Despite his self-reports that he graduated high school in 1997 with a grade point average of 3.2, John’s transcript shows he finished with a GPA of 2.9, after attempting to complete 265 units and finishing only 247.5. Although he excelled in the electives, getting an A+ in advanced ceramics and A’s in choir and drama, he also did well with A’s in government/economics, job skills, a course titled “transitions,” and his eleventh-grade English course. He got F’s, however, in chemistry, English/myth literature and integrated science.
Jenni and John continued to date after graduation, and he often came back to campus to visit her and his other friends, and sing with the choir. It was his unauthorized presence on school grounds that got him into trouble with the law for the first time.
The school security guard had repeatedly warned him, “You need to have a reason to be here, and Jen is not a valid reason,” but John continued to come, anyway. The guard finally told John he would be arrested the next time he showed up. When John defiantly returned, the guard followed through.
John was charged with disturbing the peace and unlawfully coming on school grounds to disrupt activities. The prosecutor dropped the first count in a plea bargain, John pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace and received probation with a fine. But that still didn’t stop him. He came back a couple more times, stopping only when Jenni broke up with him for good.
John had always had a roving eye, which caused him and Jenni to break up twice for cheating. To her knowledge, he’d slept with only one girl the first time—one of her friends, who confessed to her. Jenni took him back after they’d spent a month apart.
About six months later, she learned he’d been cheating again from another friend he’d slept with, and this time “it was more people than I could count on my fingers. I want to say it was the teenage hormone thing—somebody wants me, let’s do it.”
Their breakup occurred at the high school after his arrest, which he continued to visit in spite of the “stay away” notice he’d been issued. “He sauntered in with that carefree smile, and I threw my class ring at him [which he’d given to her], and it hit him in his head,” she recalled.
“What the hell?” he asked her.
When he saw one of the girls he’d cheated with was standing next to Jenni, he realized what was going on.
“Ohhh,” he said.
He tried to talk to Jenni, but she didn’t want to listen, so he walked out of the room, crying. A couple of days later, she agreed to talk to him, but only because she wanted to find out how many girls he’d been with. She learned that he’d been cheating on her for quite some time, including one night he’d had sex with five girls at a friend’s party.
In spite of all this, they remained very close friends. “I was never going to take that again,” she said. “I deserve better than that. I can love him, but I don’t have to be in love with him.”
John began to decompensate after high school, while he was still living with Cathy and taking general education classes at Crafton Hills College for a couple of months. Things weren’t going well at school, because Cathy had thought his high school was going to send transcripts or alert the community college that he needed services for special education. That never happened, though. After agreeing to get back on his meds, John decided he didn’t want to, after all. He dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles in October 1997 to live with his cousin Jason.
He seemed to settle in better there, taking courses at El Camino College, near Torrance, and working at In-N-Out Burger. Excited to be on his own, he knew he could always come home to live with his mother again, if things didn’t work out.
Six months later, he lost his job for goofing off at work, and he moved back in with Cathy, who had purchased a condo on Matinal Road in Rancho Bernardo, in March 1998.
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