When Brian French jammed the seventh round into the shotgun, it was the last shell he had. The first five he’d shot in warning. The sixth he’d fired 40 seconds earlier, and it had torn apart his roommate’s chest, sending him backpedaling into the street where he’d collapsed. That shot had stopped the raging advance of the victim, deep in the psychosis of crystal methamphetamine and with Buck knife in hand.

Then, a scene that could have been painted by Goya, I always think. A hundred people looking on in afternoon sunlight, watching as a man with a gun bends over to discharge a final shot into an unmoving head.

“The story’s a tangled web,” Brian French told me the first time I met him. The place was Chuckawalla Valley State Prison, in Blythe, California. It was April 2003. He was 51 and working on his 17th year for second-degree murder.

While every story, every life, is an entanglement of people and events, French’s has gotten bound up inextricably with the weaving of my own life. The early center remains the same: Imperial Beach. IB. That southwesterly corner of sand and ocean that’s looking through the fence to Mexico, trying perennially to transform itself into a tony Southern California beach town but never quite making it.

For some, their hometown is a place to escape. For others, it’s a place to live out their lives. Either way, it’s an undeniable point of reference, and although I went to live far from Imperial Beach — Barcelona, Paris, Sydney, New York — the slight tremblings of early memories never ceased to stir me.

By the time I was in fifth grade, my father was habitually drinking, fighting, losing jobs, and getting us evicted, in a steady push farther and farther south — from lower Chula Vista to Otay and finally to Imperial Beach. A drunk construction worker with an abused wife and three kids in tow, our so-called family landed in IB in the summer of 1957. I once counted over 20 ramshackle houses, duplexes, trailer courts, motels, and garages we lived in over the next six years. In 1963, my dad left the state on the lam, allowing me to live during my last two years of high school with a friend whose father was a Baptist preacher.

Yet, back in 1957, at ten years old, I became an acolyte of the tumbledown city with dirt streets, sucking up the local mythology, mesmerized first by the Little League heroes in white uniforms who paraded their feats at the immaculate park of sparkling grass and broom-swept infield up on Coronado Avenue. Soon the football field, track, and outdoor basketball courts at Mar Vista High School would capture countless hours of my time. I would stand quietly and ogle the irrepressible athletes at their practices — so big, so handsome, so talented, so cool in their green and gold regalia.

Among those titans there was the added honor of being tough, of being able to fight. If you could kick someone else’s ass, you went up a notch on the social scale, and that was true for the kids my age as well. It was my introduction to the primal contest for primal dominance, I suppose. James Dean and Marlon Brando had modeled the American version on screens across the nation, as well as at our local Palm Theatre. Still, I had been brought to a low-income community with a sizable Navy base — two elements that make for a tough town. Which it was, and it would get a lot tougher.

So in the late ’50s we had our role models. Jake Trammell was one. Star fullback at Mar Vista, and no one would even think about squaring off with Trammel. An old IB friend of mine recently recounted having seen Trammell in the locker room after practice spitting on the forehead of the best running back on the junior varsity team in an act of initiation. As teammates uneasily tittered and studied the glob slowly sliding down to the terrified sophomore’s eyebrow, Trammel calmly admonished him, “Don’t wipe it off.”

He didn’t.

The advent of the ’60s brought surfers into the scene, which was a new cool and a hybrid of the athlete-battler dichotomy. At once rebellious, surfers tested manhood on 20-foot waves breaking a mile out at the Sloughs, where the Tijuana River emptied into the ocean. When the Summer of Love in 1967 ushered in the peace and love zeitgeist making haircuts anathema, it also made fighting uncool for a while — at least for a lot of the town’s youth. As in the rest of the nation, drugs soon flowed, unleashing sex and rebellion, and before long the “Imperial” of the town’s name would sometimes be replaced by “Immoral” or “Venereal.”

But it was in the ’70s that the drug wave really broke on Imperial Beach, establishing it as one of the methamphetamine capitals of the nation. Up the road in ritzy Coronado and La Jolla, the drug of choice was cocaine, but in IB it was crystal — the poor man’s high. If less cash was paid for it, meth exacted a heavy price in other ways. Crank users were staying up days and nights without sleep, taking apart radios and putting them back together or spending a day with a toothbrush, scrubbing spotless the veins in a porcelain sink. The nervous system was so fired that something had to be done: gabble a blue streak or perform senseless chores around the house. Rasped nerves led to alcohol to blunt the edge, which led to another line of energy. And on and on and on.

In that decade, bikers seemed to show up more and more, and their particular nexus with crystal was established. You could ride, you could drink, you could screw, you could fight on the stuff. You could even hold a job, if so inclined, and not worry about sleep, if that was a concern. More bars opened near the beach, more Harleys parked outside, more meth was cooked up, more skulls were cracked, and more knives and guns were carried.

Bikers and dealers made for a surly concoction, but the ’70s brought another recalcitrant element to the town. Vietnam vets. Local grunts drafted into the Army returned as less than hometown heroes, but there was also a covey of Navy SEALs, trained eight miles north in Coronado, who returned disillusioned too. In the bars along First Avenue, a vet could quietly anaesthetize a psyche bruised from that horrible war experience. He could also feed a picked-up addiction to drugs or an acquired taste for violence.

Geography had a hand in another way. Imperial Beach in that era was a floodgate for the thousands of illegal immigrants who crossed from Mexico, many passing through the town in their northward trek. Helicopter surveillance and Border Patrol cars proliferated year after year, while the separating fences and ditches got higher and deeper. Prior to the ’70s, IB was low-income, yet largely white. Not one black student graduated with me in 1965, and of the estimated 15 percent of the class who were Mexican-American, most lived in San Ysidro, about five miles away. Before long, the huge illegal influx helped to feed an already budding white supremacist sentiment. Increasingly, some of the tattoos on arms hoisting glasses of draft beer in the many bars were exhibiting the Nazi swastika.

It was a volatile mix of men.

NATURE VERSUS NURTURE

Early in 2003, Aaron French, a young man in his 20s, called me to inquire about a coaching position. As director of Starlings Volleyball Clubs, USA — a nonprofit program for girls from low-income backgrounds — I found him to be plenty qualified to coach one of our 40 teams in San Diego, so we grabbed him. The fact that he grew up in Imperial Beach piqued my interest. So did his last name. In my era, there were two French clans in town. Bob French came from one of them. He was a superb natural athlete whom I played with in junior and senior high school. The other French family all went to the Catholic school, and Aaron French was part of that family.

Eventually I asked Aaron about his uncle, Brian. Aaron had seen him in prison a few times as a kid but didn’t have many details on his current status. His uncle was now in state prison in Blythe, Aaron told me, and he recounted his received version of the crime: that Brian had killed a crazed drug fiend who was threatening him with a knife. He shot him, then for some reason shot him a second time in the head after the guy was on the ground. Which cooked his goose. Aaron described a gifted, highly intelligent man who wrote brilliant letters home to family members. He also said that Governor Wilson and then Davis had taken a political “tough on crime” stance whereby murderers effectively no longer had any chance of parole. Brian and his family had expected that Brian would be paroled years earlier.

It struck me that something was wrong with the system, and here was a guy from my hometown with whom I felt a kinship. I asked Aaron which family members would be most willing to talk to me in depth about Brian’s story. He gave me the phone numbers of his grandmother and his mother, Brian’s older sister.

