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The cabin in Oregon was where his story was supposed to end, but it was here that it truly began. He believed this land to be his birthright. What he inherited instead was generations of drug addiction, mental illness, and hurt that would go on to irrevocably shape the outcome of his life—and the lives of countless others.
A “monster,” they called him, but before his attorney’s statement at the sentencing, few had stopped to consider what had made him this way.
“Here” was the last stop of an unforgiving path on which millions of kids, teenagers, and young adults find themselves traveling each day, wandering across the country with little more than the packs on their back and nowhere to call home.
Eighteen months prior, deputies had marched them into the courtroom, all in their jail-issued striped jumpsuits and with their heads shaved—authorities had said they had bugs living in their tangled, matted hair when they arrived in Marin County. For a short time, their bald heads added another surreal layer to an already surreal situation.
We at the Chronicle began referring to Haze, Lila, and Sean as “the drifters” pretty much from the start, and the term caught on with other news outlets as well.
I’m not sure why “drifters” became the term that stuck, but we cycled through a number of other descriptions for the three—“young transients,” I wrote in September 2016. The “accused murder trio,” said the San Francisco Examiner in October 2015. “Three young itinerants,” according to the Marin Independent Journal in November 2015; and “murderous vagabonds” in April 2017, for the sentencing.
Lila had just turned eighteen, while Haze and Sean were twenty-three and twenty-four, respectively. At twenty-six, I was just a few years older than they were when this all began, yet as I sat there in that courtroom, eighteen months later, I felt as if there were decades between us.
There was a senselessness to these crimes that nobody could comprehend, a disruption to the regularly scheduled programming of our prescribed acceptable behavior in society.
day. The transient youth population is especially vibrant in California, to the point that they have their own categorization within the realm of homelessness—street kids.
They’re not all kids in the sense that they’re under the age of eighteen, yet they all somehow have both a youthfulness and an aged presence about them.
Complaints that supposedly progressive Bay Area residents had never felt acceptable to voice before spilled over in a frenzied witch hunt, as they struggled to make peace with the dichotomy of their free-spirited history that accepted and celebrated these wanderers, and their current, unpredictable reality of street kids setting up tents anywhere they pleased, using hard drugs, urinating wherever, and holding loud all-night parties outside people’s homes.
A common narrative pushed about these kids is that they are homeless by choice. They could easily not be homeless, so the narrative goes, if they would just get a job. If they would stop being lazy. If only they didn’t want this free-living life. These kids are a middle finger to the American myth of resilience and perseverance, in which anyone can succeed if they pull themselves up by their bootstraps. These kids just refuse to try, their critics say. They refuse to live by the societal contract to which we all adhere.
You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots. You can’t persevere if the trauma you suffered as a child makes it impossible for you to look a person in the eye, if the only way of life you know is a needle in your arm to numb the pain.
The tourists can still get that Summer of Love experience when they drop some coins into the hat of some kid with a creative sign asking for money for weed or beer, or hand off their leftovers to a group lounging outside Coffee to the People at the corner of Masonic Avenue.
found it fascinating that the supposedly progressive and accepting neighbors would write off the street kids, calling them an innocuous bunch who kept to themselves, and yet look in their direction whenever violence occurred in the vicinity.
But that’s San Francisco. It’s a city of nuances and contradictions, where residents want to have it both ways without realizing the impossibility of such. It’s a city where innovation and growth come at the expense of the artists and poets who built its reputation of free thinking and progress. It’s a city that welcomes all walks of life, yet bears graffiti deriding “techie scum.” It’s a city of extreme disparities, where young, hoodie-wearing engineers with their faces glued to the latest and most expensive smartphones can walk by homeless encampments where the level of indigence has
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“No parks after dark,” he grumbled—another strange San Francisco concept, created in part because of the large homeless population who sleeps in the parks at night.
“Bad stuff happens to us,” he told me, “but more good stuff happens.” When you don’t have to answer to anyone, life is one big party. When you have nowhere you belong, you are free.
I was technically an adult, working an office job, wearing professional clothing, and paying rent, but my view of the world was still that of a sheltered child.
In the first two decades of our lives, we are socialized to reach certain milestones at a rapid pace, and then we are left with the rest of our lives stretching long and ominously ahead of us.
I wouldn’t consider myself a squeamish or high-maintenance person, but I am used to certain comforts in life. I enjoy showering every day, answering nature’s call in the privacy of an actual restroom, having clean sheets to sleep on at night. I get fussy when I’m hungry and cranky without a good night’s sleep.
The city’s history as a beacon for the counterculture meant that, fifty years after the Summer of Love, its streets and leafy parks still served as a hub for the homeless, the houseless, the drifters, and the restless.
In my years reporting on crime and mayhem, sitting in on murder trials and poring over court documents, I have learned that truth is relative—there are only the facts and what you believe those facts say, and that varies from person to person.
In her lilting Quebecois accent, Audrey thanked them for being her friends, one of her final acts before she was killed. She did not know, in that moment, that Lila had already taken her wallet.
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, an annual free music festival held in Golden Gate Park, opened the day of Audrey’s murder, but the throngs of people who would have crowded into the park for the free music would have mostly dispersed by the time Audrey found herself in the bushes on the western side of the park, not far from the golf course and the Beach Chalet Soccer Fields.
He pulled the trigger with the barrel pointed at her left temple, splattering blood and brain matter everywhere, including onto Lila, who had been looking directly into Audrey’s face when Haze took her life.
When Haze heard that Sean had been jumped several times in the facility next door, the fate for many prisoners considered to be “snitches,” he doubled over in a full-on belly laugh, displaying the most joy I had ever seen from him.
