Twenty years ago Sunday, Shawn Nelson stole a tank from a National Guard armory, rumbled across a San Diego neighborhood and into the realm of legend.

A police helicopter and TV news crews captured this 23-minute rampage, from the crushed cars to the shocking conclusion when police lifted the mortally wounded Nelson out of the M-60.

Viewers around the world couldn’t believe their eyes. They had just seen — well, what?

Stolen tank in San Diego in 1995

This local news story was rapidly transformed into a universal symbol. Nelson’s ill-fated ride became a saga about the middle class under siege; a fable about the emasculation of American men; a warning about what happens when ex-servicemen, lacking foreign enemies and domestic opportunities, bring the war home.

“The most interesting stories in any culture,” said Dean Nelson, director of Point Loma Nazarene University’s journalism program and no relation to Shawn Nelson, “are the ones that also point us to bigger stories.”

Is this a bigger story? And does it have a moral?

Police officers and paramedics tend to Shawn Nelson on a stretcher after Nelson was shot once by an officer in the tank he stole on May 17, 1995. The rampage came to a halt on the concrete divider on state Route 163. Nelson died of his wound. Nancee Lewis

Jerry Sanders , who was police chief in 1995, has no opinion on the first question — “I’ll leave that up to the sociologists” — but has considered the second. In his view, the lesson here was meant for the National Guard: “Don’t leave the batteries and keys in the tank.”

Lunacy

A neighborhood kid, Shawn grew up in Clairemont and attended Madison High before enlisting in the Army. Trained at Fort Knox, Ky., he served in a tank battalion in West Germany. His two-year hitch included what the military called “multifaceted” disciplinary problems before he was honorably discharged in 1980.

He came home to the American dream.

“We had a pretty good life for six years,” said his former wife, Suzy Hellman. “We owned a home, he was a successful plumber and I was a legal secretary. We had it made.”

Not for long. Nelson’s parents died — his mother, Betty, in 1988; his father, Fred, in 1992. At the same time, Nelson’s behavior became erratic.

“He was spiraling out of control with methamphetamines and alcohol,” Hellman said.

She filed for divorce in 1990. That same year, a motorcycle accident left Nelson with neck and back injuries. While being treated at Sharp Memorial Hospital, Nelson tried to walk out. He later filed a malpractice suit.

A firefighter jumps from what is left of a station wagon that was crushed by a tank driven by Shawn Nelson, who had stolen it from a National Guard armory. — Eduardo Contreras

By 1995, Nelson’s van and tools had been stolen, his utilities had been turned off, and he had lost his latest girlfriend. He was often drunk or high on methamphetamine. As a bank began foreclosure proceedings, Nelson sank a 17-foot-deep shaft into his backyard, telling friends he had struck gold.

Most just saw a mound of dirt.

On May 17, 1995, Nelson drove through an open gate at the armory on Mesa College Drive and started an M-60. Clanking down neighborhood streets, he left behind a trail of crushed cars, disemboweled RVs, geysering fire hydrants. Heading south on state Route 163, the tank was surrounded by police cruisers who kept pace but could do little else.

Sanders, a SWAT commander during the 1984 McDonald’s massacre in San Ysidro, had never seen anything like this.

“I don’t know that anybody could have predicted that somebody — no matter what his problems — would get in a tank and go rampaging,” he said. “Thank God that Paul Paxton was on duty that day.”

A military reservist with tank experience, Officer Paxton was ready when Nelson tried to drive over the highway median. With the M-60 marooned on that barrier, Paxton and others climbed onto the hull. They opened the hatch and called down to Nelson, ordering him out. He looked up, then went back to the tank’s controls.

Officer Rick Piner fired one shot. Paramedics tended Nelson when he was pulled from the tank, but the wound was fatal.

At home and abroad, broadcasters airing this dramatic footage stressed one theme: insanity. (In one segment, a British reporter referred to Nelson as “madman,” “deranged driver,” “enraged outlaw,” “maniac,” “lunatic.”)

Others, though, agreed with Hellman. This was a man undone by addiction.

“Amphetamines makes people nuts and aggressive and violent,” said Dr. Mark Kalish, a San Diego psychiatrist. “You could call 100 guys who deal in this field and 99 would tell you — this guy was on amphetamines.”

War at home

Methamphetamine users, Kalish said, are prone to heart attacks, strokes and delusions. Some become convinced that random innocents are evildoers who must die — or that the users themselves must commit suicide.

“Give me a heroin user any time over amphetamines,” the psychiatrist said.

Because addictions have plagued humanity for eons, Kalish has little patience for those who see Nelson’s tragedy as a symbol of late 20th century economic woes.

“What the hell,” Kalish asked, “does this have to do with the demise of the middle class?”

The loss of middle-class jobs — including those at San Diego’s defunct General Dynamics plant — is central to “Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story.” This 2002 documentary from Coronado native Garrett Scott presented North Clairemont as a neighborhood of deteriorating homes and dashed hopes, whose residents deadened their pain with drugs and alcohol.

“Those were some dark times for San Diego,” said Lambert Devoe, who worked on the film with Scott, who died from a heart attack in 2006. “In one year, 40,000 engineers were laid off from General Dynamics.”

Susan Faludi, the feminist writer, struck a similar chord in “Stiffed.” In this 1999 book, Faludi argued that powerful forces had betrayed the American male — so one American male chose to fight back.

“If a man could not get the infrastructure to work for him,” Faludi wrote, “he could at least tear it down. If a nation would not provide an enemy to fight, he could go to war at home. If there was no brotherhood, he would take his stand alone. Shawn Nelson’s sense of desperation, if not his actions, were shared by many men of his generation.”

“I just find that ridiculous,” said Nelson’s ex-wife. “We had it all, early on. He was an intelligent man who had a great way with customers.

“He just abused drugs. That’s it.”

Exorcised



If the war came home, you can’t prove it by Nelson’s old home. On the street where he lived, some houses are fading, while others — including the one where Nelson lived — have been refurbished.

“It’s completely changed,” said Gary Karns, a computer systems sales manager who bought the house on Willamette Street in 1998. “It’s been upgraded quite a bit.”

Karns and his wife renovated a bathroom, moved and expanded the kitchen, installed a cathedral ceiling, planted roses. The mine shaft has been filled in, the ghosts exorcised.

While local crime rates have dropped, Karns said it’s still a neighborhood concern: “It’s Clairemont, it’s not La Jolla.”

That’s true. In the first three months of 2015, North Clairemont reported fewer rapes, armed robberies, residential burglaries and vehicle thefts than La Jolla. North Clairemont had more assaults and thefts.

Perhaps there’s no larger lesson here. “Sometimes terrible things just happen,” said Point Loma Nazarene University’s Nelson. “Rather than trying to put this into a paradigm that proves a point you were trying to make, sometimes you just need to grieve.”

To those who knew him, Shawn Nelson was neither statistic nor symbol. He was a man whose life was not defined by a single baffling episode, or transformed into an object lesson.

“He was a wonderful person,” Hellman said.

“Everybody liked him — he was funny and he was smart,” said Tim Biers, a friend since childhood. “Shawn had some downers in his life, but Shawn was a lucky guy. His luck just ran out.”