His father worked as a railway laborer, and the family practiced Catholicism.
From the outside, it seemed like a typical working-class upbringing in the American Southwest.But behind closed doors, this child’s world was far from ordinary.
His father was a violent alcoholic prone to fits of rage that resulted in frequent physical abuse.
The boy suffered multiple head injuries before the age of six, knocked unconscious so many times that he later developed temporal lobe epilepsy.As punishment, his father would sometimes tie him to a crucifix in a cemetery overnight, leaving the frightened child alone in the darkness among the tombstones.
By age 10, he had already begun smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol, searching for any escape from the violence at home.The transformation
On May 4, 1975, when he was just 15 years old, the boy witnessed something that would have shattered most people: his older cousin Miguel shot and killed his wife Jesse in the face during a domestic argument, right in front of him per Biography.com.
Once again, the boy’s reaction was chilling. After the shooting, he became sullen and withdrawn. Miguel was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and the boy dropped out of Jefferson High School in ninth grade.
Shortly after, he moved in with his sister and her husband Roberto, an obsessive ‘peeping tom’ who took him along on nocturnal voyeuristic walks, spying on women through their windows.
When Miguel was released from the mental hospital in 1977, he sometimes joined them on these disturbing expeditions.
By 1982, at age 22, he had moved permanently to California. It was around this time that he began using coc**ne heavily, which quickly became his drug of choice.
To support his addiction, he started committing burglaries and thefts.
He lived a nomadic existence between San Francisco and Los Angeles, with no stable home or employment.
His criminal behavior was escalating, but no one could have predicted what was coming next.