Tawny Ford: 10/01/2005

Read this in an old copy of Rolling Stone. It's long, but well worth the read.

Tawny

Raya fashioned a sign in his barracks to express his growing hatred of the war

Marine Gone Mad

Andy Raya didn't kill anyone while stationed in Iraq. He waited until he returned home

By JEFF TIETZ

On Sunday, January 9th of this year, Marine Lance Cpl. Andy Raya left Camp Pendleton, took a one-way flight from San Diego to Sacramento, grabbed an SKS semiautomatic assault rifle he had obtained illegally, and made his way home to Ceres, a farming town in the Central Valley. Three months earlier he had returned from Iraq, where he had spent seven months driving supply trucks in the Sunni Triangle. Other than Marine Corps barracks, Ceres was the only place Raya had ever lived. He was nineteen.
At 8 p.m., carrying the SKS and several spare clips, Raya walked out of the night's drizzle and into the safety lights of George's Liquors, screaming that he hated the world. A toxicology report would later show that he had a "potentially toxic" level of cocaine in his bloodstream. George's is just a few blocks from the Camp, the migrant-farmworker projects where Raya grew up. The community is working-poor and encroached on by several white middle-class neighborhoods, but it turns briefly slummy around George's. Raya hadn't mentioned his homecoming to anyone. His friends and family thought he was at Camp Pendleton. In his long, hooded rain poncho, lustrous in the wet, he was not immediately recognizable.

Before walking into the store, Raya fired once at a nearby building. Inside, he said he had been shot at and asked the clerk to call the police. To the clerk, he seemed to be elsewhere. Another employee tried to calm him down. Both employees noticed the rifle under his poncho. Raya told them not to be afraid -- they were civilians and would not be harmed. Then he walked outside.

The employees immediately locked the front door. The clerk described Raya's behavior to the 911 dispatcher. Raya was pacing in front of the store, bouncing on the balls of his feet, scanning the street, waiting for the police to arrive, readying his rifle. The SKS is a Russian-designed, Chinese-made semiautomatic. It is similar to the M-16 Raya had carried in Iraq, but it fires bigger, heavier rounds, rounds powerful enough to pierce the body armor cops wear. Raya had bought it for that purpose.

One end of George's Liquors faces Caswell Avenue. The other end abuts Jiro Tire, which faces Central. An empty lot between them extends to the intersection. In Marine Combat Training, Andy Raya had spent a lot of time studying this kind of urban geometry.

Concealing himself behind George's storefront, Raya watched as Officer Sam Ryno and an officer-in-training, Chris Melton, drove up and parked in front of Jiro Tire. They walked cautiously to the front wall of Jiro's, which took them out of Raya's view, and began moving toward the building's plate-glass corner -- a straight diagonal across the lot from Raya. Raya listened and then stepped into the lot for a second to measure their approach. He pulled back just as Ryno glanced around the corner of Jiro's.

Ryno glanced again, and at the reappearance of his face, Raya shot two concentrated bursts. Two, he had been taught, is the optimal number in close quarters -- more and you risk compromising your aim. His shots shattered the plate glass and lifted Ryno fully off his feet. The SKS has a range of 1,300 feet, making the distance between Raya and Ryno effectively point-blank. Raya paused almost imperceptibly to register the effect of his shots -- there was no return fire -- and then stepped forward briskly and fired twice more. The bones in both of Ryno's legs were shattered; one was nearly severed.

From this fractional first pause until the end of his attack, Raya was in continuous textbook motion; what he had learned had become reflexive. After his second shot he ran straight at his targets, firing deafeningly in the echo chamber of the half-walled lot, his poncho rising capelike behind him and shining through the thin, hesitating smoke of his rounds. He knew that superior firepower affords great advantages and that unrelentingness preserves them.

Melton had dragged Ryno back from the corner, out of the line of fire. When Raya passed the building edge, he began side-stepping as he shot, forming a half-circle whose centerpoint was Ryno and Melton. Raya perpetually reoriented his body to this center point, never losing his preternatural poise: spine straight, gun rotating strictly. This tactic, called "pieing," gave his fire a double effect: It became both offensively overwhelming and defensively suppressive. He also remained a swiftly moving target. By this time, Raya had opened up two more big holes in Ryno's body, destroying his lower abdomen.

At that moment another policeman, Officer John King, pulled up and quickly opened fire on Raya with a high-powered rifle. King was able to protect Melton and Ryno only because he had arrived exactly when he did, with Raya about eight feet into the circumference of his circle, and because he had parked, by chance, in a good offensive position. Raya reacted to King's fire as if he had been expecting it: bolting, head down, back to the shelter created by the intersection of the buildings.

