Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (14 page)

KEITH MARTENS HAS LEFT BEHIND THE HORRORS OF THE 1984 MCDONALD’S MASSACRE AND THE DARKNESS OF THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED—EVEN THE LAST NAME OF “THOMAS”—TO START HIS OWN FAMILY AND A CAREER IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, BUT THE MEMORY OF HIS BEST FRIEND WHO WAS SHOT TO DEATH BY KILLER JAMES HUBERTY IS NEVER FAR FROM HIS MIND.
Ron Franscell

He spent much of his time in school staring out the window. He fell in with the kids who skateboarded and liked punk rock music. The first time he heard the Sex Pistols, the band’s rage spoke to him. Like them, he was angry at everything—authority, heaven, the way life used to be, the light. The dead.

Keith lived with his dad for about eight months, and then he went home to California to continue his agonizing slide into madness. At thirteen, he was a full-fledged skate punk. He carved a circled A—the symbol for anarchy—in his own forearm. He still jerked at loud noises or an unexpected touch. Once, a teacher grabbed his arm, and he slugged her.

He started running away, spending long nights in abandoned trailers or empty pool houses, living on shoplifted food. He developed an interest in guns. He smoked flattened cigarettes he found on the sidewalk. He stole beer from open garages and hid in ditches or alleys to drink himself into the perfect illusion that he was worth a shit. Sometimes he went back home on his own. Other times they had to drag him back.

As he pushed more people away, he grew more lonely, more disturbed.

That’s when Keith dropped the surname Thomas and adopted his biological father’s name, Martens. He was reaching for something solid in his liquid world, where his name had already changed each time his mother remarried. He wanted so badly to have something to hold on to that he tattooed the name in big, ornate letters on his arm.

Less than two years after the McDonald’s murders, he wrote a poem to Matao. Why him, it asked in part. He had no sins, he never did anything to that man.

He fell in love with pot. It pulled a thin veil over his memories. At fourteen, he couldn’t get enough of it. His mother feared the worst—that Keith was insane and killing himself bit by bit. One day, when she found him after he had run away again, his mother took him straight to a mental hospital, where Keith was diagnosed with an ordinary personality disorder and locked down in a ward with other kids just like him—misfits, dopers, rebels, and freaks.

After a few months, no less depressed, he was transferred to a new hospital. There, he mostly slept and partied with the kids—they called themselves “inmates”—who cheeked their meds and pooled them for late-night parties on the ward. He even tattooed his right forearm—his scars—with a question mark.

Then he went AWOL for a while until his mother found him and took him back to the hospital. He escaped again, and this time he overdosed on a handful of NoDoz pills and PCP before he was taken back to the ward.

DRAGGING OUT THE DEMONS

His mother was desperate. Nothing was working. She began to seek out specialists who might be able to reach Keith, and she found Dr. Robert Pynoos, a UCLA psychiatrist who was just beginning to investigate the unexplored mysteries of the effects of violence on children. Pynoos was intrigued by Keith, whom he believed had been misdiagnosed; Keith probably didn’t have a personality disorder, he thought, but was likely suffering from posttraumatic stresses directly related to the McDonald’s massacre.

Pynoos gave Keith a test. His Childhood Posttraumatic Stress Reaction Index was the first scale designed to measure the extent of a child’s damage from violence. A score of 60 indicated a “very severe” reaction to whatever original trauma the child had suffered. Keith scored 75.

Keith was so damaged, Dr. Pynoos warned,
that he was unlikely to live until
he was eighteen.

Pynoos immediately assigned one of his key aides, Dr. Kathleen Nader, to meet Keith. She was the director of UCLA’s Trauma, Violence, and Sudden Bereavement Program, which researched and provided counseling to innocent young victims of violence, disasters, and war.

But Pynoos told Nader not to get her hopes up. Keith was so damaged, Pynoos warned, that he was unlikely to live until he was eighteen. The first time they met, Keith looked much younger than fifteen.

