Head Shot by Burl Barer Page A

racist for no apparent reason, but Andrew Webb’s racist posturing entailed more complexity. Gail Webb, the sister thirteen years his senior, was married to a black man and is the mother of five interracial children. Her brother is “Uncle Andrew” to her brood of beautiful and obviously “half-black” offspring. At no time did Andrew Webb ever show any prejudice against his nieces and nephews, nor did he display any racist attitudes or behavior toward them.
    â€œHe may have mouthed that antiblack talk to be further accepted by Paul and Chris,” suggested his older sister. “Our youngest brother did have a very bad attitude toward blacks, primarily from his negative experiences of getting beat up every day at the all-black grade school he was bused to when we first moved to D Street in 1966. But even he was never mean to my kids. My mom’s mother said that my kids weren’t welcome to come visit her because they were black, but Mom said, ‘If they can’t come, none of us will ever come.’ That settled that. Grandma did a complete turnaround and made my kids welcome. So the race-prejudice thing with Andrew was either fake, or his kindness to my kids was fake. The things that were very real, especially once he started drinking and drugging, were Andrew’s hair-trigger temper, interest in violence, and really poor judgment.”
    Andrew Webb’s proclivity for illegal and violent acts, unlike Paul St. Pierre’s, didn’t derive from being born with a diminished mental capacity. Instead, any thought disturbances or brain-function irregularities were due to one or more head injuries.
    â€œAlthough Andrew had his head hurt a few times when he was little, the first time I noticed a drastic change in his behavior,” said his sister Gail, “was when he was about seven or eight years old. He got into a scuffle with another boy on the way home from school, and he fell down, banging his head on the curb. When he got home, he showed us the bump on his head. He kept saying the exact same phrases over and over to us as if he had not ever said them before. He would show us the bump every minute or so just like we hadn’t seen it or heard about it. Then he also showed some memory loss. Turns out he had a concussion, but by the time the doctor diagnosed the problem, Andrew couldn’t even remember how it happened. From then on, he was not the same in lots of ways, but he was still bright and did well in school, but he gradually became more and more weird. I’m sure smoking pot, drinking, and taking lots of acid were major factors. Especially because of the head injury.”
    Andrew Webb’s successes were consistently noteworthy, both in secondary school and in romance. While attending Lincoln High, he became enraptured with an attractive senior-year dropout named Anne. Equally smitten Anne overlooked all blemishes beyond the superficial. Eager for adulthood and the pride of parenthood, the two married soon after Andrew Webb graduated from high school.
    â€œWhen I married Andrew Webb in the summer of 1981, I was so captivated by him that I couldn’t see the major problems, things that were obvious to my parents and my sister. Such as him being a weird and dangerous Bible-quoting alcoholic with a peculiar passion for guns—you know, things like that. But there seemed to be so much good about him, too. Sure, he was the life of the party, but he graduated from high school with honors, was a hard worker, and had that big pride thing going because he was a real man with a wife and family. Then, one day, he broke his collarbone in a dirt bike accident during his lunch break from work. As it wasn’t a work-related accident, Labor and Industries didn’t cover it. Suddenly, he was out of work, no income, and his pride was hurt more than his collarbone. It healed wrong—the collarbone, I mean—and he had to have it rebroken three months