In October 2015, three young drifters robbed and fatally shot Audrey Carey in the bushes of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and went on to kill Steve Carter for his car keys on a popular hiking trail, just over the Golden Gate Bridge.

At their sentencing, 18 months later, Chief Deputy Public Defender David Brown stood to address the packed courtroom; his client, Morrison Haze Lampley, remained seated, his unruly mop of sandy-brown hair pulled back into a neat knot. Though the emotional statements from the victims’ families had drawn tears from many in the gallery, as well as from his two co-defendants, Lampley – who goes by Haze – kept his expressionless stare focused on the table in front of him, just as he had for the majority of the legal proceedings.

David Brown had worn a similar mask over the past year and a half, one of practiced stoicism shaped from years of courtroom experience.

But on the day Haze Lampley, his teenage girlfriend and his longtime acquaintance were to be sentenced for the murders of 23-year-old Audrey Carey and 67-year-old Steve Carter, Brown spoke to the court with the candor of an attorney who knew that his client was about to spend the rest of his life in prison. Brown laid out the brutal reality of Haze’s 24 years on this earth: the neglect, the homelessness, the abuse, the mental illness. He was “deprived of everything a child needs”, Brown said, dosed with LSD as a toddler, shooting up drugs by the age of eleven. A psychiatrist once described him as a “feral child”.

“Haze would have fared no worse or no better if he had been dropped off on a street corner after he was born,” Brown said.

Then he turned to the front row of the gallery, where the victims’ families sat.

“This is not offered as an excuse,” Brown said to them, “but as an attempt to understand why we’re all here.”

•••

What “here” meant differed for each person in the courtroom that day. For the family members of Steve Carter, a respected tantra instructor who had moved back to California to support his wife through chemotherapy, and Audrey Carey, a free-spirited young girl with a bright future, “here” was a hell created by three monsters –Haze Lampley; his 19-year-old girlfriend, Lila Scott Alligood; and Sean Angold, their 25-year-old friend – for whom no amount of prison time could make up for the lives they stole.

“It’s not like those people just killed Steve,” said Lokita Carter, Steve’s widow. “They killed a huge chunk of me. They killed a whole other part of another human being.”

In a statement read at the sentencing by a prosecutor, Audrey’s mother, Isabelle Tremblay, denounced all three as “proof that evil exists”. “You are not human beings,” she wrote.

Her statement was an emotional, stinging barb, pulled from a deep place of grief to pierce into the hearts of the ones to whom it was directed. Lila sobbed through the reading, her attorney patting her on the back, while Sean kept his head down, his eyes damp. But months later, Haze shrugged at the vitriol directed at him and his two co-defendants that day. “Unspeakable monsters”, Isabelle Tremblay had called them. It wasn’t the first time, Haze said, that he’d been called a monster.

It wasn’t even the first time he had been called such as it pertained to this case. Throughout the proceedings, observers and those with knowledge of the case dismissed Haze as a “psychopath”, an amoral creature sowing chaos everywhere he turned. They remarked on his “dead” eyes, his blank stare, the way he never reacted to anything in court.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Morrison Haze Lampley at a hearing in September 2016. Photograph: Robert Tong/AP

Authorities were quick to paint him as the ringleader, the one who called the shots, the one who pulled the trigger in both the killings. In the realm of culpability, he had the most blood on his hands, they said, and that was reflected in the charges and sentencing. Sean was sentenced to 15 years to life for the murder of solely Steve Carter, as part of the plea deal for his testimony. Lila was sentenced to 50 years to life, while Haze received a 100-year sentence.

A “monster”, they called him, but before his attorney’s statement at the sentencing, few had stopped to consider what had made him this way. Few had stopped to consider what sort of life he had lived that had allowed him to deem it acceptable to rob two strangers at gunpoint, knowing full well that any misstep could end in bloodshed. Few had stopped to consider the sort of misfortunes that had shaped him into the type of young man who could witness up close the gore from one murder and still feel unaffected enough to pull the trigger on a second human being just days later. And even fewer had stopped to consider that the misfortunes that had made Haze who he is today are the same ones that have driven countless kids to a life of aimless homelessness – that the demons that haunt Haze, Lila and Sean are the same that haunt the youth we pass on the streets every day, squatting along city sidewalks amid a cloud of body odor and marijuana smoke.

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Because for Haze, Lila and Sean, “here” was the abrupt end of a complicated and treacherous journey through their youth, one riddled with violence, drug use, terror, and crime. “Here” was the last stop of an unforgiving path on which millions of kids, teenagers and young adults find themselves traveling each day, wandering across the country with little more than the packs on their back and nowhere to call home.

•••

The tearful sentencing unfolded in the same courthouse that had been made famous by Angela Davis and the Black Panthers in the 1970s. Located in the heart of Marin county, the Civic Center is an architectural marvel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, all chic curves and sleek glass atria. As the crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, I had spent a chunk of the 18 months it took to reach this point in the case crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with other local journalists in a modish wood-paneled courtroom, scribbling down every gruesome, bloody detail of the killings under a bizarre spherical light fixture that reminded me of a cartoon spaceship. At times, being in that stylized courtroom felt like stepping into a topsy-turvy alternate reality – at the center of which sat Haze, Lila and Sean. Eighteen months prior, deputies had marched them into the courtroom, all in their jail-issued striped jumpsuits and with their heads shaved – authorities had said they had bugs living in their tangled, matted hair when they arrived in Marin county. For a short time, their bald heads added another surreal layer to an already surreal situation.