Keith hated Nader and he hated the bullshit therapy. He cropped his hair closely and bleached it blond. He had inked a skull and crossbones with the words “Dead Kennedys Society” on the sleeve of his oversized, olive-drab jacket. He told Nader that he didn’t need whatever she was peddling and just wanted to be out of the hospital, on his own, with the motley crew of friends he was assembling among the “inmates.”

Nader quickly saw how extraordinarily complicated Keith’s psychological wounds were.

Even more than two years after the massacre, he was still having nightmares. Memories of the horrors still intruded at odd and all-too-often moments, yet sometimes he reenacted parts of the experience. He was unable to function in a classroom. Good kids avoided him. He was emotionally detached, seriously depressed, blamed himself for living, and couldn’t control his impulses. If
he wasn’t lashing out at anyone who tried to talk about the massacre, he was literally beating his head against the wall until they shut up.

Nader saw Keith’s unresolved grief for Matao, whose death was all tangled up in the memory of that horrible day. Keith couldn’t properly grieve for his friend without reliving the whole grotesque moment and triggering a new series of horrifying symptoms.

The loving, intelligent, self-assured little boy Keith had been before the McDonald’s incident had been swallowed up by his own damaged, traumatized, angry, antisocial shadow.

Just keeping him alive—much less fixing him—would be more complicated than peeling back the layers one by one. Keith was an unfathomable tangle of survivor guilt, rage, depression, self-destructive behavior, hostility, drug abuse, pessimism, emotional detachment, feeble self-esteem, obsessions, poor impulse control, self-mutilation, nightmares, and identity problems—all traceable to that day at McDonald’s, all left untreated for more than two years, and all on the razor’s edge of a little boy’s adolescence. Worse, Keith’s unstable childhood before the massacre left him especially vulnerable to the horrors the massacre heaped upon him.

Under Nader’s care, Keith was released from the hospital and started seventh grade in an affluent school near the beach. He was the only skate punk, still doing drugs, still hanging out with old friends and skipping classes, still picking fights just to avoid being the victim again. He got high and listened to Black Flag, the Exploited, and other hardcore punk bands. In time, the school kicked him out. He went to a new school, where he still didn’t fit in.

Things continued to get worse, not better. He had sessions with Nader once a week, but he skipped many of them and then stopped going altogether. She was still trying to drag out all his demons, and he was still resisting. The fights, the school, the drug use—mostly pot—were getting worse.

Still in junior high, he graduated from huffing aerosol Scotchgard to dropping acid, doing speed, and then snorting cocaine. He held himself together by selling marijuana to buy booze and more drugs. He was still running away, sometimes sleeping under the piers at the beach. Each time, his mother brought him home, but he never stayed long.

As if his life had become some kind of psycho-drama, Keith began acting out various roles he had witnessed in the McDonald’s massacre. At different times, he wore the masks of the aggressor, the victim, the rescuer, even the information gatherer.

He became obsessed with books and movies about killers. Even as he tried on the parts of victim and rescuer, he always returned to the killer. He started dressing in fatigues and tight black T-shirts, like Huberty. He instigated fights and surrounded himself with kids who reinforced his aggressive behavior.

In one treatment session with Nader, Keith created a paper doll that looked just like him, down to his bleached hair and the green jacket with an inky symbol on the sleeve. He then proceeded to beat the doll, break its arms, slap it on the table, and hang it.

By the time he was sixteen, Keith was working dirty jobs for cash, partying constantly, and getting more violent. He loved to fight, especially bullies. He fell in with a punk gang, then with the skinhead underground, which embraced his violence with fiendish gusto. He quit working altogether and sold pot to make ends meet.

One dark night, while he waited in San Ysidro for a cab ride into Mexico, he started thinking about what had happened there. He started to cry, then started to drink just to numb himself. He blacked out.

During those days, the law was starting to catch up with him. In 1992, after a violent attack with some of his skinhead thugs, Keith did some jail time for misdemeanor assault and he spent more than a few nights in lockup on other charges, but it didn’t dampen the rage in him.

