Member-only story
How a Double Murder Helped Shape the Writer I Am
What Shapes Me (Revised)
I was still young enough when I was nineteen to think I might be invincible. Not that I believed I would never die, but I believed death wouldn’t touch me as much as it did, when a father and son were tragically murdered at the age of twelve. This brilliant twelve-year-old boy was so brilliant, he could have cured cancer, but he was still twelve years old, and he was the most laid back man you could ever meet, a man who loved his wife and child and had a good heart.
Neal owned Precision Tune Auto Repair on San Pablo Avenue in Pinole, and Brendan, 12, was a seventh-grader at Pinole Middle School, where he excelled in science and computers.
That is just a vague description of the Father who gave me my first laptop when I declared I wanted to become a writer at a time when laptops were far less common than they are now. He was an intelligent and generous man, to say the brutal murder of Neal and his twelve-year-old son Brendan. One of the reasons I write the way I do is to try to give hope and to provide answers, because nearly two decades later, the Abernathy Murders remain unsolved.
