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.

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Though ambivalent about La Jolla life, Emery Kauanui’s skills as a surfer gave him a free pass into the Windansea tribe. “Emery spent most of his days in the water,” Cindy says. “He surfed with an incredible flowing style and was like a bird on the water. We used to part the waves together. I would go right, and he would go left.”

Cindy says she shunned La Jolla High School because it was “too rough” and enrolled Emery, instead, at the Julian Charter School, a San Diego high school whose administrators didn’t seem to mind when students missed classes to compete in surfing contests, and where surfing is actually graded as a sport.

Though her son got into a few alcohol-fueled scuffles on the beach, Cindy advised Emery to avoid confrontation. “I always taught him not to fight and to walk away,” she says. “Emery wanted peace.”

Jason Billings, who surfed Windansea with Emery, says, “Emery would never jump anybody, but he always stood up for himself and his friends.”

According to Max Diaz, 20, an amateur surfer who attended La Jolla High School and worked with Emery as a counterman at a barbecue place in La Jolla, “Every surfer around here has to hold their own, at some point.”

IT WASN’T A HURRICANE that brought the Cravenses to La Jolla. More likely, it might have been the legal and financial troubles Seth’s father found himself in. In Hawaii, Bill Cravens, like Emery Kauanui Sr., had been something of a player, but on the island of Oahu, not Kauai. He headed the Polynesian Cultural Center, a major Hawaiian tourist destination an hour from Waikiki, from 1975 to 1983, and served as chairman of the Development Bank of American Samoa.

Money problems dogged Bill Cravens, however, perhaps due to the strain of supporting such a large family. Two men, including Jared Jossem, a leading labor lawyer who served as the chairman of Hawaii’s Republican Party, filed suit against Cravens, seeking alleged unpaid judgments totaling around $125,000. Owed $42,944 in a dispute whose origin is unclear, Jossem, in court records, alleged that Cravens told him he’d never settle the debt and that Cravens left Hawaii, “in part, if not solely, to escape payment.” Later, a city marshal garnished a portion of the money owed from Bill Cravens’ account at Bank of America in San Diego.

Seth’s mother, Karen, looked after her many children, attending game after game, sitting at La Jolla High stadium, where the Pacific Ocean shimmers like a diamond in the distance. Bill and Karen raised their children in the Mormon faith. Scripture and family prayers were regularly recited in the Cravens home, which is decidedly modest by La Jolla standards.

Unlike his squadron of brothers and sisters, who attended college, found good jobs, married and started families of their own in the San Diego area and in Hawaii, Seth always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder and no direction in life. An acquaintance says, “Seth was the kid nobody liked, the kid who, if his name came up on your caller ID, you wouldn’t pick up.”

Another says, “Seth always felt like he had to fend for himself and that he had to maintain a tough-guy image. He knew nobody liked him or trusted him.” By most accounts, unlike the majority of his fellow Bandits, Cravens never had a steady girlfriend.

He wrestled and played football at La Jolla High, and those pursuits seemed to channel some of his anger. “We ran him at fullback and also at linebacker,” says head football coach Dave Ponsdorf. “He had a tendency to get easily distracted on the field, as far as what his assignments were. We would have to remind him every so often that he had a job to do, and it wasn’t to go out and deliver a blow on somebody who didn’t deliver a blow on him. Was Seth a problem for me? No. He knew we had the one thing that he really liked, and that we could take it away from him.”

Meanwhile, Bill Cravens failed to set much of an example for his volatile son. In 2001, federal prosecutors in Seattle charged Cravens, 60 at the time, with mail and wire fraud and money laundering for his role in a $74 million investment fraud that cheated more than 2,500 people around the United States. As part of the scheme, the government alleged, Cravens set up a shell corporation in American Samoa, a fake bank through which $25 million in investor funds passed.

Bill Cravens cut a deal with prosecutors and testified for the government against the two main conspirators in a long trial in Seattle in 2002, which resulted in convictions and lengthy prison terms for those men. Bill served a four-year sentence during the balance of Seth’s high school career and the first few years following it, when the Bird Rock Bandits were most active.

As a sophomore in 2002—the same year as the fraud trial, when Emery Kauanui was a senior at the Julian Charter School—Seth Cravens attacked a fellow male student, leaving him with significant injuries. (The record of this assault is sealed, because Seth was a juvenile at the time.) Bill and Karen removed Seth from La Jolla High and sent him back to Hawaii, to live with his older sister Mary and her husband.

“All of us were stoked,” says a Windansea regular. “No one wanted Seth around.”

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