Taking that slip of paper, I drove home with a vague intuition that I was headed for some deeper involvement with Brian French. Sure enough, that first lengthy call to Brian’s sister was the beginning of a pell-mell ride into a world I never imagined I’d be in. Her account of Brian’s character and his crime was much more detailed than Aaron’s, and it stirred my compassion. I had to jump in and learn more. My chat with Brian’s mother nudged me further. Still, there were obstacles I would have to get over if I was going to take on an advocate role for this guy. First, I detest guns. And although I have a dim view of formalized religion, I quite highly esteem the sanctity of life. So what the hell would I be doing trying to help a guy get out of prison…who’d committed the ultimate transgression with a shotgun!

In part, I suppose it’s what French himself described in a letter: “Basically, Byron’s an old hippie morphed into a present-day social-conscious liberal who’s fallen into a certain area of the modern prison reform movement. Fortunately for me he has fallen into the area that deals with me: lifer paroles.” Another factor is that French’s from IB; more so, he’s become a friend. Above all, today there are 25,000 term-to-life prisoners in California penitentiaries. Of those, 6000 are eligible for parole, including French. He and many other convicted murderers — in fact, most of the 6000 have committed murder — are getting a raw deal as defined by state laws. French was sentenced to a term of 15 years to life. That represents a huge span of time. At the time of his plea bargain, he had a good chance of being paroled after 9 or 10 years, provided he rehabilitated himself behind bars. Not today. Today it’s only life.

It cries out for scrutiny and change. Hence my efforts and why I’m writing this.

From the get-go, I had to know two things: One, why did he kill the guy? And two, could I be sure that he would not kill again should he ever walk out of prison?

So I’ve come to know the life of Brian French quite well. He grew up in a modest house three blocks from the beach, one of seven children of an enlisted Navy man. His childhood was basically “a happy one.” His mother, Ramona — an intelligent and energetic woman — was active in the local St. Charles Catholic Church and in its school, where she enrolled her children. French, the second oldest, emerged from Marian Catholic High School in 1969 at six feet four, 220 pounds, a superb athlete in three sports, with letters of interest from major colleges. I remember hearing murmurings of the talent this big kid from Marian had.

Great high school athletes who never took the next step: French was one of many I had seen before and would hear of again and again from my hometown. To be fair, when I was growing up in Imperial Beach, only a small number of athletes were ever in a position to turn down a full ride. Not many college scouts ventured to the isolated Mar Vista High School in the smallish Avocado League. Further, few kids in town entertained the idea of going to college — usually only those rare ones who had a parent with a degree. That all changed in the early ’60s with the proliferation of junior colleges throughout California. In 1961, Southwestern College was erected in Chula Vista to serve the youth of the South Bay, and suddenly there was a realistic avenue to a college education — and for the athlete, a place to pursue his dream on a higher plane. I enrolled in 1965, mostly to play basketball.

I have learned that there’s a lot to be said about staying in a place. Not the modus vivendi I chose, but it was French’s. Even today he confesses “to love IB and wouldn’t live anywhere else.” He’s a man who likes people, and they like him. His size, his smile, and his easygoing nature make for a likable recipe. Ingenuousness oozes from him, and it’s this sense of innate honesty that most strikes me, even more than a quiet, unusual intelligence that is consistently noted in the many legal reports I have read — compiled by attorneys, psychiatrists, counselors, and parole commissioners. Perhaps the fact that the average inmate in California has a seventh-grade reading level sets French apart, but he speaks and writes eloquently, holding forth on the politics of the Middle East or making an informed opinion on the budget deficit of California. He listens to National Public Radio as well as to the most conservative AM radio jocks in an effort to get both sides of issues.

French has spent much time trying to learn about himself and how to cope with his transgression and “the reality I deal with in here.” He usually rises at 4:00 a.m. It’s the only chance an incarcerated man can get for quiet time and study in the barrackslike living situation French is in. Part of that time is spent in meditation, which he learned through Siddha yoga and a correspondence course he began about a dozen years ago. “I wanted to learn how to deal with conflict better. When I first went to prison I would get worked up if I was shown disrespect or aggression. But that happens every day in here. It’s so compact. Someone is always testing you. There’s just no escape from people.” He shakes his head. “You can go either way: find a peaceful way to deal with it or get caught up in the violence, which is what I did the first few years. Then I found that meditation keeps you centered in a higher state.”

Self-examination has also become a continuing exercise. As a result of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, French makes a daily assessment of himself and his place. “I use it as a daily guide for myself. It’s also the chance to let my mind just go where it will.” I’m sorry to learn that the notebooks he’s filled have been tossed out due to storage limitations for inmates.

Yet there is a pervasive sense of vulnerability at French’s core, a streak of fatalism that marks French and seems to have always been there. He confesses that his biggest failure has been disappointing those he loved by not rising to the level of abilities he was given. “My parents would continually ask me why I didn’t achieve more. I’d tell them, ‘Look, I don’t wanna change the world.’ ”

Occasionally my probe goes deeper. Why didn’t he take those scholarship offers and go for greatness? He stares ahead in contemplation before gently responding. “No backbone, I guess.”

No backbone? I study again the log-sized forearms and upper body of the man who today weighs 280 pounds. I call up his reputation for fearlessness and toughness and try to square all that with his answer. Perhaps it’s in the psychological evaluations of him that I have studied. The first one, performed two years after his crime, is the most thorough as well as the most revealing. The appointed psychiatrist provides the results of various intelligence exams, including an IQ test. All of the test scores were “exceedingly high,” and his full-scale IQ score placed him “in the superior range of intellectual functioning.”

More interesting are the results of the personality examinations, summarized as the following: “Personality tests reveal he is passive, overly accommodating, dependent and unassertive. He does not endorse traditional masculine values and prefers to avoid situations involving personality conflict. During periods of stress he is prone to scattered, illogical thinking. He has an inadequate self-image, perceiving himself as fragile, weak and lacking in confidence. Neither history nor test results indicate he is a person prone to criminal behavior, aggression or violence.”

One who lamented the waste of talent was a former Olympic athlete and French’s high school football coach, Jan Chapman. “He told me I could play in the NFL,” French recalls. “I was good with my hands as a kid. So I played split end and defensive end. In tenth grade, my aggressive nature came out on defense. I saw I could hurt people. I mean, I could pick guys up, throw ’em to the ground, and spit on ’em. But I didn’t like that in myself. Besides, about that time sports took a back seat to partying. So I quit the next year. Coach Chapman talked me into playing my senior year, but I wasn’t very into it.”

Coming of age in the Summer of Love, French was introduced to not only the new mantra of universal peace but also to drinking, pot, and rebellion. “I got caught up in the counterculture. Vietnam War, the whole thing. I always had an inquisitive mind, so now I questioned everything and everybody, especially my teachers, who were priests.”

A seminal event was when he picked up a book, Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown. Published in 1965, the best seller is a raw narrative of a black kid transplanted from the South to the jungle of Harlem, where he must learn to negotiate his way among killers, prostitutes, and drug dealers.

“It had a big effect on me,” French recalls. “The struggles that Brown went through were fascinating, and the idea to work with troubled kids began to intrigue me. But by the time I graduated, I was sick of school. Eventually I enrolled at Southwestern junior college and declared criminology my major, since that would be closest to counseling kids with problems.” His wistful smile recognizes the irony. “But I wasn’t really into it. The partying continued, and I dropped out.”

Like many of his childhood buddies, French turned to construction for a living. “I worked hard, and I also partied hard. In those days, making money was to have a good time.” Romance became a big part too when he fell in love with a girl who was the daughter of an attorney in Coronado. Although they had both attended Marian High at the same time, French’s amorous interest in her developed a few years later. “We loved each other a lot,” he recollects.

