larry told her what he had heard on television, she began to cry. His parents arrived home shortly in a jovial mood. His mother, he recalled, walked through the door and kissed him on the cheek. Larry asked to speak with his father outside the house, and when Mrs. French began to follow, he insisted that she stay behind. As the two men walked toward the driveway, Larry told his father he had news about Brian. “Did he have an accident with the truck?” Mr. French asked. He had lent Brian his truck a few days earlier. “No, it’s not the truck,” Larry replied and repeated the news he had gotten from the television. His father leaned against the car in the driveway and began to weep.

Mrs. French, watching from the front window, ran into the yard and demanded to know what was wrong. “Is it Brian?” she asked with a mother’s premonition. For the third time, French repeated what he knew.

Larry French related the morning’s events in April, a month after the shooting, as he sat in a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on the outskirts of Imperial Beach. His brother had remained in county jail, and his father had called a number of defense attorneys. The quoted rates ranged from $50,000 to $125,000, far beyond the family’s modest means. Mr. French is retired from the navy on an enlisted pension. Mrs. French works six days a week at St. Charles, where all seven of the French children went to school.

Across the table from Larry sat P.K., a childhood friend and former classmate at Marian High School, where Brian was an all-CIF basketball champion in 1968. After coffee, P.K. drove his Chevy convertible past their old alma mater. Two tall, blonde cheerleader types dressed in white drifted across the school lawn. P.K. honked his horn and called out to them, “Marian High School, right on!”

By April, thirty-six-year-old Brian French had been promoted to tank captain at county jail, a supervisory position that entails overseeing a group of some thirty other men either serving time or awaiting trial for felonies. As such, he was entitled to five one-hour visits per week, as opposed to the half-hour visits on weekends only that are allotted to the majority of other inmates.

Mondays are the most crowded days for visitors. Wives, girlfriends, and mothers sit patiently in plastic chairs that crowd the narrow hallway. Some, like their men, are thin and tattooed; others come straight from work and are dressed in pastel business suits. Many bring children, carrying them on public transportation to visit their fathers. The children while away the time, playing on the floor. A hired security guard patrols the halls, making sure that the visitors do not consume food or beverages while they wait for visiting hours to begin. The only drinking fountain is out of order.

The visiting-room walls are stained with smoke and despair. Communications here is by telephone through small, thick plates of barred glass. Nearly a dozen conversations with Brian French took place here as he related the series of events in his life that led up to the fatal shooting of “Tin Can” Tom Megill on March 1, 1987. The story that ended in the dust and heat of San Ysidro began decades earlier in Imperial Beach.

A hundred years ago, before there was a city called Imperial Beach, a small group of settlers came to this place by the ocean. They called their community by the Iroquois name of the place they had left behind in central New York state, Oneonta, which means “a place to rest.”

The residents of Oneonta, California, envisioned their beautiful village near the sea as a nationally famous resort, where the wealthy from the East Coast would bask in the golden rays of California sunshine. Advertisements in national magazines were placed to tout “Oneonta by the Sea.” But soon the houses built upon sand began to shift, ruining their foundations. A series of fires plagued the village. Flooding from the Tia Juana River destroyed property, ruined crops, and crippled the railroad that was to carry visitors to beautiful Oneonta by the Sea. The community ceased to exist. The site of the original village is now occupied by the military helicopter station of Ream Field. The only reminders of the settlement are a street and an elementary school that bear its name.

From the turn of the century, the dream of national recognition has eluded Imperial Beach, and the city has maintained a low profile of geographic and cultural isolation. Before 1985, in fact, one would be hard pressed to find mention of Imperial Beach in any tourist brochure rhapsodizing about San Diego.

“If you ask a child here, ‘What is west of Imperial Beach?’ he’ll say, ‘The pier,’ not ‘Hawaii,’” said my sister, Patricia Kelly, vice president of the Southwest Teachers Association. When school started this fall,

She asked her thirty-two second-grade students at Oneonta Elementary School how many of them had been to the beach over the summer. “At least one-fourth did not raise their hands,” she said.

