Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (15 page)

Keith began to imagine himself as an adult talking to the twelve-year-old boy who had been lost so long ago. Not Matao, but Keith. He felt an overpowering urge to save the child from James Huberty and everything that would follow. He reassured his younger self that everything would be all right.

The Rescuer.

He finally crossed Huberty off his list.

Keith 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.

For many years, Keith wouldn’t set foot in a restaurant of any kind. When he finally did, he would sit with his back against the wall, facing the door. Today, he still won’t go inside a McDonald’s, but he often uses the drive-through window. Baby steps.

For a long time, he was haunted by two distinct moments at McDonald’s: his poking at Matao’s dead legs and his being snatched from his hiding place by cops who he thought might be killers. He no longer lashes out instinctively at people who touch his legs or arms, although some physical contact still reminds him of his near-death experience.

Keith now works as a project manager for a Southern California company that builds high-tech, high-end home theaters for wealthy clients. He also dabbles in oil painting, preferring themes of light and dark, inside and out.

These days, Keith still feels emotionally distant from most people except his son, but he’s working on it. He also still blanches at the sound of beeping deep-fat fryers in fast-food joints. He continues to discover who he is and wrestles every day with stubborn old demons, but he’s finally got the upper hand.

He has grown comfortable in the role of the rescuer and no longer endangers himself in violent situations. He counsels anyone who needs to hear his story and learn what he has learned.

And he still talks to Nader, his own rescuer, every couple of months, no longer as the patient but as a friend. A pioneer in childhood PTSD and a veteran of dealing with later school shootings, mass murders, the Gulf and Balkan wars, and even the World Trade Center attacks, Nader now lives in Texas and is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the long-term effects of catastrophic trauma on children.

Some days, Keith thinks about Matao. He still has some of his friend’s drawings, but he has never gone back to the cemetery where he was buried. He’s not there. Keith feels Matao watching him every day. An angel, no longer a ghost.

He hasn’t seen Ron Herrera since the day he handed back Matao’s bracelet. Keith often thinks about the man who saved his life, but he doesn’t know what he’d say if they met now, and he doesn’t want to revive bad memories for a husband and father who lost nearly everything. He knows the awful power of memory.

His mother never gave up on him, even when he lashed out at her, took her money, and failed her in so many ways. She was the one constant in a life spent on the wind. She remains his most ardent protector.

The McDonald’s massacre shaped Keith Martens. It’s still a part of his life that he doesn’t completely understand. But he knows this: James Huberty doesn’t own him anymore.

“I used to fantasize about pissing on his grave,” Keith says today. “But not anymore. I don’t care about him now.

“It’s just easier to get over it than it is to hang on to it.”

SUZANNA GRATIA REALLY DIDN’T HAVE TIME FOR LUNCH.
She had a dozen errands to run and a full afternoon schedule at her chiropractic clinic in Copperas Cove, Texas. She was just thirty-one, a single woman struggling to build a small business in a small town. She refused to waste a sunny autumn weekday slacking off. She’d already declined a lunch offer from a friend who managed the Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) up US-190. Time was money, and Suzanna needed both.

So when Suzanna’s retired parents, Al and Suzy Gratia, dropped in after their Wednesday morning golf game and invited her to lunch, she begged off. After all, she saw them almost every day. They lived next door, and Suzy, a former executive secretary at Boeing in Houston, closely watched the clinic’s administrative operations, while Al, who’d recently sold his heavy-equipment dealership, kept Suzanna’s books.

Less than two weeks before, the Gratias had celebrated their forty-seventh anniversary with a big family party. Al and Suzy were anything but fragile geezers waiting to die. Al was seventy-one and Suzy was sixty-seven, but they traveled and golfed most mornings. Al spent his afternoons writing a book and local newspaper columns. Still, they had more time on their hands than Suzanna, and today she needed her lunch hour to do more pressing things.

So mom and dad bartered for her company: If Suzanna would eat lunch with them, they’d run some of her errands for her.

Suzanna couldn’t refuse. She called her buddy, Luby’s manager Mark Kopenhaffe, and accepted his offer. On the way, she and her mother dreamed up plans for Al and Suzy’s fiftieth anniversary party. When they arrived at Luby’s a little after noon, the parking lot was already packed. It was the day after payday at Fort Hood as well as National Boss’s Day, and employees around Killeen didn’t have too many other choices for a cheap, fast lunch with their supervisors.

Suzanna parked her Mercedes in a side lot. But before she got out, she slipped her Smith & Wesson .38 caliber handgun out of her purse. Soon after she graduated from chiropractic school and moved to Houston, one of her patients—a prosecutor—suggested she carry a gun for protection in the big city, even though concealed weapons were against the law in Texas. “Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six,” he joked.

So a friend gave her a gun and taught her to shoot it. She was licensed to carry it, but Texas law forbade her from taking a hidden weapon into a public place. So now, rather than risk losing her hard-won chiropractic license by breaking the law, she tucked the snub-nosed revolver safely out of sight, behind her front passenger seat.