They also had a son. “She left me when he was two. I was devastated but had only myself to blame. Drinking and hanging out with my friends too much.” The adventuresome woman decided to relocate to the West Indies and take her son with her. “In letters, she’d tell me I’d love it down there and to come and check it out, but I couldn’t really see it. San Diego was already like paradise to me.”

His lifestyle stayed simple: pound nails all day until the evening, when the beer and drugs flowed. “Look, I always lived a little on the left side of the law. That was my choice, and I made it clear to my friends and family. ‘I ain’t John Q. Citizen, and I don’t wanna be Mr. Success. So don’t expect that of me.’ ”

Of course, honesty cuts both ways, and Brian French has had time to look long and hard at things. He doesn’t sidestep the most penetrating questions, and when they’re posed there is a moment when his mouth puckers and his eyes contract in laserlike intensity. He draws a deep breath and exhales, then speaks with a ferocity of concentration and conviction. Given his stature, it is a formidable sight. “I can tell you that I never woke up a day in my life with the intent of hurting someone.” He summons more gravitas. “Including the guy I killed.” Numerous family members and close friends who know French well have said the same about the man.

In 1978, smarting from his girlfriend and son’s departure, French looked for a new beginning by enlisting in the Navy. His job as an aviation electronics technician he found stimulating, and “I worked my ass off for six years in the Navy.” Indeed, his military record bears out an exceptional work history with commendations, but French’s predilection for after-hours pot and booze remained with him. Following a welcomed transfer from out of state to Miramar Naval Air Station in 1984, he was granted leave, and following a couple of weeks of hometown revelry, he reported to a new assignment — as well as a new policy of random testing for marijuana. French was popped on the spot. Disenchantment with that event coincided with his mother’s hospitalization for a stroke, and he went AWOL. Faced with reduction of rank, he eventually settled for a less-than-honorable discharge and went home to IB.

Now in his mid-30s, adrift but in no hurry to attach any permanent moorings, French returned to construction jobs. Alcohol and pot were the normal fare, but for the first time, he began using crystal methamphetamine. “After coming home from the Navy, I began using meth,” French says. “I liked it because it made you think hard. And everything seemed good. You come up with all these great ideas at the time, while reality is lowering the chances of ever realizing them.” He began a serious relationship with a woman.

I believe Brian French might still have turned out the happy citizen like some of his close childhood friends who eventually gave up the partying life. Matured to the point of working on a steady basis with his strong hands or his exceptional mind, he might have married a girl, raised some kids, and bought a humble IB house, then watch its value appreciate with the years. He might have grown as a person in his own manner and at his own rate.

Might have. Had things not drifted off center, then finally corkscrewed into a crazed afternoon of unfettered violence, rage, and remorse. Tragedy finally, and usually the tragic event spreads a dark, indelible stain over the lives of many. It also can present to the same unwelcoming eyes many questions that demand examination and maybe…enlightenment.

TIN CAN

It started one evening in 1986 with three guys at a bar.

I knew the setting: the Rathskeller. When I was growing up in the ’60s, it was called the Beachcomber, one among a bevy of IB bars my dad had habituated. In those days it was still called a “beer joint,” with shuffleboard, jukebox, Hamm’s or Schlitz on tap. It was one of many watering holes for construction workers and sailors.

By the early ’70s, the place had a new name and new clientele as well. In time, the “Rat” grew to become emblematic of the town’s drug-plagued problems. David Engleman, a lifelong resident and former fire chief, saw the steady deterioration in IB during his years of duty there from 1966 to 1981. “It got to the point that most of our calls for fires were drug-related. Almost nightly, bodies from heroin overdoses were picked up on the beach.”

That evening in 1986 began innocently enough for French with a visit to the annual bazaar of St. Charles Catholic Church. He left and went to the Rathskeller looking to buy some speed. His source not around, he ordered whiskey after whiskey while he waited. The conversation of the two adjoining drinkers pricked his attention. The one who was a biker was talking about the brutal beating he had recently given some local guy. Now he wanted to kill him.

Although French hadn’t heard about the beating, the loser of the fight, Barry Webster, was a friend of his. Eccentric by nature, Webster reputedly was a Special Forces Vietnam vet who returned from the war without being able to fully stop living it. He continued his intensive military training while running through the streets of Imperial Beach in full combat gear, haunting the local bars, although he disdained drugs and rarely touched alcohol. He was also very feared. Brian French’s brother, Larry, remembers, “He was a trained killer. I saw him more than once use martial arts to clean up two or three bikers at a time. So I was shocked when he later told me some guy had hospitalized him and broke his ankle.” The rest of the town would be shocked too. Word would get out about this biker and ironworker from New York known as Tin Can. His real name was Tom Megill.

French ordered another whiskey and interrupted the conversation. “Hey, none of my business, but that guy you’re talkin’ about is a friend of mine and a good guy.”

Megill turned to him, “You’re right. It’s none of your business.”

French shrugged. “Man, I ain’t lookin’ for trouble. I just know Barry, and he’s cool. Sounds like you already beat him pretty good anyway.”

Megill shook his head slowly. “Not good enough. Next time I see him I oughta cut off his f head.”

As French drained a dozen glasses of the amber liquid, he let the subject go. “I was a happy drunk, as they say. Sure, if I had to get busy with someone, I would. But I didn’t look for it.” My brother, Danny Shewman, often ran into French at the beach or some party. He recalls, “Mellow guy, but everyone said don’t mess with Brian French.”

Finally, about two o’clock and with no speed to sustain the night, French stumbled toward the back exit. Almost to the door, he barely saw the fist flying from the side. Next, he was on his back, trying to ward off the blows. “I was so drunk I couldn’t get hold of him. I remember turning my head and seeing Megill’s boots pointed away from me, so he wasn’t in on it. He was just guarding his friend in case anyone else tried to get in. But I got the beating of my life. It took me about a month and a half to recover.”

After his bloodshot eyes cleared and the piercing headaches ceased, French returned to the Rat in search of the guy who jumped him. “I had a pretty good reputation in town, and I wanted to uphold it. Revenge was eating me up.” Oddly enough, it was Tom Megill and a local biker, Tom Sweeney, who talked French out of a rematch. Weeks later when Megill’s friend surfaced, they both agreed to drop it.

“One good thing came out of it,” French admits today. “It made me decide to quit drinking. I never wanted to be in that state again where I couldn’t defend myself.” He continued to frequent the Rat, ordering nonalcoholic drinks while speeding on crystal. He enjoyed the demimonde of the dark bar, a crossroads where drifters and grifters, homeboys and fighting bikers, dealers, derelicts, and mad hatters could cavort and spew. A place where pretense had no place, or if it appeared, was quickly discouraged and sometimes pounded out. On one particular evening, French mentioned his interest in finding a new place to live. Of all people, Megill told him of a spare bedroom in the house where he was living in San Ysidro, about a mile from the Mexican border. Tom Sweeney and Jim Powers, the owner of the house, were living there too. “I’d been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend, Tani,” French says, “and she was pushing the idea of living together. I wasn’t quite ready for it. I knew Sweeney since we were kids, and I had gotten to like Tin Can, so I moved into the house.”

Many events in the life of Brian French have seemed ill-starred, but the timing of his move to San Ysidro in early December 1986 was darkly ominous. Not at the onset. “We all got along. I was only doing crystal on weekends. Usually we’d stay up all night doing a jigsaw puzzle.” By the end of that month, French saw serious changes in Megill’s behavior. Tin Can always had money, and the story was that he had just gotten a cash settlement of $50,000 from the ironworkers union. He’d gotten injured, and when not allowed to return to work, he’d sued the union.

