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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At Kahuku High School, on the North Shore of Oahu, Seth wrestled and played running back on the Red Raiders football team, which posted a long winning streak in 2002. “Seth’s time in the islands,” Mary Cravens said, “brought out in him a renewed sense of humility, respect and acceptance of those around him.” Still, among Kahuku students, Seth was never popular.

Back in La Jolla, his senior year at La Jolla was a fairly uneventful stretch for Cravens, considering his rocky past. He returned to the football team, as a middle linebacker on defense—no offensive assignment this time.

“Seth was not a very good player,” says coach Rey Hernandez, the Vikings’ longtime defensive coordinator. “In fact, at that position, he was probably the worst we’ve ever had, making the fewest tackles. Football is about more than physical strength. Seth wasn’t good at reading offenses and filling gaps.”

Cravens read books on magic and mysticism, played video games and attended services, sporadically, at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in San Diego. But if he had been changed by his time under the Hawaiian sun and the nurturing of his older sister, that transformation was about to dramatically reverse itself, because Cravens, unable to fit in with established groups of young people in La Jolla, created a crew of his own.

One night in October 2005, some of the Bandits struck at a party in La Jolla. Cravens and company, witnesses said, were not on the guest list. A guest named Eric Pardee went looking for his ex-girlfriend, from whom he’d recently split. “Yeah, she’s f---ing that guy over there in the other room,” Cravens said, according to SDPD reports. As Pardee left the house, Seth sucker punched him, knocking him to the ground. Pardee suffered multiple broken bones, one of which required the implantation of a metal screw to repair. Public defender Attridge, however, contends Pardee was so drunk that night that he couldn’t positively identify Cravens as his attacker.

ANOTHER CHARTER MEMBER of the Bandits was a fellow La Jolla High football player, a handsome young man with short, curly, gelled hair, Eric House. A native of Riverside, Eric, the youngest of three boys, has lived in the Bird Rock neighborhood of La Jolla since he was 2. He was about that young age when, after a brief marriage, his mother, Lisa, divorced Eric’s father, Staff Sergeant James Edward House, a drill sergeant stationed at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County.

Eric, now 21, played lacrosse and football when he attended La Jolla High, gaining a reputation for keeping his cool on the field and for his smarts at the defensive back and linebacker positions. In his senior year, 2004, he captained the Vikings football squad, which won the Western League championship. (At the same time, Eric compiled a juvenile record: a battery in 2004 and a petty theft in 2005.) Then his father died suddenly of heart failure at the age of 46, and his grandfather, who briefly stood in as a father figure, suffered a debilitating stroke, leaving Eric without a male authority figure in his life.

House lived with his mother last year and worked in a series of local restaurants before enrolling at Mesa College to pursue a business degree. He also took a part-time job coaching middle-school lacrosse in La Jolla. Unlike fellow Bandits, House could actually ride a wave with some skill, and he once counted Emery Kauanui among his friends.

The Bandits also included Orlando Osuna and Matthew Yanke, both former La Jolla High football players, and Hank Hendricks, a star quarterback who’d earned a full scholarship to play football at the University of New Hampshire. A lawyer’s son, Yanke came from more money than the other Bandits, but he was a problem student at La Jolla High. Like House, Yanke, according to an affidavit filed by Deputy District Attorney Roach, has a sealed record in San Diego as a juvenile. It includes a June 11, 2003, arrest for battery, a July 4, 2003, arrest for resisting arrest and being drunk in public and a December 29, 2003, arrest for battery, vandalism, marijuana possession, witness intimidation and destroying a phone line. (Roach released this information in an attempt to increase bail for the Bandits, a request Judge Einhorn turned aside.) “Matt was a loose cannon,” says a La High School teacher.

Hendricks, Doug Flutie’s protégé, didn’t seem to belong among the Bandits at all. In fact, Hendricks, who has no juvenile record, had spent almost zero time in La Jolla since graduating from high school three years ago. New Hampshire, where Hank made the dean’s list, is about as far away from La Jolla as you can get.

Flutie, whose daughter, Alexa, was a cheerleader for the La Jolla High Vikings, began tutoring Hank after dropping by one afternoon to pick up Alexa and being impressed by the young quarterback’s athleticism and decisionmaking on the practice field. “Hank has always been a model citizen,” Flutie wrote last year in an e-mail to Judge Einhorn, when Hendricks was successfully seeking bail.

Two months before the fight with Kauanui, Cravens and Osuna took on another former La Jolla High classmate, John Hlavac, whom they had bullied while in school, outside a local taco shop. Prosecutors say Hlavac was knocked to the ground and beaten by Cravens and Osuna as he lay in a fetal position.

Two weeks before Kauanui’s killing, Cravens waded into the fight that led Shack management to ban him from the bar, bloodying another young man’s face and leaving him with cuts on his hands. The next day, on a MySpace page maintained by Cravens, he boasted of the attack: “Bird Rock Bandits: May 10, 2007 3:32 PM — what the f--- when r we gonna chill? I cant [sic] go to the shack for a while because I murdered someone hahahaha no biggie call me up and lets get krunk [sic].”

Last May, Hendricks came back to California for summer break. On May 23, within hours of stepping off a plane from New Hampshire, Hendricks later told investigators, he hooked up with the Bandits, drank some beers and smoked some weed. At 10:30 p.m., the group headed for The Brew House, where the music is loud and pitchers of local microbrews go for $14 apiece.

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