Harris Murders Leave Mark on Mira Mesa : Crime: Many newcomers don’t even know about the slayings almost 14 years ago, when the area lost its innocence. Longtime residents can’t forget.

In a funeral-home voice, Dwight Simpson talks about the day Robert Alton Harris methodically snuffed out the lives of two Mira Mesa native sons. He speaks solemnly, like a man who has forever lost something precious.

On that sultry July day in 1978, Simpson, the pastor at a local Baptist church, recalls holding his small weekly prayer meeting when the unthinkable news came like a taunt from the devil:

Two neighborhood teen-agers on their way fishing had been shot execution style--best friends pleading for their lives with an unhearing kidnaper who killed them anyway. Then he calmly ate the boys’ fast-food hamburgers before using their car to rob a local bank.

As the execution, scheduled for 12:01 a.m. Tuesday at San Quentin, was delayed Saturday by a U.S. District Court judge, frustrated local residents await the ultimate punishment for a man who took the lives of two 16-year-olds, Michael Baker and John Mayeski, and robbed a community of its innocence.

Once, Mira Mesa was quietly isolated, a burgeoning suburb largely separated from urban stress and crime. But the blasts from a killer’s handgun changed all that.

“People felt that something like this could just never happen here. Not here. We were just too small a town,” said the bespectacled Simpson. “We were shocked that a bank had even been robbed here, let alone the double murder of two of our own.

“It was all so cold-blooded and just so out of place. And it hurt us all, gave us a sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach that we just can’t forget,” he said.

The killings became a defining event that symbolized the community’s emergence from small crossroads to thriving San Diego bedroom community--with all the increased population and newfound crime statistics that go with it.

“It was,” Simpson summed, “the biggest thing that ever happened to this place.”

Today, Mira Mesa has grown up. The community is a dizzying suburban sprawl of commercial enterprise, rows of look-alike tract homes and enclaves of upper-income housing on the hillsides.

In recent years, a once-neighborly population of 18,000 has jumped to more than 70,000. The vacant fields have sprouted schools and parks. The streets have become linked with busy traffic arteries to the south and west.

Existing in the shadow of the Miramar Naval Air Station, about 15 miles north of downtown San Diego, the community has seen an ever-changing ebb and flow of military families--a force as strong as the Pacific Ocean tides that lap the shoreline not far to the west.

And Mira Mesa has such a large influx of Asian residents--from Laotians to Vietnamese to Filipinos--that some old-timers even refer to the place as “Manila Mesa.”

The very spot where the murders occurred--on a deserted path near Miramar reservoir--has since been plowed under by the area’s raging development, covered by houses.

“People are probably living right over the site where the boys were killed and don’t even know about it,” said local Bob Dingeman. “We haven’t made a big deal out of this thing. We haven’t dwelt on it. It was too unpleasant.”

Indeed, change has come to Mira Mesa, killing much of what was simple here.

“We were once a neighborhood community with a neighborhood feel,” said Simpson, 43, who has been preacher at First Baptist Church for almost two decades. “Now we’re a regular bedroom community of San Diego. New people have moved in to fill all the new homes. We just don’t have the same linkage.”

And, perhaps worst of all, locals say, violent crime has now become an accepted fact of life.

“If the murder happened today, it would unsettle us but it would not move us as emotionally as it did back then, when we were more closely-knit,” Simpson said. “But that was a different time. And this was a different place.”

In the days before Tuesday’s scheduled execution was put on hold, Mira Mesa was going about its emotional preparations for Harris’ walk to San Quentin’s gas chamber like a community suffering from schizophrenia.

For the long-time residents, the nearly 14 years and seemingly endless stays of execution that have elapsed between the crime and the punishment have been like living in a Truman Capote novel--trying to go on with life knowing the last chapter of that horrible murder has yet to be written.

But newcomers haven’t been part of that agony, and to them, those two young boys have never existed.

At Mira Mesa High School, where both Baker and Mayeski attended classes, students say the issue of their deaths is rarely raised.

“I’ve seen stories in the school newspaper but I didn’t know about it,” said junior Sergio Palacios. “But when I asked my friends, they didn’t care about it. We’re having problems on campus and so we’re worried about things happening today, not 15 years ago.”

Principal James Vlassis agreed that the Harris murders are rarely, if ever, discussed at the school.

“During the 17 years I’ve spent as an administrator in the community--seven in the junior high school and 10 in the high school--I’ve never heard the matter discussed by students,” he said. “Never.”

There are no memorials on campus. No plaques. For school administrators, the only reminder of the killings is that Sharron Mankins, Michael Baker’s mother, works in the high school’s financial office.

With each delay of a would-be execution date, they have seen her cry. But not the students. “Most of these kids weren’t even born when this crime occurred,” Vlassis said. “They’re just totally oblivious to what’s gone on.

“They’re just wrapped up in their own problems, the crime and drive-by shootings, rather than the fate of two boys who died before they were even born.”