Raya stopped and listened; it was quiet. He was untouched. Eighteen seconds had passed since the beginning of the assault. Melton and King were concentrating solely on evacuating Ryno, which was very brave, because they had not neutralized Raya and had no idea whether he had accomplices.

More than a half million U.S. soldiers have now done at least one tour of duty in Iraq. The universal nature of combat there -- the war zone is the whole country -- damages every soldier who serves, regardless of assignment. Before January 9th, the violence committed by Iraq War veterans fell along a limited continuum: Soldiers came home and killed themselves; they assaulted people; they abused their spouses. Then Andy Raya came home and created an approximation of the combat environment he had just left, and the continuum seemed to lose its limits.

Before Iraq, Raya hadn't displayed any emotional instability or propensity for violence. He had the kind of personality that pulled people out of themselves and into common space. When his family and friends reminisce about him, they not infrequently jump up and act out things he did. He was one of the first kids in his class to realize that just before Christmas break you could say, "See you next year," and he drew out the confusion by saying it over his shoulder as he left. Every Easter he painted a raw egg and fake-hid it and broke it over someone's head. In elementary school he designed his own symbol, which looked something like a manta ray, and made tiny reproductions of it wherever he stopped. In high school he would walk complicated paths while eating oranges one after the other and dropping the peels at intervals, so you could track him. "Everyone was always waiting to see what he would do," his father told me.

Raya's parents, Tomas and Julia, picked peaches and apricots in the commercial orchards that begin at the edge of Ceres and extend for miles into the Valley. They lived in the Camp, which had been sheltering migrant farm workers since the Depression. By the time Tomas and Julia got there, in 1983, it had become a county housing project.

Back then, the Camp had sporadic problems with drugs and with the Nortenos, a street gang that originated in the California prison system in the 1960s. But it was basically a hardworking place, and the government-subsidized rent allowed many immigrants to take the transformative step from fieldwork to steadier employment. Tomas got a job at a canning factory; Julia became a nurse's aide. They bought their own home shortly before Andy entered high school.

Andy was proud of being from the Camp and proud of being Mexican. He visited his father's hometown, in Michoacan, several times, and it changed the way he thought about himself. He bought books on pre-Columbian Mexico and collected Mayan and Aztec iconography. When he was ten, the housing authority began a campaign of evictions in the Camp, which sharply reduced the Norteno presence there, but the gang had come to represent the Camp. Its name refers to Northern California, and every neighborhood kid knew Norteno signs and recognized the autonomy and power inherent in its name. If you were a kid in the Camp just coming into adolescence and proud of where you came from, you inherited a Norteno loyalty.

By the time he was thirteen, Andy was talking about joining the Marines and vowing to finish high school on time so he could sign up as quickly as possible. His father likes to tell the story of how, right after the graduation ceremony, Andy found him in the crowd and said, "See, Pop? I told you." Before he began his initiation into the Marines, he said, "Just wait, Pop, just wait. It won't be long before I have my honors" -- his first ribbons -- and the next time he came home, he had them.

Raya loved boot camp in San Diego, and he loved Marine Combat Training at Fort Leonard Wood, outside St. Louis. The discipline and suffering suited him. The setting of his life had never changed before. He had never before been anonymous. Submerged in Marine culture, he fashioned himself into a hard kid from a hard neighborhood. He called the Nortenos his "boys" and threw around pictures of himself and his childhood friends flashing Norteno signs. He showed off his tattoos like they were gang symbols; he was always listening to gangsta rap. He bragged about getting "locked up," but he was vague on the details -- he'd been arrested only as a juvenile, once for having a pot pipe and once for using a Piccolo Pete firecracker to blow up a mailbox.

Andy returned from his seven-month tour in Iraq in September 2004. He was posted to Camp Pendleton and expected to be shipped back to Iraq. His parents picked him up at the base on the day he arrived. He was still in his fatigues. He seemed totally disoriented. He never stopped examining his surroundings, and he remained in a silence that forestalled questions. He was "very, very quiet," his father says.

His parents stopped at a restaurant not far from Camp Pendleton. When they got out of the car and started to shut the doors, Andy yelled, "Don't close the doors! Don't close the doors!" He began rifling the car for his M-16. It took his parents a few minutes to convince him that he was where he was.

The restaurant was crowded, and Andy sat with his back against the wall, staring everywhere and at everyone. He looked, according to his father, "lost, just all lost." His father asked what was wrong. "I don't know, Pop," he said. "I don't know."