The importation and manufacture of drugs has been a longtime cottage industry in Imperial Beach. In the Sixties, it was marijuana and heroin transferred through the wide, open channels of the Tijuana Slough under a smuggler’s moon. Hauled up from surplus military rubber rafts across the dirt of First Avenue (before it was renamed Seacoast Drive) into the parking garages of the Boca Rio and a handful of other apartment buildings rented by the local high-rollers, it was a quick and easy journey from acquisition to distribution. It took forever, it seemed, for the border patrol agents to figure it out. And it goes on still.

Today it is speed, crystal meth, crank that is the reigning drug in Imperial Beach. Rumors exist of ten methamphetamine labs currently cooking within the city limits. As with every drug that has come in or been manufactured here, it is in abundance for those who come looking.

And so is the crime that is often attendant. Last year, within the 4.4 square miles of the city of Imperial Beach, there were two homicides, nine rapes, fifty-seven robberies, 108 aggravated assaults, 296 burglaries, (down from 403 the previous year), 442 larcenies, and 222 motor vehicle thefts. Sheriff patrol officers, from September of 1986 to September of this year, made seventy-four methamphetamine-related arrests. And these figures do not include statistics for the arrests made by the Sheriff’s Narcotics Task Force or the DEA, which are so far unavailable.

My sister has seen an eerie, street-smart knowledge of drug awareness among the very young. Once, she said, in 1983, a second-grade girl took out a mirror and began combing her hair. The child next to her said, “That’s what you use to snort coke with.” In another group of third-and-fourth-graders, one student told another that her father had beaten her mother because the mother spent too much money on groceries. He then, according to the student, threw the groceries all over the house.

The isolation of the community here is self-perpetuating, my sister feels. People do not leave; they stay and marry, as do their children. It is necessary to leave the community to gain an education beyond high school. The two nearest community colleges, are each about fifteen miles from town. SDSU is at least twenty miles away. “If you’re poor and don’t have a car, you can forget about going to college,” she said.

She believes that the struggles of daily life for many families in Imperial Beach leave them little time to think about broadening their children’s horizons. “The beach is not for recreation. It’s just there.” Still, she notes that more parents are volunteering time at the schools. Attendance is up at the free English-language classes offered to parents. “There are parents here who struggle against enormous odds to provide a good life for their children. There are so many single mothers here.”

It was in this community that Brian French spent nearly all his life, moving here at the age of five. In a prison interview, he said of his years at Marian High School, “I was always rebelling against something. And I was always in the wrong.” According to him, high school was a time for rock music, arguing against the Vietnam War, and marijuana. The one thing that kept him in school was his passion for basketball. He played with a determination to excel, and his junior year, he made all-CIF. That year the letters began arriving from Stanford, UCLA, and Loyola, inviting him to consider their campuses. He chose not to go to college, it held no interest for him. “All I wanted to do was drop out,” he said. The letters were forgotten.

After high school, there were some half-hearted attempts to attend Southwestern College, a year spent on a fishing boat, and more often than not, construction work where he learned the skills of a carpenter’s trade. He met a woman, a former high school classmate, the daughter of a prominent Coronado attorney, and had a son with her.

In 1979, twenty-eight-year-old French began a five-year enlistment in the navy, first working in personnel and then receiving two years’ schooling as an aviation-electronics technician. He received citations from his superiors. But not only was he away from Imperial Beach for the first time in his adult life, he began drinking in the enlisted clubs at the bases where he was stationed. And he continued the marijuana usage that had begun in high school.

In 1983, French recalled, his mother was hospitalized with a brain aneurysm, and French said he requested a Christmas leave to return home. The request was denied; he had recently transferred to Miramar Naval Air Station, and when he had reported to duty, urine tests revealed marijuana in his system. He was confined to base, but instead, he went AWOL. For punishment, he was confined to the brig for forty days, and his rank was reduced from E-5 to E-3. This meant a loss of status, seniority and salary. “When I was an E-5, I was entitled to an allotment for my dependents. I paid $300 a month in child-support payments. And I made those payments every month,” he added. “When I was busted, the allotment was taken away, and the child-support payments stopped. I was thirty-three years old. Most of the other E-3's ’ere in their twenties. The situation was not too cool.”

He requested a discharge, but the request was denied, and again he went absent without leave. This time his request was granted with a less-than-honorable discharge. French recalled that he was given the option of appealing the category and asking that it be upgraded to an honorable discharge after a one-year waiting period, but, he admitted, he never got around to filling out the paperwork.