In French’s view, “Tom loved his work. But when he took the settlement and couldn’t work anymore, it emasculated him. He went off on a binge of no return. We saw him less and less and only when he’d bust in talking and acting crazy. Over a two-month period, he progressively got worse until he ended up in madness.”

In her October 8, 1987, Reader cover story, “Murder Charge,” Marianne Kelly detailed the nightmarish atmosphere that enveloped the house. The article refers to the preliminary hearing in a San Diego courtroom where Sweeney testified that he began to notice a change in Megill even prior to French’s arrival. Sweeney related an incident when he had spent several hours repairing plumbing in Megill’s living quarters, which were attached to the house but had a separate entrance. After the repair, according to the article, “Megill then accused him of rigging the toilet with explosives so that when he sat on it, it would explode.”

The uninterrupted snorting of meth heightened Megill’s delusions as the weeks passed. “He came to think we were snitching on him to the police,” French says. “We tried to reason with him. But it only got worse. Another time he came at me with a framing ax. We told him, ‘Tom, you gotta get some sleep, man!’ ”

At one point, French and Powers had convinced Tin Can to check into a rehab at a hospital in Chula Vista. Indeed, a special meth rehab — that assured anonymity — had been set up there since crystal-meth abuse had become epidemic in the South Bay. “We had him in the car,” French says. “And on the way, when we stopped at a stop sign, he jumped out of the back seat.”

Wild-eyed and disheveled, meanness seeping from his pores, Megill could do a lot of damage even in the best of moods. Now he was leaving a trail of punch-outs and blood behind him. A bartender at the Rat, Renee Hartley, is quoted in the Reader article:

“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 that I was a ‘dead bitch.’ That I was ‘on my way to the cemetery.’ ”

Tin Can started looking like the time bomb he was. Again, from the Reader:

Megill’s room…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 his 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.

While Marianne Kelly documents Megill’s descent into a psychotic maelstrom, there are also official accounts of his behavior. One was the probation officer’s report, filed on February 24, 1988:

On the other side of the coin, law enforcement and investigation reports paint a picture of the victim, Tom Megill, as a person who was a heavy drinker, addicted to crystal methamphetamine and who bullied and picked fights and threatened everyone around him. Witnesses state that he was constantly fighting, carrying knives, and was rumored to own a .22 caliber Ruger, which he threatened to shoot people with at different times. There are reports in the DA file confirming that Tom Megill broke a man’s ankle in one of his terrorizing rages and fights, struck a female bartender with his fists in her face and pulled a knife on another victim threatening to kill that victim.

BLOODY SUNDAY

Brian French lay on the couch in midmorning, lazily perusing a magazine. A Sunday morning: March 1, 1987. Jim Powers and Tom Sweeney were still sleeping in their bedrooms. The jigsaw puzzle French and Powers labored on Friday night lay unfinished on the table. French’s mind suddenly jerked. He heard the high whine of a Volkswagen bus as it approached the house. Its owner was Tom Megill. A wave of dread passed over French.

Within moments the front door cracked open. Megill flew into the house bellowing, “Where in the f* is Tom?” Then he burst into Tom Sweeney’s bedroom. The muscles of French’s body tightened.

“Have you ever heard the sound of someone’s skull cracking?” he asks me. Always one to jump to the defense of a friend under attack, French, for the first time in his life, got to his feet without resolution. “I was paralyzed with fear. I went to the door and stood wondering what I should do. I knew Sweeney had a handgun, but he was being pummeled.”

Suddenly Megill leaped up from the bed and rushed toward the door brandishing a Buck knife. French stepped backward against the wall as Megill advanced and planted the knife’s blade against French’s throat. “I’d been in the drug culture since my teens,” French says. “Seen it all. Done it all. But I’d never seen this. A guy’s eyes actually vibrating. Looking in them I became petrified.”

Then, inexplicably, Megill’s hand dropped, and he left in his van.

French had Powers drive him to a friend’s house in IB where he borrowed a 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun and a clutch of rounds. Larry French comments, “One of my brothers and I grew up with guns, since we hunted, but Brian never liked them. So that was another shock when I heard about what happened, that Brian had killed someone with a gun.”

Larry French’s best friend growing up, Hal May, today owns his home and has raised a family in Imperial Beach. He graduated from Marian High School like the French kids. “Larry and I were a couple years younger than Brian, but he was always our hero growing up. He was the biggest and strongest, the best athlete of anyone we knew. I can also tell you one thing. Brian French had no fear of anything or anyone. So I couldn’t believe he had to use a gun to stop him. All I could think was that this musta been one bad dude.”

It’s a question that many who knew French have pondered, as did former commissioner Brett Granlund of the Board of Prison Terms, who presided over French’s last parole hearing, in 2002. In the transcript, Granlund begins the hearing with questions about the crime. He inquires about the size of Megill, who was five feet nine and 200 pounds.

Presiding Commissioner Granlund: Which is basically — he’s my size. I wouldn’t want to tangle with you today. So what I’m trying to understand is how — what was it that would cause a man much smaller than you in stature, in physical stature —

Inmate French: His condition.

Presiding Commissioner Granlund: He was ten years older than you.

Inmate French: He was ten years older, and I’ll tell you, as you say, I’m six foot four and 220, and you wouldn’t want to tangle with me. By the same token, sir, if I looked at you and your eyeballs were vibrating and I had seen you damage people because you had this incredible strength that I know for a fact was coming from amphetamines, that — I would be afraid to deal with you. And I was afraid to deal with that person.

French today reflects, “This wasn’t about a fistfight and who would win. It was about a madman who was gonna kill someone. Probably one of us.”

When French returned to the house, he locked himself in his room with the shotgun, having loaded five shells into the magazine. Sweeney was locked in his room as well. Jim Powers was at the table finishing the puzzle when the VW bus pulled up at about 3:00 in the afternoon. Megill, according to the Reader article, had spent most of the afternoon in the Rathskeller drinking and spouting nonsensical comments. Later, the article goes on, the autopsy report “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.”

French’s mind was whirling with reflection and new resolve. Two months of madness in the house was enough. On Monday he was starting a new construction job with his childhood friend, Tom Hyde, and maybe it was time to settle down with his steady girlfriend. At 35, French thought this might be a good moment to try to walk closer to society’s middle line. First, how to get out of this?

When Megill plowed through the front door, French was sitting on his bed and holding the loaded gun. Tin Can saw Powers at the table and this time screamed, “Where in the f* is Brian?”

Then French heard again the vicious, hollow sound of fist on flesh. He pushed open his door to see Megill straddling the helpless, semiconscious Powers, his riveting fist holding the same Buck knife. French trained the gun on him and yelled, “Get the f* off him!”

“Some people don’t realize that I coulda shot him right there,” French says today. “He jumped up and ran out the door, and I fired a round above it. I followed him out of the yard and fired two more rounds into the air as he ran down the street. I yelled, ‘Come back here, m*, and I’ll kill you!’ I turned around and noticed his van was half parked on the sidewalk, still running. That enraged me more because I realized he was on a hit-and-run kamikaze raid. I shot two rounds into the van.”

The thundering shots brought people in the crowded neighborhood to their windows and into their yards. Back inside the house, French quickly told his two startled roommates, “Man, if you guys are holding any dope or anything you don’t want the cops to see, you better get rid of it now, ’cause they’ll be here any minute.”

Were it so. “I shot off those rounds hoping the cops would come to clean up this mess. We lived right next to the border, off Interstate 5, and the neighborhood crawled with law officers of all types at all hours. Here it was Sunday afternoon, and a hundred people watching. It didn’t matter who got arrested. Me, Megill, whoever. Just so they’d come and end it. They didn’t.”