For the three days of his leave, Andy stayed in the house. He was not inclined to do much more than sleep and eat. When he sat he was always straight-backed, his knees making right angles, as he had learned to do in the Marine Corps. His attitude was usually that of someone concentrating hard on a problem. To questions about Iraq, he almost always said, "Well, you guys wouldn't understand." He had nightmares every night, but he didn't talk about them. He had photographs of his buddies in Iraq, and also of rubble and ruined vehicles and wounded soldiers. One picture showed the aftermath of an improvised explosive device that had almost killed him, but he wouldn't say much about it. Another showed him in his barracks holding up a handmade sign that read "Operation Send Me Home."

When he came home again for Christmas, he said he didn't want to return to Iraq. With no elaboration, he said the war was not right. "The only thing I think about is dying out there," he told his cousin Rebeca. "That's the worst thing that could happen to me is that my mom sees me die in Iraq." In public, he often said, unprompted, "These are all civilians." Many times he declared to family members, "You guys are considered civilians." He called men "males" and women "females" and sometimes spoke in Marine slang: zero-dark-thirty, gungy, deuce gear. His family kept saying, "We don't understand you," and he kept saying, "Oh, yeah, you guys are civilians," but he never really stopped. Sometimes he just sat and stared at nothing for four or five minutes.

One day, Andy pulled a metal ball out of his pocket and threw it hard at his cousin Alex. Before Alex had a chance to respond, Andy said, "How you felt it is how I felt it." It was a piece of shrapnel that he said had shattered the body armor covering his chest. Andy often carried it, holding it in his palm and metronomically tossing it up and down.

Andy was most like his old self when he was with his friends, hanging out smoking and drinking. One night they broke into the high school gym, tore up an American flag and used the strips to spell "Fuck Bush" on the floor. Andy said things to his friends he didn't say to anyone else. He said, "Bush is a fucking devil. People just don't realize how much power he's got and how much he's using it." He said, "You can't picture hell any worse than Iraq -- that is hell." He had known very little of the world before he went to Iraq, but the world, he said, wasn't right: There was no point in it; it was full of sin; it was going to end.

After a few seconds of surveillance in front of George's, Andy Raya threw his poncho over his shoulder and again stepped toward the lot, his rifle in firing position. He could have rushed and killed Melton and Ryno and King, but with studied caution he pulled back, paced, appeared to reload -- a three-second procedure -- and then seized up at the sound of another approaching officer, Sgt. Howard Stevenson.

Stevenson had driven slowly down Caswell toward Central and pulled to within a half-block of George's. He unholstered his pistol and began walking along a white fence that partially screened him from the storefront. Raya dashed in a crouch to the side window of a car parked in front of George's, rose slightly to fix his target with his eyes and then drew his body downward and backward: a pretty, pendular motion that brought him to rest in a stable firing position. "Shoot me, motherfucker!" he was screaming. "Shoot me! Shoot me!" Stevenson had walked past the end of the fence. Aiming at the figure behind the car, he yelled, "Put down your weapon! Put down your weapon!"

Raya fired two bursts through the car window. As before, he was in constant motion after his initial shot -- he moved forward into a deeper crouch and shot twice over the car's trunk. Raya rushed Stevenson as soon as he began to fall, firing accurately. The officer was no longer moving when Raya reached him. Raya bent down and shot him twice in the back of the head, like a technician. Then he kept running, telling one woman to get back into her house -- she was a civilian and would not be harmed. After a half-block, he veered from the street and vanished into a residential grid of yards and alleys and houses.

By the time Raya got to Iraq, in February 2004, the Marines had invested scores of hours in teaching him how to kill other human beings and desensitizing him to the act. The military now excels at overriding the nearly immutable human instinct against intraspecies killing: In World War II, at least seventy-five percent of American soldiers under fire did not shoot their weapons; today, nearly ninety-five percent do. Five decades of military research has produced photo-realistic targets, complex and visceral virtual-reality scenarios, three-dimensional human mannequins that bleed and fall, and exercises in which live humans believably die when hit by simulated ammunition. Recruits kill in this way many hundreds of times, until destroying a manifestly fragile human form becomes automatic and affectless and associated with honor. They never have to label their marks humans or people or soldiers or even them. They shoot at targets or positions or hostile fire or the enemy. They are not killing; they are not even shooting: They are attriting, suppressing, returning, engaging.

After six months of training and conditioning, Raya was shipped to Ramadi, a shot-up provincial capital of cement and mud brick in the middle of the desert. Saddam Hussein had drawn most of his special forces from the city. When his army was dissolved, the country's best fighters went home to Ramadi. They brought a sophistication to the local insurgency that rivaled the American military's.