He can’t remember anything about Audrey, but he remembered that at some point that afternoon, they met up with a man from Humboldt County, California, who had smoked them out and gave Audrey the creeps by hitting on her.
“What do you remember about her?” I asked. Was she kind, was she curious? Was she happy, was she sweet? Was she scared when you held her down and tied her up with rope? Did she know she was going to die when you pulled out the gun?
truth—and a man who didn’t respond to my inquiries. Though Haze’s grandmother denied these accusations on Haze’s father’s behalf, the problem with sexual assault is that even if his father had set up a face-to-face meeting, looked me in the eye, and sworn under oath that no such rape had ever taken place, that still doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. As we’ve unfortunately had to learn with the #MeToo movement, far too often it’s the victim’s word against the alleged perpetrator’s, with no independent way to verify either. Cases of intrafamilial sexual abuse involving children are particularly
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He has a distinct memory of the older daughter of his mom’s abusive boyfriend at the family cabin in Oregon, making him show her his penis and touching it, which he doesn’t consider sexual abuse because he doesn’t believe children can sexually abuse each other.
“I moved to stop him,” he said, “but I was wearing these Jesus sandals. I tripped, and I pulled the trigger.”
When the first responders came upon the scene, Coco, ever loyal and steadfast, stood guard over her master’s body, blood dripping from the eye she would eventually lose.
They could be dirty, their hair clumped in unwashed chunks, or they could be one of the free-living locals wearing their hair in dreadlocks. They could be strung out or sleeping off a hangover under a palm tree, or they could be just one of the many beachgoers relaxing in the perfect weather.
They can bundle up in their blankets and hoodies against the sharp ocean breeze and look like any of the many soaking in the last bits of yet another perfect beach day. They can be their own weird, damaged selves and be accepted.
There’s a level of kindness extended to the homeless and traveling population here that I haven’t seen in many other places—the baristas at the café that sells five-dollar nut mylk lattes give out cups of coffee when they can to the kids who ask. Even though they’re not supposed to, they let a man who has been around for some time sleep on the patio at night.
Edie had the sass of a Southern woman, and she gave me the impression that she was not the sort of person I’d want to mess with, yet there was also something childlike in her demeanor, in the almost immature melodramatic way she spoke of her life and explained her line of thinking. When I looked up her Facebook page, I found her wall littered with the song lyrics, memes, and brassy quotes of a girl much younger than she was, posted with the frequency of a teenager: “I try to make people feel loved and wanted because I know what it’s like to not feel loved and wanted.” “Raise your hand if you
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children exposed to complex trauma may attempt to communicate their traumatic past in a reenactment in their day-to-day behavior, according to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.
Haze’s happy, drug-fueled days at Ocean Beach ended with him in the damp chill of the Pacific Northwest, on the streets with his mother and her new boyfriend. Summer must come to an end sometime, even in the land of endless summer. But he’d be back. And it was here, at Ocean Beach, that he’d find Lila Alligood, setting in motion the final domino on the path to murder.
Whenever there’s a romantic relationship at the center of a murder case, people always imagine some sort of Bonnie and Clyde ride-or-die situation. His dedication to her fits that trope, but not much else does.
It felt like Haze was just saying what he thought one would say about the supposed love of one’s life.
But what is love to a kid like Haze, a kid who has only experienced hurt and more hurt, inadvertent or otherwise, from the ones tasked with loving and caring for him unconditionally? What is love to a kid who only understands three emotions—happiness, anger, and sadness? What is love to a kid who has probably never even met a couple in a healthy, loving relationship?
Haze shrugged off questions about what it was about Lila that drew him to her, what it was about her that made him love her.
“It’s really, really wrong,” Haze said. “But the perfect person for me is a younger, crazier version of my mother, and that’s what Māhealani is. Strawberry blonde, a redhead in the sun. My little brother does the same thing. We date women who remind us of our mother. And my mother has dated men who were me in the future.”
Christian told me later that he’d expected this reaction. These days, San Francisco isn’t so much in the midst of a Summer of Love as it is deep within a Spring Awakening of Wealth. The gap between the rich and poor continues to grow at an astounding rate. A 2014 report by the city’s Human Services Agency found that San Francisco’s income inequality is worse than in developing countries like Rwanda and Guatemala.
The median household income is almost $97,000, more than one and a half times the national median, but teachers, law enforcement, and other municipal employees can no longer afford to live in the city of San Francisco, where, by 2018, the median price of a single-family home hit a jaw-dropping $1.61 million.
When you’re traveling down a path paved with gold, the last thing you want to pass is a homeless encampment, a reminder of the stark poverty that still exists outside the tech bubble.
The last homeless tally in San Francisco put the count at about 7,500, with about one-third of those individuals being thirty years of age or younger and almost 50 percent being forty years or younger. In 2016, voters passed a ballot measure banning tents on city sidewalks, but failed to pass the ballot measures that would have funded more housing for the homeless—meaning that while voters supported getting the homeless off the streets, they didn’t particularly care about where they’d go after that.
“You are never going to fix the foster care system. You are never going to fix what’s coming from the top,” Christian said. “The city is going to talk about it, the city is going to say we have this much money to do this with, but most of that money is going to salaries. They’re supposed to fix the problem, but really, we’re just in this vicious cycle of, ‘I’m fixing the problem, I’m fixing the problem,’ when really what you’re doing is just keeping them homeless. The only solution for homelessness is homes. Get somebody inside, and then get them services.”
All kids are guilty of bad ideas, and it is completely dependent on their level of privilege how irreversible and harmful those ideas end up being.