The years 1984 and 1985 were aimless ones. He lived in Imperial Beach and worked as a carpenter at construction jobs, but every few months, he would invariably quit to live on his savings. He drifted from place to place, renting rooms from friends. And when the money ran out, there were always childhood buddies, now in positions of authority in the community, willing to offer him work.

Alcohol had become a problem for him, and, he said, he continued to drink until January of 1986, when he made the decision one night to join Alcoholics Anonymous. He stated in prison that from that night until the day he was taken into custody, he had remained alcohol-free. However, in September of 1986, he began to frequent a beachfront biker’s bar called the Rathskeller, known more familiarly to its habitues as “the Rat.” Although French said he continued to abstain from alcohol, he found himself drawn deeper and into the milieu of the Rat.

In the fall of 1986, the Rathskeller had an unsavory reputation. Brian French acknowledged that he was comfortable in its netherworld, with the bikers, drifters, and Satanists who helped make up the cast of characters there.

“The Devil is at work there,” said Tani Thatch, French’s girlfriend of the past three years. “People have disappeared in that place.” Thatch, a platinum-blonde wearing hot-pink lipstick, sat in the tidy duplex that she has shared with her son for eleven years. As she drew her fingers toward her mouth, the scarred, melded skin that ran from her hands up to the side of her neck was exposed, third-degree burns left by a long-ago fire. She is a lifelong resident of Imperial Beach.

Thatch said she met French while he was playing pool one night at the Bull ‘N’ Stick with his friend P.K. “Brian always said, ‘You know it’s not going to work out if it starts in a bar.’” But their relationship has lasted three years, and she continues to visit him in prison. French lived with her, sporadically, for several months prior to his move to San Ysidro in January of 1987.

Thatch remembered French’s deepening attraction to the Rathskeller and to the friendship he developed with “Shotgun Tom” Sweeney, a resident of the San Ysidro house where French moved just two months prior to the March shooting. Thatch felt that she was competing with Sweeney for French’s attention. “The phone would ring at 3 o’ clock in the morning, and it would be Shotgun. Brian would get out of bed, get dressed, and go out. ‘Tom’s lonely, he needs someone to talk to,’ Brian would say. I felt like the other woman.

“And he began wearing things like a leather vest with no shirt underneath,” she grimaced. “I saw him change physically. He began to look ‘shadowy.’” Her voice rose as she described his methamphetamine addiction, and she blurted out, “Brian was a bag-whore. He was killing himself.

“I don’t think about what happened,” she continued. “I don’t think about the legal things, In concentrate more on the personal things, like what was he wearing and did he eat that day. I don’t think about the other things.”

Renee Hartley sat cross-legged on the couch of her one-bedroom apartment next door to the Rat. She had just gotten off work from her job as a security guard at the South Bay Drive-In swap meet. And she had the night off from her second job as a bartender at the Rat, where she works for four dollars an hour, plus tips. No one at the Rat ever leaves a tip.

Hartley spoke about Brian French and “Tin Can” Tom Megill and the patrons of the bar. She is a tall, rangy woman with waist-length black hair and dark, unquiet eyes. As she talked, her eyes darted occasionally to the front window looking down Seacoast Drive for signs of her twelve-year-old daughter, who is mildly retarded.

“Brian was a gentle giant. I trusted him to babysit my daughter. There aren’t very many people I trust with her. But I trusted Brian. I never knew him too well before about six months ago, when he started coming into the Rat. He didn’t drink, but he’d just come in and talk. I have a VCR, and sometimes he’d come over, and we’d watch movies.”

The story she told of Tom Megill’s behavior was much the same one she testified to at French’s preliminary hearing after the shooting. “If you ask me, Tin Can [Megill] was a dirty old man. He didn’t like women very much. A couple of weeks before he died, he threatened to kill me three times because I parked my car in the motorcycle parking spot at the Rat for about eight minutes one day, when he wanted to park his bike there. He came knocking on my door and said I was a ‘dead bitch.’ That I was ‘on my way to the cemetery.’”

Hartley’s daughter, a tall child who moves and speaks as if in a dream, returned from her walk on the beach. “She’s gonna try out for cheerleader next year,” the mother said proudly. “She’s in a special school. I don’t know how much longer I can afford to live in I.B. This apartment building and the Rat will probably be torn down pretty soon and condos put up. I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna have a job there. There aren’t too many places for low-income people like me to go. Kind or ironic, considering I was born and raised here.”