Insurgents in Ramadi plotted Marine troop movements and diagrammed ambushes in three dimensions. In street battles they sometimes stood and fought to the death, sometimes flanked Marine positions and sometimes re-treated in tactical sequence. They were good with rocket-propelled grenades and shoulder-launched missiles, and they had professional snipers: In a firefight in April 2004, two months after Raya arrived, five Marines died or were badly wounded by single shots to the head.

Weapons stockpiles and bands of disguised insurgents were everywhere. "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind, " an American soldier told a reporter toward the end of Raya's tour, "would be to kill the entire population."

Raya's camp, like every other Marine camp in and around Ramadi, took rocket and mortar and small-arms fire almost every day. That March, bomb attacks in the city wounded nineteen soldiers in two days. On June 21st, four Marines died defending an observation post. On July 1st, one Marine was killed and seven wounded by a roadside bomb. Every Wednesday for the following three weeks, insurgents inflicted multiple casualties on patrols by coordinating the opening volleys of their attacks. One Marine company whose tour overlapped with Raya's saw more than sixty of its 185 soldiers killed or wounded.

Raya drove seven-ton supply trucks from Ramadi to strategic points all over the Sunni Triangle. During his tour, a driver in every twentieth convoy was killed or wounded. Drivers could expect to encounter hostile fire every fourth or fifth mission. One of the first times Raya went out, insurgents detonated an improvised explosive device under a truck in his convoy. The IED was in a dead dog. The explosion lifted the multi-ton truck several feet off the ground and left its occupants unconscious and bleeding in the road. Raya was temporarily deafened by the explosion; a military doctor later told him he would soon lose all hearing in one ear.

To hurt transport convoys, which tend to be big and have a lot of firepower, insurgents fired 120 mm missiles or rocket-propelled grenades from rooftops or palm groves or the far side of sand berms. They put mortar tubes in the trunks of cars and used the car battery to fire 82 mm or 122 mm artillery shells. By the beginning of Raya's tour, insurgents had begun filling cars with explosives -- sometimes more than a thousand pounds of explosives -- and driving them into convoys. Insurgents posing as road crews built median strips to house IEDs. They set IEDs under overpasses so they exploded downward. They planted fake IEDs to delay convoys, and they responded to radio jamming by using timed detonators.

Over a period of six months in Ramadi, insurgents planted more than 400 IEDs on a single stretch of road. Ramadi convoys often had to take or cross a 4.5-mile section of a major highway known as Route Michigan. Insurgent shelters -- a crowded market and a series of mosques -- line it. Drivers called it the "suicide train." One morning just after Andy Raya left Iraq, American soldiers found or were wounded by nine bombs on Route Michigan: an IED for every half-mile.

Serious ambushes took a classic form. They began with the detonation of an IED, or a daisy chain of four or eight or ten IEDs, and then proceeded to RPG and mortar fire. Injuring and pinning a convoy in this way made close-range rifle and machine-gun fire sustainable, and it pretty much guaranteed casualties. A convoy was ambushed in Ramadi on July 21st. When a rapid-reaction force arrived, it was ambushed as well.

Raya sometimes drove at night, when convoys moved fast, often without headlights. Visibility on moonless nights, even with night-vision goggles, was no better than a few hundred yards: At times, drivers saw little more than the chemical lights attached to the bumper in front of them. In daylight, roads were impinged on by sheep, immolated military vehicles, mule carts, fuel tanks, dead animals. Blast craters and sandstorms appeared unpredictably. Desert crevices cut into truck routes. Irrigation canals ran along raised roads -- driving on them was like driving on top of a wall. Quicksand could grip seven-ton trucks for hours. Drivers had not been trained to operate in these conditions, and there was no time to practice. Learning on the job, they killed and injured themselves in crashes and rollovers, and died because their mistakes made them good targets.

Iraqis wove in and out of American convoys as a gesture of disrespect and tried to get hit so they could file compensation claims. In narrow city streets, where potential enemy firing positions seemed absurdly close, traffic slowed convoys to a walk, or halted them. Insurgents engineered traffic jams and posed as traffic cops. As suicide car bombings became common, all traffic came to seem intolerable. Because children sometimes ran in front of trucks to halt convoys in advance of ambushes, drivers were ordered not to stop for children and not to look back. So they cultivated in themselves a readiness to keep driving.

Every truck driver in Iraq heard tales of what happened to every other driver: When Iraqis in a Baghdad street, resuming their errands and transactions minutes after an IED attack, inadvertently stepped on the brains of a dead driver; when drivers consciously crushed children; when IED explosions threw severed American heads into the air and soldiers had to go retrieve them.

Raya wrote many letters home, but he almost never called -- he had seen too many people get depressed afterward. An acquaintance had shot himself in the head after his girlfriend told him she was sleeping with someone else. "I could of lived happily," Andy wrote to his cousin Marisa, "without seeing what I've seen."

A number of people saw Andy Raya disappear from the street after he killed Sgt. Stevenson. Ceres police were soon able to identify the yard he had entered. An 11-99, which summons every officer who hears it, had been broadcast; units from all the surrounding counties were arriving. The police received several calls from residents as they glimpsed or heard Raya amid their houses. This information and a surfeit of manpower enabled them to rapidly establish a perimeter that was tight and wide enough to contain him.

High-powered spotlights on the roofs and doors of squad cars lit the sightlines from the perimeter into the cordoned area. A California Highway Patrol helicopter held at 800 feet, dropping sometimes to 500. The helicopter had a 50-million-candlepower searchlight that was impossible to look at directly and that illuminated -- like daylight, people in the neighborhood said -- several front yards at once. With a good approximation of Raya's position and this amount of movable light, the perimeter closed fast, stopping at one square block. Firepower had been concentrated wherever there was a clear view of the alley. Snipers climbed onto surrounding rooftops. Ten policemen with semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles stationed themselves about 300 feet from Raya's position, behind a black flatbed pickup parked in front of a house.

For the next two hours, no one inside the perimeter heard or saw anything. It later became clear that Raya never left a tiny region of three or four adjacent back yards near one end of the block. The back yards ended in a narrow alley, across which lay more yards and more cover, but Raya never crossed it; he never attempted to enter a house. There is no evidence that he moved at all. He most likely sat or lay under a large tree that shielded him from the helicopter's searchlight.

Then, with no warning, he leapt over a backyard fence and into the alley. The helicopter was overhead -- Raya had chosen to jump into a well of light. People in a house with a direct view of the alley said he was shirtless. They could see the contours of his tattoos: the Aztec sun on one shoulder, the Aztec moon on the other. Several saw him jump with his hands up.

Every cop behind the pickup started shooting: a continuous mutual burst that went on for what seemed like a long time -- fifty rounds, the people in the house thought. The house vibrated. On the door the noise acted like a solid object.

The silence after the shooting seemed unyielding. Raya lay prone and still, bleeding heavily. His left arm had been flung over his head and lay flat on the ground; his right forearm leaned in the air: elbow cocked, wrist limp, fingers dangling. Then his arm moved. To people in the house, it looked like a nerve running from his right hand to his shoulder, its impulse, probably the last live thing in his body, jerked his arm upward, marionettelike. Every cop who had shot before shot again, fewer rounds this time but with the same retributive sustain.

The Raya shooting had no precedent in Ceres. The community had remained, in essence, a country town, its organizing force still the fruit orchards that surrounded it. Gang violence had been increasing in the region, but in Ceres it had yet to become more than an irregular, small-time problem. No police officer had ever been killed in the line of duty. "One reason this affected us so much is it wasn't somebody who went into a bank to do a robbery and shot a cop," Lt. Bill Heyne, the lead investigator in the case, told me. "Raya just flat ambushed these officers. You can't anticipate that is ever, ever going to happen." Suddenly, the war in Iraq seemed surreally close. "If the military has guys coming back like that," Heyne wondered, "what do they have to do to make sure they don't go off?"

For several days after the crime, Chief of Police Art de Werk told the media that the shooting was probably a case of "suicide by cop," the act of a soldier determined not to return to Iraq. Despite the fact that Raya had set an ambush for the cops and shot one to death, the police spoke about him with a detachment that neared deference: He was a United States Marine who had just spent seven months risking death for his country -- he had earned, at least, a distanced respect.

But the Marine Corps quickly disowned him. Three days after the shooting, a USMC officer spoke to Heyne, telling him that Raya had never been in combat, and that his experiences in Iraq could not have influenced his actions in Ceres. In a Marine Corps report on the shooting, Raya's superiors and fellow soldiers all stated that the war had made no real emotional impact on him. Raya had taken the IED explosion he witnessed "in stride" and "did not seem 'stressed out' over the incident." He "operated in" a "combat environment," but that had "no discernible effect" on him. Raya was "always in a good mood around the barracks." The report also underscored the fact that Raya knew gang signs, was "obsessed with" gangsta rap and liked to show off his tattoos. At Camp Pendleton, he "related he was a member of 'nortenos' back in Modesto." It was his visits home to Modesto, not his tour in Iraq, that had altered him: "LCpl Raya's demeanor changed, becoming more confrontational, after spending so much time in Modesto."

The change in the investigation was instantaneous: Andy Raya was a gangster and a cop-killer. The image turned irrevocable when Ceres police found a safe in Raya's room containing home videos of "gang-type behavior." There was also evidence that tracked Raya's emerging politics and adolescent fascination with violence: a photograph of him throwing gang signs when he was fifteen, a weapons shopping list he had written when he was seventeen, another photograph of him burning an American flag.

The police were now certain that Raya's assault was a vanguard action -- a military-style template for gang attacks on cops. At the crime scene, along with improvised altars and spray-painted memorials, was a piece of graffiti that read "187 the pigs" -- a reference to the California penal code for homicide. Heyne and de Werk chose the morning of Raya's funeral, five days after the crime, to make their theory public. Heyne delivered a PowerPoint presentation and showed stills from Raya's videos. "Ceres police," the Los Angeles Times reported, "now point to the gangster milieu and hip-hop culture as the main reasons behind the attack. Raya, they said this week, may have been acting as part of an ongoing gang insurgency targeting law enforcement."

Raya's attack, with its Marine precision, now engendered another professional assault. De Werk inaugurated the counteroffensive by dispatching a dozen unmarked police cars to tail mourners from Raya's funeral back to the Camp. The department also spent $18,000 on military equipment -- chiefly AR-15 assault rifles -- for its forty-five officers, and it primed the public for its actions. "We're in a new age now," Sgt. Patrick Sullivan told the Modesto Bee. "I hate to tell you," de Werk said at a press conference, "but the days of Mayberry are over."

Police patrols in the camp became so frequent they amounted to a permanent presence. Cops searched people and cars and homes nonstop. Police appeared on lawns and doorsteps in groups of three or five or ten, rifles out, demanding to be let into homes. Detentions and friskings were slightly hysterical: multiple semiautomatics cocked and aimed, shirts lifted, legs spread, crotches patted, all in front of neighbors and friends and family. Residents who witnessed searches say it was routine for two AR-15s to be pointed at the temple of a single suspect.

The cops seemed to be stopping every male between fifteen and twenty-five. Parents began locking their kids inside. The police paid particular attention to Andy Raya's friends, who had been hanging out in the same places, unnoticed by the cops, since they were little kids. Now they were being searched as many as six times a day. One officer became notorious for walking through the neighborhood with his gun drawn, clicking the safety on and off, smiling. Residents said policemen threw suspects around and yelled a lot, and they didn't seem to care what they said. "Everyone who knew Andy Raya has a fucking target on their head!" one cop reportedly yelled.

While being searched at gunpoint, a neighborhood kid said, "You're just out for revenge. You'd shoot us right now if you could."

"You know what?" the cop searching him said. "You're right."

The Ceres Police Department is mostly white, and few of its officers are bilingual. One time the cops pulled up alongside a friend of Raya's just as his cell phone rang. On previous patrols they had heard him speaking Spanish to his parents. "Don't answer it!" one cop yelled. "Don't answer it! I could arrest you for obstructing justice for talking Spanish!"

During one search, the cops pulled aside a strikingly light-skinned kid named Jorge Acosta. They asked why he was hanging out with gang members. Was it for protection? "No, officers," Acosta said. "These are my childhood friends."

During another search a cop asked a resident, "If I touch you, will I explode?"

"What am I, a terrorist?" the kid said.

"Well," the cop said, "are you?"

On January 17th, Ramona Flores was watching TV with her kids when three cops showed up on her doorstep. Two had drawn their pistols; one held an AR-15. Flores doesn't speak English. Her teenage son, who had been acquainted with Raya, asked for a warrant. Ignoring the question, the cops told Mrs. Flores that denying entry would mean greater suspicion and possible arrest. She relented, and the cops searched her son's room. They found a lot of Oakland Raiders gear.

The questions the cops repeated over and over during searches -- Where are your guns? Why did Raya do it? Who worked with him? What was his position in the gang? -- yielded nothing, the residents of the Camp said, because everyone who knew Andy Raya knew he wasn't in a gang, and no one had any idea why he did it. By the fifth or sixth futile rifle-point frisk, kids started to mouth off. They would point to a day-care center and say, "Yeah, that's my meth lab over there" or, at the end of searches, "Another bad bust, officer?" Some started lying, saying, "Yeah, I'm a gangbanger. Why don't you do something about it?"