Over at the Jack in the Box, the fast-food outlet where Harris surprised the two teen-agers as they sat eating their lunch, the regulars don’t talk about the crime much either.

“It just doesn’t come up, that’s all,” said Judy, a coffee-serving manager at the restaurant, who didn’t want to give her last name.

At the restaurant, the work force has turned over 20 people in the last 18 months alone, she pointed out. And the customers come and go as well. “Life keeps going,” Judy said.

Added 21-year-old worker Greg Vanard, as he flipped burgers at the grill: “When these murders happened, I was just a kid. Pete Wilson wasn’t governor of California, he was the mayor of San Diego.

“I mean, sometimes we’ll talk about it,” Vanard said. “We’ll ask, ‘Why did he do it? He finds these two kids, steals their car and then he has to kill them. And he eats their hamburgers on top of it.

“But it was so long ago, like the beginning of time.”

Down the street at the Lucky’s supermarket, assistant manager Jim Black, who commutes to work each day from San Diego, said he only recently became aware that Harris committed his crime spree in Mira Mesa.

“One day it finally dawned on me--this whole thing happened in Mira Mesa,” he said. “But a lot of people are like me. For all they know, it might as well have happened in Salinas or something.”

At the San Diego Trust & Savings Bank branch, which Harris robbed at gunpoint shortly after killing the teen-agers, tellers think it’s bad karma to talk much about holdups, especially this one.

But Customer Service Manager Kim Whaley, who transferred to a new job at the branch only last week, has contemplated Harris and his crimes.

“I knew that the robbery happened there, so on my way to work that first day, I was wondering what the staff thought about it,” she recalled. “But there wasn’t much impact anymore, which is just as well because the whole thing was pretty scary.”

Ten years ago, when Whaley worked as a teller at the same branch, things were different.

“Back then, it was very much on people’s minds,” she said. “Because the people in the community, it seemed like they were hurt, that’s the best way to put it. There was a sense of being injured. But now I think enough time has passed.”

Too much time, according to Dan, a local construction worker.

“Nobody wants to talk about what happened to those boys anymore, it’s too morbid,” he said, declining to offer his last name. “After all these years, without anything being done, it’s become kind of a joke. People are believing in this execution thing less and less.

“I mean, what gives them the right to take someone’s life?”

On tiny Cetus Road, a typical suburban street where Harris once lived, some neighbors still express doubts over the impending execution.

“I don’t know, now that Mother Teresa has asked for clemency, surely they won’t go through with it,” one said, shaking her head.

Jim Hulsey has heard just about enough of that kind of talk--mostly coming from newcomers he says weren’t even here when the detested crime went down.

“To anybody who doesn’t want to see this Harris character die, I say that we ought to go out and shoot their kids and then see how they talk,” said the longtime Cetus Road resident, a tall man with a closely cropped beard. “Then we’ll watch them change their tunes.”

Hulsey, a 48-year-old landscaper, slowly builds a steam of anger as he talks. He remembers the day Harris rushed home after the murders and hid the stolen car in the garage. He recalls the legions of police who surrounded the neighborhood, driving out the killer.

“They ought to just juice that sucker and get it over with--they’ve already wasted too much time and money,” he said. “He’s got to pay the price. And I hope it’ll be a wake-up call to the rest of them guys.

“The message is: You kill somebody, you go straight to the chamber. It doesn’t matter if you’re crazy, loony, or what. You die.”

Across town, at the First Baptist Church, Simpson has other but no less closely held convictions about why Harris should be put to death.

“God put government on earth to maintain order and administer justice,” he said. “The government needs to attach a value to human life. And it needs to assess the most strict punishment possible to anyone who would so callously take another person’s life.”

While Simpson has discussed the death penalty both on the pulpit and in his Bible classes, he said he has rarely--if ever--used the Harris murders as an example. For many, he said, the details are simply too painful to hear.

Residents still carry images of Harris leading the boys at gunpoint to the reservoir. The memories include seeing Baker, after watching his best friend shot to death, begging for his life until an unmoved Harris finally responds: “God can’t help you now, boy. You’re going to die.”

Simpson feels those ugly moments.

“Anytime you have two teen-agers who lived so innocent a life--I mean, they were on their way to go fishing--it tears apart not only the family but the whole community as well,” he said.

“Those details of his callousness just twist the dagger in the community’s back. It adds to the revulsion, making what he did just take root in our consciousness and become impossible to forget.”

Former San Diego Councilman Ed Struiksma, another longtime Mira Mesa resident, said many locals believe that almost 14 years after the crime was committed, the execution “will finally bring a degree of finality to a sad, sad episode in this community.

“I know that both my neighbors and I have thrown up our hands in disgust that the whole legal process has taken this long,” he said. “Because all along, at every step of the way, he could have let those boys go.

“He didn’t need to kill them. Instead, he acted like an animal. He showed a total lack of remorse, almost a sense of glee, when he shot those boys one at a time in such a brutal, uncaring, callous fashion.

“And, if given the opportunity,” Struiksma said, “a lot of people here would like to return the favor before the state did it for them.”