French inserted the remaining two rounds into the shotgun and walked out to the porch, praying Tin Can would not return. “I knew he’d come back. I knew he couldn’t let this thing go.” Sure enough, French watched Megill turn around at the corner and start back. A hundred yards away he crossed over to the far side of the street, then continued until he was directly facing French. “I could see he was carrying the knife in his right hand. When he crossed the street again and approached me, he put his hand behind his back. He then tried to sweet-talk me. ‘Bubba, Bubba, I ain’t got nothin’ against you. It’s Tom and Jim, man.’ ”

French yelled as his adversary started to reach for the gate to open it. “You’re f crazy, man! Don’t come in here! Don’t come in!”

“Hey, bro! Lighten up. We got no problem!” Tin Can reached again for the gate.

French remembers, “When I drew the gun down on him he went ballistic.”

“You won’t shoot, you f coward!” Megill pointed the finger of his left hand at French. “You’re dead, mother! You are dead!”

“You’re gonna kill me, m*?” French screamed back. “I’ve tried to be your friend, and you’re gonna kill me!”

“You’re dead, mother! I’m gonna bury all of you f!” Megill pushed the gate. French fired.

“He yelled ‘Ahhhhh!’ and threw his hands up to his chest,” French remembers. “His yell kinda shocked me. For a second I realized he was really shot. He stumbled back into the street and fell.”

Jim Powers came out to the porch and saw French searching the grass for something. He cried, “Brian! Brian!”

French looked up. “Why did he make me do this?” Powers stood stunned and waited. French spoke again, “I gotta put him out of his misery.”

Today French recalls, “I had no awareness of Tin Can. Of nothing other than finding that last round. I put it in the gun and then walked over to him. He wasn’t moving and was in a fetal position. I pointed the gun at his head and fired.”

It was over.

Only 40 seconds transpired between the first and second shots; it was likely the first shot killed him, as the autopsy revealed a three-inch hole rupturing the aorta. “The second shot was his big mistake,” recalls Deborah Carson, the woman who was appointed his defense attorney by the County of San Diego. “Since the victim was on the ground and no longer a threat, it made the difference between manslaughter and second-degree homicide. The photos of the crime didn’t help either.”

“Why the second shot?” I asked French.

“Law officers, counselors, psychiatrists, all kinds of people have asked me,” French says, “and they all want it to be black and white. But it isn’t. It can be gray. I killed a guy who was threatening my life as well as my roommates’. But there’s another reason for what I did, and that’s where it gets gray. Tom had been a friend. But he was so far insane he wasn’t coming back. He was living in hell, man! One he created. In my mind, I had to end it for us, for me, and for him too.”

After firing the second shot, French threw down the gun and placed his hands above his head. Immediately law officers surrounded him, guns drawn, while sirens blared.

At the San Ysidro substation, French sat chained to a bench, flummoxed and forlorn. One of the officers asked him if he wanted a soda. Handing him the cool can suddenly became a token of human compassion. French crumpled into a shaking mass of sobs. “I cried until I was empty. I don’t know, maybe an hour without stopping. I didn’t cry for me. For the guy I killed, for his family, for my family, for everyone. I poured all my grief out then.”

His feelings swung widely as he was taken to downtown San Diego for questioning. “Now my emotions centered on why I was here. Why had I ended up in a position I never intended? A friend who I tried to help had come unglued to the point that he was going to kill someone. And if no one was going to stand up and stop it, I decided I had to.”

Waiving his Miranda rights, French confessed immediately. “No attorney. I knew exactly what I had done and had to accept it. I have never once tried to hide from it.”

In French’s mind, his forthrightness was soon met with sleight-of-hand tactics by the two interrogating officers. “I’m here confessing total truth to these guys, and they start screwing around with the facts. It caught me off guard, until I realized they were trying to frame a guy who didn’t even need framing. It started with the knife.”

According to French, one officer asked the other, “Frank, do you remember anything reported about a knife?”

The second detective, the nicer one, feigned surprise. “No, I don’t remember anything about a knife.” Hostility rose in French’s gullet as he saw their transparent intent.

He recalls, “Here I had killed a guy holding a knife, and these guys are saying, ‘What knife?’ In fact, they didn’t even include the knife in their evidence report. Only later did my defense attorney investigate that and get it included.”

Instantly the prisoner erupted. “Listen, you mothers! Don’t try that cheap TV cop routine with me. What the f are you trying to pull?”

The good cop responded, “Okay, Mr. French. Calm down.”

The tougher one queried, “Mr. French, there were alternatives to shooting this man. Why didn’t you call the police?”

“Hey, I grew up in IB in the ’60s, and as a kid, you learned to fight and protect yourself. In that town, you learned that the cops were not your friends. Especially those idiots down there. Besides, ratting out someone was the last thing you’d ever do.”

“So you decided to do their job?” the same detective asked.

“Actually, I tried to get them involved. Don’t you think shooting five rounds off on a Sunday afternoon on a crowded street where some bikers live woulda gotten a cop there?” French glared at the officer. “Where the f* were they! Down at Dunkin’ Donuts?”

“They arrived as soon as they could. There aren’t enough police to protect citizens everywhere, all the time, Mr. French.”

French shot back, “Protect! I know what you guys do. You bring in 20 cops to unload their guns into some poor guy and take him away in a green plastic bag. You don’t protect anyone.”

Every word of French’s diatribe was recorded in the police report. Upon reading it, his defense attorney muttered, “Oh, Brian!”

Of the more than 50 murder defendants Carson has represented, French is one of the few she remembers vividly. “First, I remember he was such a big man. I’m small, but to me he was,” she searches for words, “a gentle giant. He was very respectful and accepted full responsibility. He never asked for anything. I also remember the unusual number of people who showed up for his hearings. He had a lot of support.” She goes on to tell me that she’d be more than happy to write a letter of support for French or even attend his next parole hearing if that would help.

For the next year, French waited in the San Diego County jail. Hearings and discussions between Carson and deputy district attorney Mark Pettine continued until the options became clear. Carson presented them to her client. Going to court meant facing a first-degree murder charge. The thought of dragging his family through such an ordeal had no appeal for French. Instead, he could plead guilty to a second-degree murder charge and get 15 years to life. Since he’d used a gun in the crime, he also faced a gun-enhancement charge that meant two more years added to his sentence — something that would be eliminated if he pleaded guilty. At the time, such a sentence with good behavior in prison usually meant a parole in 9 or 10 years. He took it.

After sentencing French to 15 years to life, the judge asked Carson if she would like him to write a letter on French’s behalf for early release. “That’s the only time that a judge has ever offered that to one of my clients,” Carson says.

Judge Wayne Peterson wrote the following to the Department of Corrections:

I am the Judge who sentenced Brian Richard French in the above-referenced matter. Although I rejected his attorney’s plea to place the defendant on probation and sentenced him to State Prison, I recommend that Mr. French be given every consideration for release at an early date, so long as his performance within the Department of Corrections is deemed acceptable by the authorities. I base this recommendation on the defendant’s age and the fact that he has no prior criminal history.

THE TIGHTROPE

Fear has a constant presence in prison. It can make you cower, or you can turn it into your own form of aggression. French learned almost immediately that controlled aggression has its part, and its rewards, in the cellblock.

“I got out of the questioning Sunday night and put in county jail at about three in the morning. There were rows of guys sleeping on the floor, so I took a place. I happened to lie down next to a black guy. Big, strong. You can take in a small bag of personal items, toiletries. I had a new pair of shower shoes, and a few hours later when I woke up they were gone. He had them. It occurred to me right then and there what my future was gonna be. Was I gonna stand up for myself or not? I told him those were mine, and he denied it. The whole cell was watching with real interest now.”