To the police, the taunts became admissions of guilt. Sgt. Sullivan told the press that officers freshly trained in gang identification were relying on clothing, tattoos and suspects "admitting to being a gang member." "Many gang members," de Werk said, "are more than happy to declare their gang affiliation." By the time police activity in the Camp began to wane, a month after it had begun, no accomplices had been identified. No stashes of guns or drugs had been found. No evidence of any criminal enterprise had been uncovered. The police had arrested one person, for cocaine possession. The suspect, Heyne told the press, was "associated with Raya." A friend of Raya's said the suspect was his cousin, and had known Andy only to talk to.

Several weeks after the shooting, I met with Heyne and de Werk in the featureless conference room of police headquarters. I asked Heyne to describe his investigation into Andy Raya's motives. Heyne is a deliberate guy who speaks in full, lucidly enunciated sentences. "Raya wasn't in a combat unit," he said. "He never saw combat. He never shot or killed anybody. No one close to him was killed. But he conveyed to people back here that he'd gone through all this stuff -- he's seen babies killed and legs blown off and his buddies killed. Didn't happen. All the ribbons Raya received are standard -- there's no combat stuff, no Silver Star, none of that. And then we uncover all the gang stuff."

Heyne had not found anyone who thought Raya was a gang member. "But, as per usual," he said, "most people are very leery of speaking of the dead." The evidence in Raya's safe, however, was "quite revealing." He had found a novel called Midst of My Confusion, by a rapper named Sir Dyno. The book, Heyne said, was the story of a Hispanic kid who joins a gang, becomes an enforcer for drug traffickers, kills people and escapes to Mexico, where he witnesses the army, using American-made helicopters, brutally suppressing an indigenous uprising.

"But what you don't get by me telling you all this is there's a lot of things that Raya underlines in this book," Heyne said. "Give you an example. Here's page forty-two. Says, 'You really think you're tough, huh? said the cop. You just look like a punk to me.... He was trying to provoke me. I just stared at him with total hate. If looks could kill he would be dead, buried and forgotten....' And then he underlines this: 'I knew that someday, I would have my payback.' And you know if you read a book for pleasure and you don't underline anything it's just a pleasure read, but when you underline or highlight something -- "

"You're studying it," de Werk said.

" -- it has significance to you," Heyne said. "It's impacted you in some way. Here he says, 'I was sweating with adrenaline just knowing that the cops were going to find us.' You know -- highlighted."

On the night of the shooting, Heyne said, Raya was carrying a CD called Seasons of Da Siccness, by the rapper Brotha Lynch Hung. "It was a very violent CD," Heyne said. "Some of the titles of the songs were 'Dead Man,' 'Return of Da Baby Killa,' 'Datz Real Gangsta,' 'Dead Man Walkin,' 'Welcome 2 Your Own Death.' Pretty disturbing." Heyne had devoted a slide in his PowerPoint presentation exclusively to the CD: the name of the artist and album at the top, the title of every song bullet-pointed.

Chief de Werk, who is six-seven, earnest, ungainly, bespectacled and huge-jointed, said, "There's a lot of music where these kinds of words are so common that it actually trivializes it -- it's just like two friends getting angry with each other and saying, 'I'll kill you.' But with this event, it changes everything, and now, as far as we're concerned, we can't dismiss those as simply being colloquialisms or just comments."

Heyne turned off the lights and played a montage he had made from Andy Raya's home video, most of which had been shot a few months earlier. There was scene after scene of drinking beer and talking shit and smoking dope out of Pepsi-bottle bongs. There was a long shot of Mrs. Raya cooking tamales. There were so many of these family scenes on the tape, Heyne said, that it had been impracticable to edit them all out. Andy and his friends threw gang signs, mainly "XIV," the Norteno number, but also "420." I asked Heyne what 420 meant. He said he didn't know. The guys signed "Campo" a lot. After one stretch of dialogue -- "Bitch had this big ol' ass, fool! Bitch put so much pressure on me: 'Go go go go!' " -- de Werk looked disgusted. "And a local reporter went and actually visited some of these people," he said. The camera paused on the design Raya had been making since elementary school. Heyne said, "That's his personal sign, his mark."

At one point Raya seemed to be showing his friends how to make signs. "He's teaching them how to properly throw a gang sign," Heyne said. A moment later, Raya was setting his fingers at various angles, frowning. It looked like he was trying to remember how some of the signs went.

Raya showed his biggest tattoo: large calligraphic words from shoulder blade to shoulder blade that read SOLO DIOS ME PUEDE JUZGAR. "Now what does that mean again?" de Werk said.

Heyne said he wasn't sure.

"What does that juzgar mean?" de Werk said. "I never could figure that out."

When Heyne didn't answer, I said juzgar meant "to judge," and then translated the phrase: "Only God can judge me."

Heyne and de Werk turned and looked at me. "You speak Spanish?" they said, in near unison.

One weekday afternoon, a day or two after talking to de Werk and Heyne, I walked into the Camp. It was like a lot of California housing projects, a little subdivision of one-story bungalows. The houses were in decent condition; the streets were clean and empty.

After some ambling around I saw a young guy in a G Unit T-shirt and 49ers beanie leaning against a sedan in a bungalow carport. There was a new day-care center across the street. With almost tender hospitality, he asked me what I needed. His name was Esteban Diaz. Andy Raya had been one of his best friends.

Diaz is a big, vocal guy who often made benign exclamatory gestures. He told me a lot of stories about Andy, and they conjured up the image I already had: kinetic, extemporaneously funny, steadily tending toward the center of every gathering. Diaz's perplexity about Andy's crime was as absolute as everyone else's.

Two young women pushing strollers left the day-care center. I asked Diaz about the police sweeps and the theory that the Camp was a hub of gang activity. "Aw, there's no gangs here," he said. "I mean, yeah, there might be a few members or people affiliated or whatever, but pretty much everyone just goes to school or work or whatever. I mean, just look around. Ten years ago or something, it was bad, it was a lot of gangs -- and back then the cops never even came in here. And if it was like that now, there would be some dead cops. But until all this happened it was, like, one of the safest neighborhoods in the U.S."

Diaz had recently graduated high school and was looking for a job. Right after the shooting, he said the cops had impounded his car on the theory that he had driven Raya to the site of the crime. Diaz had been in Arizona visiting family at the time, a fact that, combined with a fruitless scouring of his car, had caused the cops to return it with no comment a week later. Diaz hadn't learned of the crime until he got back to Ceres. With no car, he said, he'd missed a job interview.

Diaz was waiting for his friends -- Andy Raya's friends -- to get back from school. "We got locked in, fool! We got locked in, fool!" a kid named George Flores said as soon as he arrived. He was around sixteen; his new Tommy Hilfiger polo and handsomeness and the gel-shine of his black hair made him look like he could be in an actual Tommy Hilfiger catalog. He said a school security guard thought he'd heard seven rounds of gunfire in the street. Within minutes, a dozen cops had arrived, and the students were either locked in or evacuated. Hours later, the cops still hadn't found any evidence of gunfire.

Diaz was cracking up. "That was my friend, that was my friend!" he said. "He had just put cherry bombs on his car and was testing it out like right around there. The cops are scared of everything now!"

To Andy's friends -- several of them were in Heyne's montage -- the gang motive was not even worthy of discussion. The cops thought you were in a gang if you lived in the Camp and knew gang signs, wore baggy jeans, had a tattoo or knew Raya. "You're in a gang if you know signs?" someone said. "How could Andy be in a gang if he was in the Marines?" Diaz said. "He always wanted to be in the Marines. He just came back from Iraq!"

Ever since the sweeps began, someone said, the cops had been videotaping suspects. In response, the kids in the Camp had started using their cell-phone cameras to take pictures of the cops conducting pat-downs. The police would then turn the video cameras on them -- creating the spectacle of the cops filming the kids taking pictures of the cops filming the kids.

Several hours before andy Raya's funeral, Chief de Werk asked the officiant, the Rev. Dean McFalls, to come to the police station. After looking at the evidence, McFalls decided to deliver a sermon about divisiveness -- the fracturing force of gangs, colors in symbolic opposition. He told the mourners that they had to face the shocking truth: Andy Raya was not the person they thought him to be. In a difficult time, he said, they might look to the united colors of the American flag.

After the service, to reassure themselves of Andy's character, some of his cousins got together to recall their adolescence in the Camp. Most were college students or professionals. They talked about throwing Norteno signs as teenagers. They had all, at one time or another, shown gang colors; they had all had some experience -- extensive or fleeting -- hanging out drinking and smoking dope. These things had constituted a requisite gauntlet, and had been left behind.

Andy Raya seemed to have made it through the gauntlet. His parents had lived narrow lives so that he could broaden his. "We're the ones who are gonna make it out of here," he said at his high school graduation. He used the GI Bill to save money for college. He talked about becoming a firefighter. He received America's greatest benedictions, and suffered its worst curses. If, in the course of his brief life, he came to revere the forms of violence that America has nurtured since its inception, he remained a son of his country as surely as any American ever was.

(Posted Jul 28, 2005)

Tawny Ford

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