The San Ysidro house that Tom Megill, Brian French, and two roommates shared sit near I-5. Barely a mile away lies the San Ysidro substation of the San Diego Police Department.

Jim Powers sat on a well-worn rattan sofa, wearing a navy-blue mechanics work shirt. His dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and as he spoke, he occasionally touched his fingers to his beard. The house is his, an inheritance from his parents. Powers is a lifelong resident of the area. He remembers San Ysidro when it was mostly farmland.

Two years ago, Powers took what he called a “working vacation.” He crossed the U.S., working as a mechanic and a construction laborer as he traveled southeast, ending up in Florida. During the time he was gone, he left the care of his house in the hands of a roommate who rented one bedroom of the three bedroom house. When Powers came back, the roommate was gone, owing several months’ rent, and Tom Megill was living in the house.

When asked what brought Megill to San Diego, Powers replied, “The wind. He rode in on the wind.”

Megill wasn’t in the house long, according to Powers and “Shotgun Tom” Sweeney, before he established a reputation as a two-fisted drinker, a barroom brawler, and a womanizer. He was also a highly-skilled iron worker who earned nearly thirty dollars an hour. He always had money, and he always paid his rent on time. “Tin Can made a lot of money when he worked. He would work for a month and make enough money to party for three months,” said Powers, who testified at French’s preliminary hearing that “when Megill wasn’t drinking, he was a great guy.”

Red-headed Tom Sweeney perhaps knew Megill best of all. Tense and slightly built, Sweeney was raised in Imperial Beach and is a navy veteran and the former owner of a motorcycle shop in Chula Vista. He talked about Megill’s background in fits and starts, between making phone calls to try to raise money for a friend in jail on a misdemeanor charge.

Megill was from the Bronx, he said, from a long line of iron workers, the men who built the skyscrapers and bridges on New York City. Megill told him that he was such an unruly child, his father, who at one time had boxed professionally, put him in an orphanage. Megill claimed that it was in the orphanage that he, too, learned how to box. He often boasted of being the New York State Golden Gloves champion at the age of fifteen and for several years after that as well.

Megill’s room, although attached to the house, is reached through a separate, outside entrance. It is barren, with cinderblock walls, and a stained velvet couch is the only piece of furniture. “That was Tin Can’s bed,” Powers said, pointing to the couch. “In the end, he really didn’t own anything. He’d buy a new set of clothes and just wear them until they fell off. He didn’t care what he looked like.”

Back in the living room, Sweeney claimed that when Megill’s son and brother arrived from New York after the shooting, one of the son’s first comments was, “This man was not my father. My father would never have lived in a place like this. My father would never have dressed like this.” The son eventually accepted the inevitable and rented a van to carry his father’s Harley-Davidson back to New York. His father’s car was given to friends that work at the Rat, and his van was impounded by the police.

On most day, Brian French was eager to talk, and the words came out in a rush. At times his voice filled with anger; there was sometimes despair, as he described the circumstances that brought him to this dense and stifling place.

In January of 1987, Jim Powers offered him a room in the house on Sycamore Road. Since French was a carpenter by trade, Powers exchang3ed the room for labor on repairs. French knew both Megill and Sweeney from the Rathskeller, although Sweeney had been recently banned from the club for an incident that occurred one night when he jumped over the bar and punched a female bartender (the manager’s former wife) in the face.

Shortly after French moved in, he claimed, he noticed a change in Megill’s attitude toward him. He said he knew Megill prided himself on his reputation as a fighter; he knew another local Imperial Beach resident who was hospitalized after being severely beaten by Megill in a fight. But now, he insisted, he felt that Megill had become obsessed with the thought that French had moved to the house, as part of a conspiracy with Powers and Sweeney, to murder him.

At the April 21 preliminary hearing, Tom Sweeney testified that he began to notice a change in Megill’s behavior four months before the March 1 shooting. When asked by the defense to explain what he meant, he related an incident that occurred during that time, although he could not remember the exact date. When the plumbing in Megill’s separate living quarters was out of order, Sweeney testified that he himself had spent the better part of the day repairing it. But Megill then accused him of rigging the toilet with explosives so that when he sat on it, it would explode.