We at the Chronicle began referring to Haze, Lila and Sean as “the drifters” pretty much from the start, and the term caught on with other news outlets as well. All the media coverage made a point to reference their youth – at the time of their arrest in October 2015, Lila had just turned 23, while Haze and Sean were 23 and 24, respectively. At 26, I was just a few years older than they were when this all began, yet as I sat there in that courtroom, 18 months later, I felt as if there were decades between us.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lila Alligood listens to a detective testify in September 2016. Photograph: Robert Tong/AP

The defendants’ youth contributed to the media frenzy around the trial, but that was just one of several elements of this case that captured the attention of the Bay Area. There was a senselessness to these crimes that nobody could comprehend, a disruption to the regularly scheduled programming of our prescribed acceptable behavior in society. The fact that the three killed two strangers was especially chilling – according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s uniform crime reporting program, only about 10% of all homicides nationwide involve strangers – and the fact that they committed these murders within days of each other led many to wonder whether there had been, or could have been, more had the police not arrested them when they did.

But most of all, what terrified Bay Area residents was the fact that Haze, Lila and Sean could have been any one of the hundreds of kids, teens and young adults we pass on the streets every day. The transient youth population is especially vibrant in California, to the point that they have their own categorization within the realm of homelessness – street kids. Mention the term “street kid” to anyone on the west coast and they will know exactly of whom you speak – the tough and, at times, confrontational kids with dreadlocked hair who spend all day lounging around in the parks or on the sidewalks. Yes, they’re homeless, but somehow they’re different from the downtrodden folks who line up with carts outside of soup kitchens. They have neither money nor steady employment, but they’re not destitute. They’re not all kids in the sense that they’re under the age of 18, yet they all somehow have both a youthfulness and an aged presence about them.

These kids were the backbone of the vagabond counterculture that became a part of San Francisco’s identity, but following the slayings of Audrey Carey and Steve Carter, they became scapegoats for law-abiding citizens to fear the most. Complaints that supposedly progressive Bay Area residents had never felt acceptable to voice before spilled over in a frenzied witch-hunt, as they struggled to make peace with the dichotomy of their free-spirited history that accepted and celebrated these wanderers, and their current, unpredictable reality of street kids setting up tents anywhere they pleased, using hard drugs, urinating wherever, and holding loud all-night parties outside people’s homes. At best, these kids blocked sidewalks and lived on handouts. At worst, they were a violent, threatening presence who fought among themselves and scared away customers from local businesses.

For these Bay Area residents, “here” was the possibility that these kids who had long been part of the fabric of San Francisco life now had the potential to be the monsters, to be the evil that tore through Audrey Carey’s and Steve Carter’s families. “Here” was the chance that you or someone you love could be the next Audrey or Steve.

•••

Even before the killings, street kids were regarded, in San Francisco and beyond, with a level of disdain reserved specifically for this particular subset of the homeless population – and this disdain has only continued. What little compassion we have for the homeless is saved for those who fit our ideal version of homelessness: those down on their luck, struggling to make their way off the street. On the flip side, there are the street kids. The vagabonds. The drifters. The free spirits, taking advantage of our goodwill to neglect the responsibilities set by a social contract by which we all must abide. A common narrative pushed about these kids is that they are homeless by choice. They could easily not be homeless, so the narrative goes, if they would just get a job. If they would stop being lazy. If only they didn’t want this free-living life.

To street kids and those who work with them, this narrative is not only inaccurate, but also damaging. Because for the majority of these kids, the choice is between homelessness and, for example, “Do I want to stay at home and get raped every night by my uncle?”, in the words of Christian Garmisa-Calinsky, who ran a nonprofit that found housing for street kids in San Francisco. “Or like it was for me: do I want to stay home and get my bones continually broken by my mother?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The public defenders David Brown, left, and Pedro Oliveros, right, representing Morrison Haze Lampley, speak with reporters in October 2015. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

I had met Christian just days after the three were arrested in Portland, Oregon, at a heated Haight Street community meeting in which he acted as the voice of reason, reminding the angry masses that it’d be unfair to paint all street kids with the same brush and assume all have the potential for murder. After all, just a decade ago, Christian had been part of this population, sleeping in parks with his pack underneath him and his legs tangled over his bicycle to prevent theft.

In his time on the streets and in the work he does now, he’s come across countless kids with the same sort of background as Haze, Lila and Sean. They run away to escape a life in which it was beaten into them that they were nothing, less than nothing, and then they are taken in by the streets, where the last of their humanity is ripped from them.

•••

“This is not offered as an excuse, but as an attempt to understand why we’re all here.” I had been having conversations with Christian about this very point for weeks before David Brown made this statement in court. Christian had needled me for wondering about what forced these kids into the streets, into a life of violence, drug abuse, instability and – in the case of Haze, Lila and Sean – murder. “You should focus on the solution, on how to get them off the streets,” he said. Because for those who work with this population, they already know all too well that “here” is what happens when our children are failed, time and time again, by the systems in place. “Here” is the end result of instability, neglect, abuse, drug addiction, mental illness and violence that is only perpetuated the more time these hurt kids are forced to live as homeless transients, in a community of other hurt kids just as unpredictable and in need of help as they are. “Here” began for generations of youth before Haze, Lila or Sean were even born.

This means little to the families of Audrey Carey and Steve Carter. They have had to endure an unspeakable loss because of these circumstances – circumstances beyond their control – a loss for which there is no excuse. But these circumstances are not being offered as an excuse. They are being offered as a way to understand this generation of lost youth, a generation of hurt kids just like Haze, Lila and Sean, many of whom find themselves every day teetering at the same precipice of no return where those three stood in October 2015. “Here” is not Americana folklore, Jack Kerouac and the Summer of Love coming home to roost. “Here” is a crisis, decades in the making. “Here” is millions of hurt kids, abandoned on the streets, knowing little more than doing whatever it takes to survive.

The question, now, is where we go from “here”.



