Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (13 page)

Local cops came to the house more than once, sometimes because the Hubertys were complaining about the neighbors, sometimes because the neighbors were complaining about the Hubertys. Twice, the Hubertys were hauled in on minor charges.

In 1980, police charged James with disorderly conduct in a dispute at a service station. The reporting officer said a belligerent James simply wouldn’t calm down, even after police intervened. He pleaded guilty and was fined only court costs.

A year later, Etna was charged with four counts of “aggravated menacing” for waving James’s Browning 9 mm semiautomatic pistol—the same gun he later used in the McDonald’s shooting—at neighbors during an argument. The charge was reduced to disorderly conduct.

NOTHING TO LIVE FOR

In 1982, James Huberty’s fragile world began to crumble.

He was laid off from his welding job of thirteen years when his employer, Babcock & Wilcox, closed the plant.

“I got no job or anything,” he told Etna. “I’ve got nothing to live for.”

A coworker recalled even more chilling words. An embittered James talked about “shooting somebody.”

“He said that if this was the end of his making a living for his family,” the coworker said later, “he was going to take everyone with him.”

Etna believed James had a nervous breakdown after the layoff. His politics became frighteningly radical as he blamed irrational enemies—capitalism, secret government initiatives, America’s rich, former President Jimmy Carter, minorities, or the shadowy darling of 1980s conspiracy theorists, the Trilateral Commission—for his ruin. Voices in his head urged him to kill himself. He told people he was a German, even though he wasn’t. He feared a nuclear war was only days away.

Then he had a brainstorm. They would sell their house for a big profit and move to Tijuana, where they had once vacationed. There, James said, they would “make a lot of money,” although he never truly had a plan.

“We’re going to show them who’s boss!” he crowed.

Unfortunately, the neat little Massillon house sold at a $69,000 loss, but in October 1983, they moved to the grubby little Mexican border town
anyway. James, the Rust Belt refugee, hated it. It was polluted, and the cops often stopped him on his motorcycle. Distrusting Mexican schools, they drove the girls across the border every day to a San Ysidro school. It was too much. Within three months, he uprooted the family again and moved across the border to a $610-a-month, two-bedroom apartment, where the Hubertys were the only Anglos in a mostly Latino complex. And they were running out of cash quickly.

Then James saw an ad for a program that trained low-income, unemployed men to be security guards. He ranked near the top of his twenty-seven-student class but made no real impression on his trainers. In April 1984, he got his license, and a few months later, since he had no serious crimes on his record and a check of his FBI fingerprints didn’t raise any red flags, he received a gun permit that let him carry a loaded .38 or .44 Magnum pistol on duty.

But the voices in James Huberty’s head grew louder and his delusions more twisted. Once, he approached a police cruiser on foot and surrendered himself as a war criminal. An FBI check showed nothing, so he was simply told to go home.

The voices in James Huberty’s head grew
louder and his delusions more twisted. Once,
he approached a police cruiser on foot and
surrendered himself as a war criminal.

In June, the Hubertys moved again, this time to Averil Villas, a dowdy, stuccoed apartment building a block off San Ysidro Boulevard, a stone’s throw away from the McDonald’s.

A month later, on July 10, he was fired from his job as a security guard because his bosses were troubled by his skittishness and odd behavior. James was again crippled by his disappointment at yet another failure in his life. On July 17, Etna finally convinced him to call a mental health clinic, but because of a clerical error, his message was never delivered.

The next day—the last day of his life—James Huberty took his wife and daughters to breakfast before appearing in traffic court on a routine citation. Afterward, they ate lunch at a McDonald’s in San Diego and visited the zoo. They came home in the early afternoon and James took a nap.

Etna grumbled that the mental health clinic hadn’t called back, but James shrugged her off.

“Well, society had their chance,” he said.

Before 4 p.m., the forty-one-year-old unemployed security guard got up, dressed in camouflaged fatigues, black combat boots, and a maroon T-shirt, then kissed Etna good-bye.

She asked where he was going.

“Hunting,” he said. “Hunting humans.”

The ominous comment didn’t faze Etna. James was always saying weird things. He could have walked to the McDonald’s in less than a minute—it was that close. But Huberty got in his black Mercury Marquis and drove. In his duffel bag were his Browning P-35 Hi-Power 9 mm pistol, a Winchester 1200 pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, and a semiautomatic Uzi, all legal weapons, all legally purchased. He also had more than five hundred cartridges and shells.

Slowly, the missed signs began to emerge.

After the massacre, Etna told a reporter that she regretted thwarting her husband’s futile suicide attempt a year before. Or wished that she had killed him herself, which she tried to do during one of their many arguments thirteen years prior, but her gun jammed.

Neighbors and coworkers remembered moments that, in light of the killings, took on new, ominous meaning.

“He always did comment on how he wanted to go through a lot of people,” his ex-foreman at the plant told the Canton paper the day after the rampage. “He had a lot of guns in his house, and he always said he wanted to kill a lot of people. We watched him a lot. We believed him. It was just a question of when.”