French spoke, “ ‘You gimme those or I’m gonna f* your world up, man! Right now.’ The guy mumbled something and handed them over.

“My first day in jail reinforced what my vision of jail already was. It alarmed me. Am I gonna have to live like this? Am I gonna have to kill another guy to survive in here? Fighting becomes inevitable. In time I learned to let it go. Today a guy could tell me, ‘F* you!’ and I could let it go.”

In May 1988, French was sent to Chino State Prison. His exceptional intelligence and 45 units of college helped him get a clerical job processing prisoners in the state penal system. With a view to the future, French took advantage of a program that trained him in Vocational Mill and Cabinet over the next three years. After 2000 hours of vocational instruction, he was granted a certificate of completion from the State of California. “Chino was pretty good to me. My family, including my son, would come up, and we’d have picnics on the grass. I was a workout fiend. I ran, played ball, and would hit the punching bag for hours. It got rid of my aggression as well. The guards would say, ‘Man, how long can you do that?’ ”

In 1998, French was transferred to California State Prison in Lancaster. It was a stark change. “We were locked down every other day, it seemed. Because of riots. Riots and most violence in prison happens along racial lines. By definition you are a member of a race and expected to stand up for each other. In Chuckawalla, Hispanics have the largest number, followed by blacks, then whites. The Mexicans are the most feared in any prison. When it all does break down, the ‘Eses’ don’t mess around. They bring out the shanks, and everyone knows it. Physical stature is nullified when a guy gets stuck. They stay together. If a Mexican fights another Mexican, their own people will beat the shit out of both of ’em. A guy was shanked to death in here last Thanksgiving.”

He pauses in thought, then displays his unusual trait of tolerance. “Don’t get me wrong. There’s some bad people in here. But even in this setting most guys are decent. Even the gangbangers. The young guys show respect to elders. It’s just those times when it boils over.”

After a year in Lancaster, French was transferred to Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe. “I put in for a transfer because after my second parole hearing in 1998, one of the few things my board suggested was psychiatric therapy. The only place I could get it was here. A month after I got here the funding was cut and the psychiatrist was let go. That’s the game played in here, and it finally beats you down.”

The morning I’m to meet French is beautiful. Palm trees, punctuated by shrubs, stretch up on each side of the isolated road I drive to the prison. It could almost be a desert resort in the distance. In the visitors’ center, my apprehension heightens. I see mostly Hispanic and African-American visitors, maybe 10 percent male. I remember, when I was five, going the first time to visit my own father in jail. Seeing him behind a thick, square window, I was struck by how pale he was. He frowned at my mother. “Why’d you bring him?”

Passing through heavily barred gates, I follow an asphalt sidewalk a couple of hundred yards long lined with razor wire that crowns a 30-foot-high fence. In the visitors’ room, up to 70 people sit at round tables; 10 more people are outside on the patio. I grab a vacant chair and wait, surveying this new world. The prisoners are easy to spot: light blue denim short-sleeved shirts, nicely pressed. Darker blue denim pants. Tattoos are in abundance, some on the scalps of shaved heads or encircling necks. A few kids play checkers with their fathers. A long line leads to the vending machines with their fare of sodas, chips, and burritos in plastic that can be warmed in the adjacent microwaves.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a big man approach the desk. Having played beach volleyball with one of French’s younger brothers, I’m struck by the resemblance, and I know it’s him. I see his 51 years and the 16 years of incarceration. His arms are huge. There’s a suggested sag in the gut and a slight limp from arthritic knees.

Through the glasses he wears, he stares at the visitor’s chit. I know he’s wondering who in the hell is visiting him. He turns around, and I stand up. He approaches with a quizzical look on his face. We shake hands.

“Hey, Brian. I’m Byron…Shewman. An old IB guy. I think you know my brother, Danny.”

His smile broadens, and immediately my anxiety is gone for good. “Yeah. I know who you are! You’re famous.” Maybe in IB!, I acknowledge to myself. Apparently my years playing on the USA Men’s Volleyball Team and professionally in Europe had become hometown lore.

By December, I’ve spent several five-hour sessions with French. A dozen times I’ve driven from Blythe back to where I live in Leucadia to start anew, calling wherever and to whomever the path leads — mostly to dead ends. Attorneys, cops I’ve known, an old teammate who’s a DA for the County of Los Angeles, writers, and even a filmmaker. Politicians too. I try the office of local state senator Dede Alpert, and the offices of state senators John Burton and Gloria Romero, who are on the California Correctional System committee. I dial up the Board of Prison Terms. I study French’s file downtown at the Superior Court. I talk with some of French’s family members. I go by and meet his parents and have several long tête-à-têtes with his engaging mother, who gives me the old Reader article. I run down a guy who worked for a while with Tom Megill. Close friends of French’s I chase in IB, as well as some who will give him job offers, if and when he comes home. I jump in the huge reservoir of information that is the Internet. I drive by the fateful house in San Ysidro several times, running back the reel of events filtered through my own imagination. I find myself talking about French’s story incessantly.

On my three-hour drives to Blythe, I think of questions to pose. On one visit I notice a guy about 50 years old walking the patio with a female visitor. Slightly built, maybe five feet nine and 140, sans the blue tattoos and blue denim uniform, he could pass for a manager at Home Depot. I ask French how such a guy survives in here.

French grins. “CPAs on speed, we call ’em. A guy like him is gonna be okay. He’ll be confronted from time to time, usually by some bully. What he has to do is stand up for himself. Not let anyone bitch slap him. Then the other white guys will jump in if he’s getting hurt bad. But he’ll be taken care of if he does the right thing. It’s just like in any situation in life: if you use your head, you can usually avoid trouble. If that’s what you choose. But a certain amount of violence can’t be avoided in here. If you see a guy walking around the yard with a black eye from time to time, you know things are pretty normal.”

French gives me a poignant summation. “What’s most lacking in here is the feminine touch. To make it softer. It’s all guys in here. Since there’s no woman’s influence, it becomes a much harder, unforgiving place.”

My fascination leads me to questions about the racial strife. “I don’t have a problem with it,” French says. “I played basketball on the yard in here with black guys my first two years. If a white guy played with blacks in Lancaster, he’d get beat down or stabbed. But even in here it became an issue with some white guys who didn’t like it. It wasn’t worth having it escalate, which would happen if I kept playing. Lately I play on a team with mostly Mexicans. But as a white guy, you can’t sit down in here and eat with a black guy. Or play cards with him. Just the way it is.”

Eventually I tell French how when I begin a visit with him he speaks with a distinctive cadence as well as a tincture of the accent associated with Spanglish — what’s spoken in East LA. But within a few hours he loses it. He nods and smiles. “Just the other day a Mexican guy in here was telling me that he heard two dudes behind him talking. Black guys, or morenos, as they call them. He said he turned around and was shocked. ‘Man, they were Mexican!’ What can I tell you? In here you’re like a lizard. When he jumps to that tree, he’s blue. When he jumps to that one, he turns green.”

From time to time I send French articles on the Starlings program, which he shares with some of his friends. “Hey, the guys like reading those. Volleyball is really popular in here with the Mexican nationals. I guess they learned it in Mexico.”

Then, what most men wonder, and fear: What about rape? “Nah, I think that’s a perception created by media and movies. I haven’t really witnessed it. It’s not like what you hear on the outside.”