Tom Sweeney, Jim Powers, and Karen Norman, Sweeney’s sister, were all present an afternoon some two weeks before the murder, when Brian French was working on a leather pouch that contained his carpenter’s tools. According to Norman, Megill, who she thought was high on LSD, picked up a framing ax and said to French, “Did you know that most people are killed with their own weapons?”

French, shaken, walked out to the front yard, followed by Megill, who was still holding the ax and who said, “This would make a good weapon to kill someone with.” Norman grabbed her purse and ran out of the house.

Yet no one moved out of the house, and no one made any official complaints. Andrea Skorepa, executive director of Casa Familiar, a social-service agency in San Ysidro, and a member of the Eighth District Citizens Advisory Board on Police Community Relations, speculated on the reasons in general terms. “In the South Bay, as well as in other low-income areas, people feel that the system does not work as well for them as for people in more middle-or upper-class areas. Over a period of time, they begin to feel that official systems only complicate their lives…They begin to make their own judgments and piece together their lives as best they can. People develop their own systems to deal with their lives. And unfortunately, in a situation where guns are involved and you only have minutes or seconds to make a decision, it is your own system that kicks in, before you think about using the official system, i.e. calling the police. The ‘tradition’ of calling the police when there is trouble, which is so strong in middle-class communities, does not have as much credibility in low-income communities.

“Also, in an upper-middle-class community, such as Point Loma, the sense of what belongs to you, your property boundaries, are much more extended. You care if there is trash in the street, you’re concerned if you hear loud noises and yelling in the street. But in a lower-income community, people pull those boundaries in tighter. They’re concerned about what happens inside their houses or inside their rooms. If you live in a place where you see deals going down in the street every day, although a shooting is an extreme example of this, you don’t call the police every time you see something. So there is a larger tolerance for what a middle-class person considers abnormal, such as loud noises and people arguing in the street.”

Skoerpa paused for a moment. “It’s real hard for middle-class people to understand this, unless they’ve had some exposure to it.”

On the bright Sunday morning of March1, Jim Powers sat in his living room, working on a giant jigsaw puzzle. French sat on the couch, reading, occasionally talking to Powers. Sweeney was in his room, asleep. Suddenly, Tom Megill loomed at the front door and demanded to speak to Sweeney. Again, the men remembered he barged into Sweeney’s room and told him, “You’re history.” He had a knife in his hand, but Sweeney remained calm, secure in the knowledge that he had a gun under the blanket and he would use it if he had to. Just as suddenly as he had entered the room, Megill turned and left.

Megill stood in the living room doorway, French maintained, “snarling like a dog,” saying, “You guys are history,” and brandishing his knife. He left quickly, and it was then, French admits, that he made the decision to arm himself. Powers gave him a ride to Imperial Beach, where he borrowed a shotgun from a friend. When he returned to San Ysidro several hours later, he made a pact with Jim Powers. If Megill came back to the house, French would stay in his room and try to avoid him. Powers would ask Megill to leave. If Megill threatened or harmed Powers, French would use the gun.

That Sunday Renee Hartley was tending bar at the Rat. She recalled that Megill walked in a nd ordered a peppermint schnapps. When she told him the drink was on her, he slammed his fist on the bar hard enough to send the drink flying. “If that’s the way you want it,” Hartley said and poured him another. Megill sat at the bar talking to himself, occasionally yelling out “Whose car is that parked in the motorcycle space?” The other patrons ignored him, knowing that the car he was yelling about was his own.

It was 3:15 p.m. when Megill came into the house on Sycamore Road. French said that he went to his room and closed the door. Then, he alleged, Megill returned to the house, demanding to see him. When Powers replied that his roommate wanted to be left alone, Megill went into the kitchen and armed himself with a knife. He came back into the living room with the knife, advancing on Powers. Powers yelled out just before Megill slugged him hard enough to render him momentarily unconscious. He came to in time to see French heading out the door with the shotgun. French chased Megill down the block toward Sunrise Street, and as he turned back to the house, he fired several shots into Megill’s van, which was standing by the side of the road, engine running. French stood on the front porch and waited.

He remembered that he saw Megill heading back up the street toward him, making a wide semicircle, holding one hand behind his back. Megill finally stopped ten feet away, in the dirt outside the low chain-link fence that bordered the small front yard. The two men exchanged threats and curses. “If I let you go,” French recalled telling Megill, “are you going to kill me?” “Yes,” he claimed, was Megill’s reply. He pulled the trigger, and Megill fell into the ground, gravely wounded in the abdomen.

