She said that the irony was, if people knew what she’d actually gone through—the details of her experience that day were worse, and more surreal, than any theory or fiction a person could possibly come up with. There was the way that she found out, when her sister arrived at the door of her and Tristan’s place in Irvine, at 6:45 a.m., when she was preparing to take her board exam, a test she’d never end up taking. Her sister Priscilla, who lived in San Diego but was there at the door for some reason—Erica said she’s always wondered, wonders to this day, if things would somehow have been different if she just hadn’t answered the door. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but I always wonder, would would’ve happened if I just ignored it? It’s like that weird feeling that you could’ve avoided all of this.”

But she did answer the door. And then came the long ride north to the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station, where her girls were being kept. The officers there, staring at her like she’d somehow become a character on a TV show. The room she and her daughters were reunited in. And then the final surreal touch, when the chaplain at the station entered to offer comfort, and his home, not far away, for Erica and her daughters to shower and change while they waited to go back to the campground.

Except, even amid the chaos and her grief, Erica thought she recognized this man. “I wish I could remember his name right now, but he's an actor,” Erica said. “You know that show Veep, on HBO? He played the vice president. And I recognized him. And he’s the chaplain, and he was there, and he was so kind. And he knew that we hadn’t eaten all morning, and we had no change of clothes. So this chaplain offered to let us come stay at his house, while we waited for word on whether we'd be able to go.”

So that’s what they did—went to the Calabasas home of the journeyman character actor Phil Reeves for several hours, until the police finally let Erica go to the campground where Tristan had died.

Yosemite National Park, 2015. Courtesy of Erica Wu Orange County, California, 2016. Courtesy of Erica Wu

After Tristan’s death, his friends and family developed rituals—little things they would do to remember him by or to keep him alive in their minds a little longer. Nolan, one of Erica’s brothers-in-law, told me with some embarrassment about the espresso machine he bought after Tristan died, because Tristan was into coffee. For the first couple of months, Nolan said, “I’d make two and then dump the second one out. It sounds dumb when I say it. But it’s my way to remember him.”

Tristan’s brother Dylan was preoccupied with how people would tell Tristan’s story, now that he wasn’t around to tell it himself. In our conversations, he returned to this idea several times. “I'm struggling with how I can articulate this,” he told me, “but what the coverage so far has been really seems like the angle is shock and, like: Look at this terrible thing—and not necessarily Why did this happen? or Who is this person outside of this?”

On his worst days, Dylan said, he felt like Tristan’s death was emblematic of something darker and more systemic that was happening in the world at large. “The events on that day felt like the physical manifestation of a lack of respect and a lack of compassion and maybe even a lack of acknowledging our fellow man,” Dylan said. “The feeling you get when someone cuts you off on the highway, or when you watch someone throw a cigarette out of the window into a bunch of weeds. Just this blatant disregard for surroundings and other people. That feeling that I know I get of frustration and anger—I had the exact same feeling about this. That someone was, in malice, shooting at a campground, or someone was just thinking, ‘Oh, I'm going to do something, I'm just horsing around.’ Like, basically, that the consequences were irrelevant. And so this felt like, or this seemed like, all of those tiny little instances of someone or something not acknowledging their surroundings, and other people, basically coming to a focal point—and a terrible thing happening. It felt like a societal defect, or a trend, or I don’t even know what—maybe people have always been this way, like they don’t care about their surroundings and their fellow humans and the people around them. Maybe there’s always been a lack of respect. I don’t know. But it seems like a powerful force, or a powerful trend, in our current society. We live in a world where most actions go unaccounted for. Look at most politicians. Look at the CEOs of powerful companies that are involved in terrible tragedies. More often than not, there are no consequences. And this is what happens when consequences don’t matter. And that may just be an angry brother looking for meaning, I don’t know.”