At a club one night, Keith—now playing the rescuer role—rushed to defend a buddy who was being trounced in a brawl. He was stabbed in the belly and the knife broke off inside him. Keith’s friends took him home, anaesthetized him with a bottle of whiskey, and dug around in his wound with a pair of needle-nose pliers until they found the broken blade, unwittingly carving up his intestines with their bumbling first aid. The resulting infection landed him in the hospital, where he quickly discovered the bliss of opiates.

Back on the street, he got into a garbage can of drugs, including a daily dose of heroin. He’d fallen in love with smack because it took away all feeling. He loved to stick his needles in the scars left by James Huberty’s bullets. He even got a kick out of sucking his blood up into the syringe, then downing the whole mess again.

Incredibly, Keith’s life would get even darker from there.

Although he had started seeing Nader again—mostly to mollify his mother and keep her on the hook for more drug money—he drifted in and out of jails, rehab clinics, and drug houses. He lived on the street or with other junkies. He tried detoxing a couple of times, unsuccessfully. He was busted for going into a bar with a gun. And he always went back to the junk.

He was twenty-two—ten years after the McDonald’s massacre—when an odd pain developed in his legs. When he couldn’t ignore it any longer, he went to a hospital, where they told him he had endocarditis, a heart infection likely caused by his intravenous drug use. The prognosis was poor because he had waited too long and the infection was too advanced. His heart was literally falling to pieces. He could stroke out at any minute.

After a month of antibiotics, doctors repaired Keith’s damaged valves in open-heart surgery. Surprising everyone, he lived and was eventually released from the hospital—back to his angry, strung-out life. He picked up with the heroin where he had left off, pushing his limits even farther than before. His incisions were still fresh when he overdosed in a park and came close to dying again. He could feel the warm China White crackling in his brain cells.

He counterfeited money and stole tires right from under cars for cash to buy more heroin. He was a junkie who knew the stuff would kill him, and he was okay with that. Many of his relatives had written him off. He woke up every morning dope sick and went back out to hustle enough money to buy his next fix. He lived dirty and bloodied inside and out; even his underwear were perforated with little burns from nodding out with cigarettes between his fingers.

He wanted to die. At least, in the few times he prayed, that’s what he asked for.

THE ROLE OF RESCUER

Keeping up a habit is hard work, especially when the goal of dying proves elusive.

Keith wasn’t dying, and he was tired of merely being miserable.

Some tiny part of him, the child who survived the McDonald’s shootings, wanted to live, goddamn it. And that part of him finally spoke up. If he wasn’t going to die, he wasn’t going to live like this any longer.

In 1996, twelve years after James Huberty turned his world upside down, Keith decided for himself to come clean. He felt guided by an unseen hand.

Metropolitan State Hospital was an old insane asylum. He spent his first week of nonmedical detox—old-fashioned cold turkey—in the Spartan “wet room,” where they caged the worst cases who would puke, shit, and piss on everything in their delirium. When he was ready, he was sent to a halfway house where he met people just like him. Suddenly, he realized he was not a freak of nature. Everyone had his or her own demons.

Drifting through halfway houses for a year, his depression, insecurities, anger, obsessions—all his defects—were on full display. With the help of other addicts, he wrestled with each of them.

It wasn’t easy. He cleaned himself up, inside and outside, not in one grand sweep, but slowly, one day at a time. He clawed his way through frozen, polluted layers toward the child buried alive beneath. He fought the foul urges that came in weak moments. He still couldn’t let anyone come close to him, physically or emotionally. He retained some vestiges of the hostage-taker.

But he was clean and sober, had come to terms with God, and for the first time since that day at McDonald’s, he stopped being a victim. Victims were not responsible for what happened to them. To take responsibility for himself, Keith had to stop playing that role.

Three years into his sobriety, Keith met the woman he would eventually marry. They had a son, who focused Keith in a way he’d never known. But his problems were not behind him: The day his son was born, Keith was undergoing a second emergency surgery on his damaged heart.

He eventually went back to school and got his GED, then started taking some college classes.

The 9/11 attacks dealt a blow to his recovery, so he entered a new phase of therapy. Among his therapist’s first exercises was for Keith to list his resentments. James Huberty was there. One by one, Keith had to make amends with his resentments as a way to move forward, but Huberty always hung him up.