He appreciates the little things. “If you have to be locked up, this is a great place. Some guys don’t think so, but I think it’s human nature for some people to complain about everything. There are guys in here who complain about what’s for dessert! Can you imagine any prison in the world where there is a discussion about choice of desserts? Or that even have dessert?” We both smile.

In a world where allegiance to a group is expected, and enforced, French has found a kind of self-dependence, laced with that same fatalism. “You know, a lot of guys in here get bitter. They only focus on the system and how unfair it is. That’s all they talk about. For me, I plan on dyin’ in here, but I don’t wanna end up bitter. My goal is to ride out this karmic storm with my chin up. With whatever dignity I can.”

Existentialism in the flesh, I reflect. In Sartre’s own words, “There is no exit.”

In early June I cross the Rubicon, and together, French and I engage an attorney for French’s next parole hearing. The very same day her services are enlisted, I receive a letter from French. He says he has sent off the signed agreement to the lawyer, he thanks me effusively for my help, and then:

“At the same time I am sick to my stomach with anxiety at the way fate seems never to fail in its desire to take the cruelest twists. I am very sorry to have to inform you that after 16 years of being ‘disciplinary free’…I have received my first CDC115 DISCIPLINARY REPORT for ‘participating in a work stoppage strike.’ I am truly sorry, man!

“I will say this ‘participate’ is a somewhat misleading description of what I did. Just ask the 5 inmates who decided to ‘do the right thing’ and NOT PARTICIPATE by going to work. Upon returning from their job assignments they were beat down and ended up with their heads cracked or their carcasses punched with holes, as in the case of one ‘courageous soul.’ ”

Oh, God! I call the attorney, and she’s not overly alarmed. She wants to investigate the incident.

During my visit that weekend, French fills me in. The prison uses well water, and some of the wellheads are broken and are not being fixed, so there’s a shortage of water. The result is that the number of showers was dramatically cut. “It gets to be 120 degrees in summer here. That’s outside, and it’s hotter inside without air-conditioning. The only relief you have is that few minutes of a cold shower. Our prisoner reps went to the administration to protest and were shut down.”

Subsequently, a group of inmates organized a strike for two of the four yards — about 1600 prisoners. They all refused to go to work except for the brave five. “Was it worth it to me or the other lifers in here to strike? Hell, no! Not over something that petty or trivial, but there was no choice. Well, you could choose to go to work and later get stuck when you’re not looking. So about 800 guys got 115s. But the guys who organized it are in transit or are parole violators, so a 115 means 30 days of extra time. Big deal. For lifers a disciplinary 115 can ruin years of good behavior. Meaning no parole. Which is my case. I’ll appeal it, but…,” he shrugs, and I know the answer.

“It’s a tightrope in here.”

PAROLE

Every felon behind bars dreams of parole. Despite the modest $200 and bus ticket you’re given whenever your lucky number comes up, you’re free! For lifers in California, that dream is granted by the Board of Prison Terms, a group of nine commissioners who are appointed by the governor. Not surprisingly, commissioners share the same political convictions as the governor. That matters tremendously for those seeking parole. That and the fact that the board is given wide discretion in determining if a man or woman is “suitable” for parole. French’s attorney is a brilliant woman who has represented clients for over a decade. Her view is that “it’s just too arbitrary. One commissioner will make a judgment on a prisoner’s suitability that is entirely different from another’s. And that’s the unfairness in this system. It’s not necessarily the commissioners who are to be blamed. There needs to be a more objective criteria for parolees.”

Shortly after meeting French, I pick up my new Scientific American and find an article titled “Reducing Crime: Rehabilitation Is Making a Comeback.” Fascinating. It reviews criminal policy from the pre-1970 era, when rehabilitation was in vogue, to the subsequent period of tough-on-crime sentencing laws that exploded the prisoner population. Interestingly, studies of late show that rehabilitation does in fact work when the proper programs are used. The article states, “Rehabilitation therapy is expensive in the short term; still, it is far cheaper than the criminal justice system, which incurred direct costs of $147 billion in 1999.” My eyes fall upon two graphs in the article that apply to French’s plight. The first reveals that of all felons released, the group with the lowest number of returnees to prison is murderers. Next, I see a graph supporting what I already know: only about 2 percent of men paroled after age 55 return to prison.

Research also shows that older guys in the big house are more costly to put up. The trail leads me to an Associated Press article from 2002 that reports that in California, the 5800 inmates 55 or older “may cost three times as much as the price of housing younger inmates.” Makes sense. Cancer, diabetes, and dementia are expensive.

Money matters. The projected state deficit of $38 billion got us Californians in such a frenzy that a recall vote of Governor Davis became a reality. As the tax and spending cut continuum is now being studied, prisons are also being looked at. It currently costs $28,439 a year to keep someone in state prison, while the California Department of Corrections, which runs the largest prison system in the Western world, has a budget of $5.3 billion. The future looks far bleaker. With longer sentences and more and more three-strikes offenders coming into prison, the tab will go into the stratosphere.

The history of the growth of penal institutions in California is enlightening too. Between 1852 and 1984, the state built 12 prisons. By 1996, there were 28; today we have 33. The number of prisoners is growing at an even faster rate. In 1977, the state housed 19,600 inmates. Today, over 150,000 have a prison address. And that ain’t all. All the prisons are overflowing. A look at the data from the Department of Corrections shows that the average is 191 percent of capacity.

When French copped to a second-degree murder plea in 1988, conventional wisdom said that he would probably be paroled in nine years, provided he maintained a clean, rehabilitative record. A year later, in 1989, 54 murderers obtained parole in California — even under the get-tough Governor Deukmejian. But when get-tougher Pete Wilson took office in 1991, the faucet was squeezed to a trickle. In 1992, the number of paroled murderers shrank to 17. It got a little more squeezed until Democrat Gray Davis took over in 1999 and held true to his campaign pledge that “no murderer will walk out of prison on my watch.” In his first year in office, none did, despite the fact that the pool of lifers eligible for release had been growing by 300 to 700 inmates per year during the preceding decade.

How was that pulled off?

The critical turning point came in the 1988 presidential election, when the pendulum of politics and public sentiment swung widely to the right on the issue of crime and punishment. Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who had spent 11 years in a Massachusetts state prison, had been given a weekend pass in 1986 through a rehabilitative furlough program supported by Governor Michael Dukakis. When Horton didn’t return on Sunday night but instead went out to commit rape and another murder, his story — and photo — became a national symbol of George Bush’s tough-on-crime campaign. Widely successful, that campaign occasioned policy shifts at state levels, including in California.

Politics was one big player in parole-policy change, but money played a significant role too. In truth, the ex-Marine Gray Davis was no softie when it came to crime. But it costs big money to get elected, and Davis was a proven fund-raiser. One of his staunchest allies was the prison guards’ union, or California Correctional Peace Officers Association — not a group overly sympathetic to lifers’ rights. On May 13, 2003, a column in the Los Angeles Times discussed the “union that’s fattened Gray Davis’s political piggy bank by more than $3 million in five years.” Influence on policy was one payback; another was “a sweetheart pay-raise deal for its members, who’ll be getting 37% more by 2006.” French doesn’t blame the guards. “Some of them are decent guys and sympathetic to us,” he says. “But in union matters they’re just cogs in the machine.”

Another way to keep lifers behind bars was by logjamming the parole hearings. For over a decade, governors were glacially slow in filling vacant commissioner positions. What dammed it up even more was the rule that two commissioners and one deputy commissioner had to attend each hearing. The hue and cry of the families of ignored lifers finally reached the office of the liberal-minded state senator John Burton, who got a bill, SB778, passed in 2001 allowing a single commissioner and a deputy commissioner to conduct parole hearings. The river started running faster. Davis’s first year in office saw 1951 lifer parole hearings. In 2002, there were some 5000.