Besides, she only carried a gun for menacing moments, lonely roads, and dark places where young women needed protection from monsters—not crowded family restaurants on warm, sunny days in small central Texas towns.

What Suzanna didn’t know was that at the same moment a young man not much older than her, his head filled with demons and his pockets filled with bullets, was barreling toward a bloody cataclysm the world never saw coming.

A BEAUTIFUL BOY

George Hennard was an unfinished soul.

Born October 15, 1956, in Pennsylvania, this son of an authoritarian Army surgeon father and a doting, narcissistic mother grew up a loner. The Hennards moved a dozen times before George was eighteen. Partly because he moved around so much and partly because he was frightfully strange, George never quite fit into any school cliques and was a mediocre student.

Some who knew him as a boy said he was outgoing and cool, but his personality and behavior literally changed overnight after an argument with his tyrannical father, who chopped George’s long dark hair with a scalpel. He was so embarrassed by his haphazard haircut that he ran away, but when he was returned home, an enraged Dr. Hennard shaved him bald.

“He was never the same after that,” a classmate said later. “He was completely introverted.”

AL AND SUZY GRATIA, SHOWN HERE, HAD SPENT THE MORNING AT A LOCAL GOLF COURSE AND WERE INTENT ON SHARING A LUNCH WITH THEIR BUSY DAUGHTER, CHIROPRACTOR SUZANNA. THEY CONVINCED HER TO JOIN THEM AT LUBY’S CAFETERIA IN KILLEEN, TEXAS, ON OCTOBER 16, 1991, UNAWARE OF THE DANGER THAT AWAITED THEM.
Courtesy of the Hupp Family

His relationship with his mother, Jeanna, who had two children from a prior marriage, was turbulent. A pretty woman who tended to dress far younger than her years, she cooed and called young George her “beautiful boy.” But almost from the start, their bond was far more complicated. Their fights were often vile screaming affairs that sometimes became physical—and then at other times, they were warm and loving. Although he deeply craved his mother’s approval, years later Hennard would call her a bitch and draw Jeanna’s head on the slithering body of a rattlesnake.

By the time he transferred from Maine to a new high school at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, Hennard—who now preferred to be called Jo Jo, the way his baby sister Desiree pronounced “George”—yearned to be accepted, especially by the girls, who always kept him at arm’s length. But he cloistered himself in his room with his rock music and marijuana. The pot mollified the beast inside, submerging him in an artificial serenity.

Jo Jo also bought a drum set, but his rock-star dreams evaporated with every jam session when he plunged into his own alternate musical reality, ignoring the rest of the band, even the music they were playing.

Hennard grew to be a handsome man, just over 6 feet (about 2 meters) tall with a trim, 185-pound (84-kilogram) physique and dark, wavy hair. Women found him attractive at a glance, but up close, his piercing black eyes were unsettling, spooky. Even when women saw past his eyes, he spoke awkwardly and had trouble communicating. Nothing ever went far.

After graduating from high school in 1974, Hennard joined the Navy. Although he hated taking orders, detested the minorities on his crew, and chafed at the tedium of shipboard work, part of him thrived at sea. He especially loved exotic ports of call, where he could marinate his unsound soul in easy drugs and easier women, who never rejected him.

During George’s unruly Navy years, his father was given command of the hospital at Fort Hood, near the small town of Killeen, Texas. When Dr. Hennard retired from the Army in 1980, the family settled in the nearby village of Belton, where they bought a sprawling, four-bedroom colonial brick mansion built on four lots.

Life was not so easy for their son. After being disciplined for minor offenses in two captain’s masts on the fleet oiler USS
Mississinewa
, Seaman Hennard was transferred to the destroyer tender USS
Dixie
, where he kept his nose clean but earned low performance scores. Three years after he joined the Navy, George’s enlistment ended, but the Navy didn’t give him a chance to re-up. Although he was honorably discharged, across the bottom of his service record was printed “Not Recommended for Reenlistment.”

GEORGE HENNARD WAS BUSTED FOR POSSESSING A SMALL AMOUNT OF MARIJUANA IN EL PASO, TEXAS, IN 1981. HE WAS FINED AND RELEASED.
El Paso County, Texas Sheriff’s Office

A LIFE UNMOORED

At twenty, George Hennard was adrift. Dark squalls were brewing inside him again. The sea had been taken from him. For the first time in his life, nobody—not his father, his captain, or his absentee conscience—could tell him what to do, and Hennard had never made good decisions on his own.

Four months and a minor pot bust later, Hennard went back to sea. He took a job in the Military Sealift Command, a government-run agency that delivered supplies to the military. After a few more months, he joined the Merchant Marine as a seaman aboard a variety of civilian freighters steaming out of ports on the Gulf of Mexico.