An autopsy found no drugs or alcohol in Huberty’s corpse but did discover elevated levels of the metals nickel and cadmium, likely remnants of his days as a welder. Two years after the shootings, Etna filed a $5 million wrongful death lawsuit against McDonald’s and James’s former employer, Babcock & Wilcox, claiming her husband’s killing urges were triggered by a combination of monosodium glutamate in the chain’s food and the poisonous metals. Together, she said, they caused delusions, kidney failure, and uncontrollable fury. The case was thrown out.

It had been almost twenty years since the nation’s attention had been so viciously grabbed. The last time was Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from the Texas Tower in Austin, which left fourteen dead and thirty-one wounded. (See
chapter 6
.) Americans had grown complacent in the intervening years. Now they were shocked all over again by the latest record mass shooting.

Neither of those slaughters clings to the cultural memory like an unbeatable cancer simply because of the body count. In both cases, place matters significantly.

Whitman’s rampage was made even more frightening by the looming tower in which he perched above everyone like some bloodthirsty angel of death. And Huberty chose a place where every American had been, a shared
space where children played, where Little League teams went after the game, where people stopped to satisfy cravings. Every town had a McDonald’s. Walking through the door, people knew exactly what to expect. It was always a safe choice. But suddenly, Americans everywhere could imagine themselves under fire in PlayPlace.

Just days after the rampage, Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, seeded a fund for survivors and victims’ families with $100,000 of her own money; the corporation added another $1 million. Keith’s mom eventually got $10,000 for his wounds. The company even took all its upbeat advertising off the air for a time, costing untold millions.

One night, a month after the tragedy, even before James Huberty’s ashes were secretly buried in Ohio, crews leveled the darkened restaurant completely. McDonald’s donated the property to a local community college and built a permanent memorial to the victims on the spot where they died.

The horror was not in vain. Of course, anti-gun politicians seized the moment, and others demanded to know why Huberty’s call to the clinic went unanswered. But many American police departments quickly rewrote their tactical manuals to make faster life-and-death decisions, and the now common practice of rapid-response mental health teams evolved.

James Huberty “had a lot of guns in his house,
and he always said he wanted to kill a lot of
people. We watched him a lot. We believed him.
It was just a question of when.”
—a former coworker

A few months later, Etna Huberty announced she planned to sell the movie rights to her story so she could raise her two daughters. Several TV networks passed on the movie. Eventually, in 1987, producers released
Bloody Wednesday
, loosely based on the massacre, but it was poorly received and disappeared from theaters quickly.

Huberty still had fans, however. One was an angry ex-seaman named George Hennard, who was fascinated with the McDonald’s massacre. He watched videotaped documentaries of it again and again. And seven years after James Huberty set the grim standard for psychotic mass murderers, Hennard plunged himself into another family restaurant more than a thousand miles away to raise the bar one more time. (See
chapter 4
.)

One hideous event had sent forth a thousand bleak ripples.

And Keith Thomas was one.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Although a normally outgoing boy, Keith stopped talking altogether in the days after the massacre.

While his wounds healed, he withdrew into himself. And he began to get angry. At first, it was with the people who kept telling him that Matao died because God needed him and stupid shit like that. He couldn’t imagine God needing a little boy so badly that he would allow him to be murdered, punctured a dozen times by a madman’s bullets.

After he was released from the hospital, he went to his mother’s house, where she lived with a boyfriend whom Keith hated. The man abused Keith’s mom and was an unpleasable authoritarian. Keith’s anger welled up every time the guy talked, and he became verbally abusive toward both his mother and her boyfriend.

Nobody had ever really talked to Keith about faith, but he remembered God from the picture Bible he had been given years before. He still sensed there was a God or something bigger out there, but now it suited him to be angry with this God. He believed God was there, but Keith was pissed off at Him.

Not long after the McDonald’s shootings, his mother took him on a Mexican cruise, just the two of them. She thought it would be good for her damaged son. The nightmares hadn’t subsided, though, and he couldn’t sleep. One night on the ship, during an argument with his mother about what to wear to dinner, she reached out and touched Keith’s leg. He kicked her across the room.

In school, Keith felt like a freak, as if he didn’t belong there, didn’t fit in. One day in school, an annoying classmate pushed him too far. Keith beat him ferociously, and it felt good every time he hit the kid. Afterward, as he realized what he had done, Keith wept.

Anger became a drug. Living mad felt good.

But once, just one brief moment, he felt peace. He was recuperating at his grandparents’ home when the television set came to life on its own. The tube hissed with snow. He hadn’t touched it, and he didn’t know why he asked out loud, “That you, Matao?”

The set went off.

Keith sat mesmerized.

“If it’s you, come back.”

The set whispered back to life, then just as quickly went off again.

It was the first time Keith believed Matao might be watching him.

But things just got worse after that. When his mother couldn’t handle him any longer, she sent him to live with his biological father, a former Army Ranger and Vietnam veteran living in Washington State and dealing with his own postwar nightmares. His father tried hard to restore the best parts of Keith, but they had burrowed too deep inside.

YOUNG KEITH THOMAS DEVELOPED A FASCINATION WITH GUNS AFTER HE SURVIVED JAMES HUBERTY’S 1984 MASSACRE AT THE SAN YSIDRO MCDONALD’S.
Courtesy of Keith Martens