Brian French said in a prison interview that what happened next “was like a dream.” According to Powers, French stood on the front porch, crying out, “Why did he make me do it?” He was haunted by Megill’s continuous moaning. Then he heard French say, “I may as well put him out of his misery.” He picked up his last round of ammunition from the ground where it had fallen. The second shot blew off the back of Megill’s head.

Forty seconds had elapsed between the first and second shots. French threw down the shotgun and walked out of the yard with his hands in the air. He stood and waited for the police – they knew that bikers frequented the house, and they were always slowly cruising past. Inside the house, in his room with a gun beneath his blanket, Sweeney heard the sirens coming closer. He dressed and walked to the living room window; he froze when he saw the yard full of police officers, weapons drawn. Sweeney was ordered out of the house, handcuffed, and thrown to the ground. It was only then, with an officer’s foot pushing his head into the dust, that he saw Megill lying in the dirt.

The autopsy report on Tom Megill showed a blood-alcohol level of .18, nearly twice the legal limit when operating a motor vehicle. Traces of methamphetamine were found in his brain, liver, and urine. A knife was found at the scene of the crime, partially hidden beneath his body. But French’s problems were just beginning. The charge that he had hoped would be second-degree murder was instead a charge of murder in the first degree. At a March 21 preliminary hearing, his bail was held at $100,000. His court-appointed defense attorney requested a bail review.

In an attempt to lower the bail, French wrote thirty letters to old friends in Imperial Beach, asking them in turn to write letters to the court, testifying favorably about his character, his history, and the opinion that he was not a flight risk. The French family contacted still others. In all, the court received nearly a hundred letters from the people of Imperial Beach. The bail review was held on Wednesday, May 13. Superior Court Judge J. Richard Haden announced he had read the letters and reduced French’s bail by half. The courtroom broke out in applause and cheering.

But the victory was short-lived. Early the next morning, Larry French said, he received a call from prosecutor Mark Pettine. According to French, Pettine apologized for what he was about to do but said he intended to request another bail review in an attempt to re-establish the bail at $100,000. At the May 13 bail review, the D.A.’s office had handled the review as a routine matter. They, like French’s attorney, Deborah Carson, expected the bail-reduction request to be denied. Pettine himself was not in court. Evidently, the resultant bail reduction was unprecedentedly low for a first-degree murder charge and had caught the D.A.’s office off-guard.

The final bail review was held a week later, on May 19. French, who had remained in custody, once more saw the courtroom fill with family and friends. He heard the judge praise his supporters for their civic responsibility and reprimanded prosecutor Pettine for his absence from the court the previous week. He saw the judge wince as Pettine presented him the color photographs of Megill’s corpse. Then Judge Haden said, “However, this is a very serious crime.” He reinstated the bail at $100,000 as the courtroom spectators sat in silence.

Five weeks later, still in jail, French’s spirits had deteriorated considerably. He got an illegal prison tattoo, a crude piece of work done with a needle, a string, and the ink of a ball-point pen. French had been demoted from his position as tank captain and was now a regular prisoner. He awaits a November 23 trial date by writing letters, watching television, and reading. Twice a week, an hour each time, he is allowed to play basketball on the roof of the downtown jail. He plays with the uncommon grace for which he is remembered by those who knew him at Marian High.

For those in Imperial Beach who were witnesses to the lives of Brian French and Thomas Megill, life goes on with a static sameness. The landscape is changing rapidly now in this city. The sounds of the bulldozer are increasingly closer to the Rat.

On an early Friday evening, Renee Hartley finished up her bartending shift. She wears a pink tube top and jeans. The handcuffs attached to her back belt loop shine in the reflection of the blinking neon Budweiser sign over the bar. In a corner next to a pool table, a green vinyl chair sits forlornly with its stuffing spilling out like an open wound.

A muscular, bearded biker wearing a plaid shirt offers to buy Hartley a drink. She chooses a shot of peppermint schnapps. “We gotta have a toast,” the biker says. Without hesitation, Hartley lifts her glass high. “To a happy life,” she says, with a distant smile.

The author lives in Imperial Beach: her two brothers went to High School with Brian French.