During Davis’s watch of five years, lifers eligible for parole appeared before the Board of Prison Terms to plead their causes over 12,000 times — many of them in repeat performances. Yet, in the end, the increased stream of hearings hardly mattered. Under Davis, only 294 paroles were granted by the board to lifers who committed murder. And for those 294, rejoicing was short-lived, since in California a parole date granted to a lifer can be overturned by the governor. In fact, California is one of only four states where the governor has such power. Here, it was a result of Proposition 89 — a measure passed in 1988 with the strong support of Governor Deukmejian. Proposition 89 became a tool increasingly employed by Deukmejian and his successors, but Gray Davis used it most. Out of the 294 lifers convicted of murder who were found “suitable” and given a parole date by the Board of Prison Terms, Davis reversed all but 8 of those decisions. Four of the 8 were battered women who killed abusive partners.

French’s attorney sees lifers who have murdered as “society’s least favorable children. And that’s why it is so easy for their rights to be trampled on.” French knows the history and the reality. “I’ve had three hearings. After my last one I gave up. You do your time, and you go before the board. They make sure you are remorseful, which I am. Then they tell me how well I’ve done in prison. No disciplinary write-ups. Self-rehab has been followed. Two vocational degrees. ‘But we’d like you to do this other thing and we’ll look at it again next year.’ You smile and say ‘thank you.’ Since my last hearing, I resigned myself to the fact that I was gonna die in here. I’m not gonna ask my family and friends again for letters of support. Hey, I sunk my own ship. I know that. What’s left is to go out the back door positive.”

His comments jibe with one of his close friend’s remarks: “Brian quit communicating a few years ago. I got the sense he gave up hope of getting out.”

“Two things will always bother me,” French says. “That I’m viewed by the legal system as someone who wakes up with the intent of killing someone. I did kill someone, but it was never my intent. And I’ve willingly paid my debt for it. The other is that so-called plea bargaining misleads you into a deal when they know there is no parole possible. It’s deceitful and wrong.”

Still, French trundles on toward that stated goal of dignity. “My electronics class keeps me going. I love learning that stuff. My favorite time is when the other guys come to me and ask, ‘Frenchie, how does this work?’ A few guys know the technical part but can’t explain it. I can take it through progressive steps so they understand it. I guess it’s a natural gift,” he explains. “Funny, older guys in here ask me about ‘my kids.’ Because I’ll see a 22-year-old gangbanger in vocational classes who doesn’t get involved. They’re just there because they have to be there. I tell them, ‘You’re smart enough to learn this stuff, man. You can go out and get an entry-level job somewhere. You don’t wanna be in here all your life.’ Some listen. Some don’t.”

French is now an associate certified electronics technician. His vocational instructor, D. Parker, noted in his evaluation, “French is a pleasure to have in the class, never disruptive, never late and is a tutor and model for the other students.”

TOMORROW

My last visit to French in early December is fortunate for a couple of reasons. It’s not 110 degrees, and, with the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, hope is astir for lifers. By December, 18 parole decisions for review have landed on the rookie governor’s desk, and his early record has lifer tongues’ wagging — 6 approved, 11 reversed, and 1 sent back for further investigation. Not counting the latter case, that’s about a .353 batting average for the Terminator in letting paroled lifers who committed murder out of prison. Not bad put up against Davis’s record of less than .03! I’ve never seen French beam as he does when he tells me, “Man, for the first time, I really think I might get outta here.”

The subject turns to the eventuality of his freedom and what it would be like. It strikes me how apprehensive he is, particularly about the prospect of earning his own living. I realize that 17 years of being institutionalized takes its toll. Then I relay a message from a mutual friend who wants to support French’s cause and has offered him a job upon his release. Our talk drifts to our hometown, and I describe how Imperial Beach has changed, how the rising tide of real estate has raised even IB’s boat. The old lifeguard station is torn down, and most of the beachfront he would not recognize. Even the Rathskeller, long boarded up, has just been acquired by a surf shop.

Yet, nostalgia doesn’t change the odds of his parole, which are still formidable. The prevailing view remains “throw away the key.” And truly, many of the 6000 lifers who committed murder shouldn’t be released. But some should. I hear stories of men and women who have sat for well over 30 years waiting for a second chance. No disciplinaries. Model prisoners. Already found suitable by the Board of Prison Terms and given a parole date. Cases where they were only a driver, thus accomplice, in a murder. French’s lawyer is representing one such woman right now. On the legal level, challenges by lifers are winning and moving up in the courts, but it’s a long, slow process.

On January 21, French’s next parole hearing will take place, and he is preparing himself with cautious optimism. The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office and the San Diego Police Department will have input at the hearing. In a county recognized as one of the most conservative and tough on crime in California, their anticipated recommendations will not be favorable to parole. Indeed, my hope is that the parole board will not focus on the “brutal, callous crime,” as is so often the case, but rather on what French has done in his last 16 years. Is he suitable to return to society? I certainly believe so. However, that argument will be the job of French’s attorney.

What French will also need is the promise of financial support and a place to live. His family is more than willing. Community support will help, and the letters of friends and church have already been sent in plenty. More crucial to the parole board is a job waiting on the outside, so employment offers are necessary. Five job offers have come forth, and in more than one field, including electronics.

The days tick off, and January 21 looms like the end of a fascinating journey for me. Yet, as unique as this road that I’m on is, there are others traveling it. Anne Rogers is currently producing a documentary film, Lifers, about term-to-life prisoners still incarcerated long after their terms have been met. She tells me the experience has “transformed” her. She recounts, “At the beginning of this project I sat in a room with a dozen people, and ten were convicted murderers. That freaked me out. But after getting to know some of these people, I came to realize their crime was often due to one of two things: a momentary lapse of judgment or an ignorance of conflict resolution. Who of us hasn’t been guilty of one or both? But for the grace of God…”

There has been a larger insight for her. “It leveled the playing field for me. It has showed me how interconnected we all are. And that includes the families of the victims. Twenty years of hatred and revenge will do a lot of damage. The ones I’ve seen with real peace are those who have learned to find reconciliation, sometimes even forgive.”

Interconnectedness. People, events, time. Both good and evil have long tentacles.

Sometimes I follow the long, silky threads of the past untangling my own web as I drive through the run-down trailer courts I once lived in. Astoundingly, there are two in Chula Vista and one each in Otay and Imperial Beach, still hanging on in decrepitude. I see how lucky I am to no longer be there. At the same time, it saddens me to see the kids who are living there today, but I tell myself that with life there is hope.

And there is both life and hope in Blythe — despite the heat. And a basically good man there who committed the worst deed a mortal can. He like me, like all of us, is lucky enough to live in a land where the laws are as just as in any country on earth. We forget too often that privilege. Yet interpretation and enforcement are subject to political power and money. At times things get out of whack and beg to be drawn back into line. Until they are, Brian French and some others are quietly running out their lives behind bars, long after paying the price our laws exacted. It suggests that of late something else is slipping from the collective memory of the nation. A great historical virtue: clemency. Our willingness to understand. And forgive.

I can’t say much more. Except for two visions that have visited me: the first is of Brian French ambling up the sidewalk of that same house he grew up in, quivering in trepidation and the onslaught of too many emotions, steps away from where his elderly parents and family members so anxiously await inside.

The other is of this huge guy in his 50s, unsteady on a big board and having trouble paddling through the beach break of IB on a sun-drenched afternoon, a two-foot grin on his face with thoughts of God’s bounty. And forgiveness.