The first words I ever read about Seth Cravens, the convicted murderer of pro surfer Emery Kauanui, were scrawled on a La Jolla sidewalk.
It was early morning in late May of last year.
I was running with the dog from Bird Rock to Windansea. Across the street from the beautifully rebuilt Raymond Chandler house on Camino de la Costa, someone (I imagined a skinny kid on a skateboard) had printed two words in chalk, the first of which was a familiar vulgar verb:
“---- Seth.”
Who's Seth? I wondered. And what's he done that's so terrible?
Shortly thereafter, I read the first of what would be dozens of rapt news stories about the Bird Rock Bandits and the drunken fight on Draper Avenue that ended with Kauanui's head fatally cracked on the pavement.
It's no surprise the La Jolla homicide generated intense local and national interest.
Kauanui's violent death ripped through the surfing world, generating swells of grief over an absurd brawl triggered by a spilled beer in a bar.
Though I had never heard of them before, the five young men charged in the beating death evidently were notorious for terrorizing a beachfront community that's heady catnip to the media.
La Jolla, as I've written before, is San Diego County's Paris Hilton, the sun-bleached blond celebrity the press loves to watch dragged down to earth.
As the criminal cases unfolded, culminating in the second-degree murder conviction of Cravens last week, I often found myself time-traveling back to another fatal beer-fueled blow to the face.
The difference?
The Escondido killer was never charged.
Under the harsh media glare, the La Jolla bully wasn't about to get so lucky.
It was late on a Saturday night. Myron “Mike” Haag, a 54-year-old airline pilot, heard a ruckus outside his family home in a rural neighborhood of south Escondido.
It wasn't the first time Haag had gone out to deal with rowdies. Haag lived below a teenage drinking spot called Teepee Hill. Weird stuff happened.
This time, in late March 1992, three young men had parked a pickup and were relieving themselves on Haag's property. Haag ordered the group to move on.
One of the young men began shouting angry obscenities at Haag. Alarmed, Haag's wife went outside and heard her husband yell, “Get this guy out of my face!”
Mrs. Haag heard a thud. The three young men jumped in the truck and sped away.
Mike Haag was on the ground, bleeding from his head. He would be taken off life support 15 hours later. Investigators concluded that he had been punched but his fatal head injury was caused by the pavement when he fell backward.
When the three young men learned in the newspaper that Haag had died, they got lawyered up and turned themselves in.
They claimed Haag had thrown the first blow and Derreck Lawton, 18, had been defending himself when he threw the fatal punch. (In a cruel irony, Haag had been Lawton's Little League coach.)
After reviewing the case, the district attorney elected not to prosecute Lawton or his buddies.
In the early 1990s, I wrote the editorials for the now-departed Times Advocate, inland North County's daily newspaper. The failure to charge Lawton with something struck me as outrageous.
Even if Haag had thrown a first punch – Lawton showed investigators a minor injury as “proof” of Haag's initiation of violence – surely obscene raving in Haag's face constituted fighting words.
How could a well-respected man, a pillar of his community, die under these murky, grotesque circumstances without a trial?
Ultimately, all I could do was hector District Attorney Ed Miller – and take cold pleasure in his crushing defeat in the 1994 election.
The conventional wisdom was that Miller lost because his office had botched the infamous Dale Akiki child-abuse case, but some Escondido voters had their own personal reason for wishing his career would end.
To be fair to history, a measure of justice was doled out.
The Haags collected hundreds of thousands of dollars after filing wrongful-death lawsuits against the young men. Lawton apologized to the family he had so grievously injured.
Life went on.
So do I feel some sympathy for young Cravens, seeing as how he has fared so poorly compared with a hot-tempered Escondido kid who threw a similar punch some 16 years ago?
Not in the least.
The jury didn't believe Cravens delivered the fatal blow in self-defense. In their unanimous view, it was a murderous act, as old and vicious as Cain's.
That's all I ever wanted for Mike Haag and his family.
A jury's judgment.
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
