Murder in Paradise?

The brutal beating death of professional surfer Emery Kauanui turns upscale La Jolla upside down, leaving five rogue brawlers—the self-styled Bird Rock Bandits—facing trial on homicide charges.

(page 1 of 7)

ON DECEMBER 31, 2006, at a New Year’s Eve party in La Jolla, a contingent of the Bird Rock Bandits showed up, uninvited. The leader of the group, Seth Cravens, arrived in a foul mood, which was no surprise. Seth rolled mad.

As music pounded and couples in their mid-20s to 30s downed cocktails, Cravens and his Bandits crew were asked to leave the house on Avenida Andorra, a few blocks from La Jolla High School. That was enough for Seth, 21, a hulking former La Jolla High football player and Hells Angels wanna-be. Though it’s not clear who started it, a brawl broke out. J.B. Haskett, a former La Jolla High basketball player, absorbed a blow to his head that would require stitches. His wife, Jennifer, was struck in the face. Kicked in the head after falling to the ground, another guest looked up to see Seth Cravens leaning over him. “I’m going to kill you,” Cravens said, according to Superior Court records, which recount Bandit activity, often in conflicting and confusing detail.

By the time SDPD officers arrived at 1:30 a.m., Cravens and his fellow Bandits had fled. One of them, Hank Hendricks, a former star quarterback at La Jolla High, who’d been mentored by NFL standout Doug Flutie, later told investigators that he’d taken off “because he did not want to be contacted by police with blood on his hands.”

But in La Jolla, where the average annual household income exceeds $103,000, and the median sale price on a home hit $3.9 million last year, it was like the fight never happened. Although Haskett filed a police report, formal charges were not immediately brought. Word of the melee—merely “mutual combat between drunks,” says Cravens’ lawyer, alternate public defender Mary Ellen Attridge—spread through the halls of La Jolla High, but no stories appeared in local newspapers. Cravens, a young man who seemed to represent everything that was antithetical to La Jolla’s peaceful nature, remained free to rage.

And it turned out the Bandits, under cover of silence, had been raging, emboldened by what seemed like a free pass from law enforcement, for years. The Bandits, in various combinations, at barbecues and birthday parties in and around La Jolla, had allegedly assaulted more than a dozen people, causing serious injuries—permanent vision loss, broken bones—and instilled a climate of fear in the town. Some alleged victims said they’d never filed police reports out of fear of retaliation. Along the way, the Bandits developed a reputation for being dirty fighters, who blindsided or sucker punched their victims, rather than confront them directly, fair and square.

Five months after the fight with J.B. Haskett, late on the evening of May 24, 2007, the Bandits struck again, and their campaign of hurt ended tragically. This time their victim was Emery Kauanui Jr., a professional surfer be loved at the Windansea break—just down Nautilus Street from La Jolla High—the magical surf spot made famous by Tom Wolfe in his 1968 collection of essays, The Pump House Gang, its title piece written about a rollicking group of sand-flecked hedonists. After a beef that started at The Brew House, a local surfer bar, Kauanui was pummeled by the Bandits outside the La Jolla home he shared with his mother, Cindy, owner of a San Diego modeling agency specializing in a natural “surf ” look.

Four days after the fistfight, during which Kauanui’s skull was fractured in three places, he died at Scripps Memorial Hospital. It was the first homicide in La Jolla since 2002. The San Diego district attorney’s office, which has charged five of the Bandits with murder, alleges that Cravens delivered the fatal blow. (Cravens claims he is not guilty; he asserts he was defending himself and that Kauanui’s death was an accident.)

Had entitled teenagers taken over paradise? Were the Bandits, who numbered about a dozen, a “gang” as Wolfe broadly understood the term, or an actual criminal organization, a loaded word around San Diego, where street and biker gangs have wreaked havoc in recent years? In a ruling in late May, San Diego Superior Court Judge John Einhorn swatted away that designation, dealing a defeat to Deputy District Attorney Sophia Roach, who’d brought additional charges—with longer potential jail terms —based on the theory that the Bandits were as much a threat to the public as, say, the notorious Hispanic gang Red Steps, or the dozen or so Asian gangs that roam the city of San Diego, or the ubiquitous Hells Angels, with multiple chapters entrenched near metro-area beaches.

One thing was certain: The Bird Rock Bandits had twisted the La Jolla vibe and obliterated the Pump House Gang’s tradition of settling beefs one-on-one. America’s 21st-century culture of organized brutality, embodied by marauders like the Bird Rock Bandits, succeeded in driving away the soulful surfer ethos, the innocence of one of nature’s purest challenges: young men versus waves.

THE BANDITS, prosecutors say, may have formed when Cravens and his fellow defendants attended Bird Rock Elementary School. It wasn’t like they drafted a charter or swore blood oaths to each other. It was much less formal than that. Later, Cravens and his compatriots simply lurched around the halls of La Jolla High hollering “Bird Rock Bandits!” and threw up BRB hand signs at bars like The Brew House and the equally rowdy Shack, a couple of blocks away.

Being a 21st-century gang, the Bandits used the Internet to boast about their exploits, and a MySpace page to proclaim a mundane credo: “Bird Rock Bandits 4 Life.” The group took their name from another popular La Jolla surf spot known as Bird Rock, where waves punier than those at Windansea break behind a pelican-crap-covered boulder that protrudes from the Pacific about 100 yards offshore.

As much as the Bandits were a group of jocks, they were also gangster pretenders, jealous of the power local chapters of the Hells Angels wield in certain bars in the San Diego area, where the biker gang originated decades ago. In his bedroom, Cravens kept Angels posters and bumper stickers and a “book of crimes.” His close friend Isaiah Bowman, another La Jolla High grad, became treasurer of the biker gang’s San Diego chapter. A tall, sturdy, soft-spoken inside linebacker at La Jolla High, Bowman had been a classmate of Seth’s sister and graduated three years before Seth did.

Acrimony among La Jolla’s surfers, such as it’s been since the 1950s, used to be sparked by what happened out in the water, among waves, when emotions ran high naturally. A surfer rode another’s wave, or that surfer came from out of town—“across the freeway”—and could only envy the lives La Jolla kids led. Interlopers received massive stink-eye and discovered plenty of surfboards stacked up in front of them out in the water, a versatile reef break with consistent waves that run 4 to 5 feet bigger than other swells in the area.

---

Update

Since San Diego Magazine published "Murder in Paradise?" Eric House, Matthew Yanke and Orlando Osuna pleased guilty to involuntary manslaughter charges Friday, June 27 in court, while Henri "Hank" Hendricks pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact.

Seth Cravens, however, will be on trial for murder charges. He remains in County Jail on $1.5 million bail while the other four defendants are free on bond.

Check back for more updates.

 

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »