Slaying Puts City Face-to-Face With Nightmare of Reality : Crime: An L.A.-style robbery that left a shopper dead on Mother’s Day underscores a changing lifestyle in San Diego.

On Mother’s Day, an hour or so before he was supposed to show up at his parents’ home for a family barbecue, Brian Sullivan dropped in at a jewelry store in La Jolla.

No one knows what brought him there just then. Perhaps he was shopping for a bauble for his mom. Maybe he was browsing for the necklace his wife wanted. No one knows the reason--just as there is no reason, no sense, to what happened there.

Three robbers, apparently from Los Angeles, tore into the quiet store, each dressed in black, ninja-style clothing. The first shouts announced the crime. Sullivan turned his head to see what the commotion was about. Before he moved again, he was shot, a bullet ripping into his head. The robbers smashed display cases, grabbed every gem they could and fled.

Sullivan, 34, lingered in a hospital for five days, then died, becoming a symbol of the very worst nightmare San Diegans have about Los Angeles--a victim of random, mindless violence.

Searching for leads, focusing on a Los Angeles-based crime ring that specializes in smash-and-grab jewelry store heists, San Diego police have mostly encountered frustration. Searching for some shred of meaning in his death, Sullivan’s family has been left instead with heartbreaking grief.

“The police told me that it almost never happens in San Diego that there’s a murder like this,” said Linda Sullivan, a widow at 27. “But the police told me there are people in life who don’t care about the value of life. Not their own, not someone else’s.

“I guess that makes me sound so naive,” she said last week in her first interview since her husband was killed. “But I never thought there were people like that, not here, not in San Diego and especially not in La Jolla. These robbers came from L.A., and they could have robbed the store and gotten what they wanted without taking his life.

“Now,” she said, “they’ve essentially taken my life, too. Because my life is gone. His family’s, too. My family’s. Brian’s friends and all the people who loved him. They could have had what they wanted without killing him. And there are just no answers.”

Especially to the hard questions that won’t go away: how it is that Brian Sullivan was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and how that wrong place turned out to be a jewelry store in upscale La Jolla.

Along with the beaches and the zoo, palm-dotted La Jolla is what most outsiders know of San Diego. Sheltered by cliffs that soar straight up from the sea and a cove whose rippling blue waters beckon surfers and divers, La Jolla is commonly--but wrongly--thought of as a separate city. It is, in fact, a distinct San Diego neighborhood.

For years, the rich and famous have made it a world-renowned playground. But off Prospect Street, the main tourist drag, La Jolla retains a neighborhood feel, with its own schools, its own community newspaper and a slew of family-owned businesses that cater to the locals.

“We’ve lived here since 1967,” said 63-year-old Marilyn Sullivan, Brian’s mother. Referring to a clothing store that used to be a local fixture, she said: “I remember sending my little kids, these six tiny little kids, down to The Scotts to try on bathing suits. They could bring them home, and if Mom didn’t like them, they could take them back.

“Those are the good memories of La Jolla,” Marilyn Sullivan said. “Now it’s such a crazy world we’re living in.”

Seen from San Diego, the embodiment of that craziness is Los Angeles, typically viewed as an uncontrolled sprawl where smog and fear poison the air. The leading vote-getter in the San Diego mayoral primary two months ago, Peter Navarro, heads a “managed growth” group called Prevent Los Angelization Now!

“There’s a little bit of Disneyland about San Diego,” said Gordon Clanton, a professor of sociology at San Diego State University. “We want to believe here that everything works.

“And when it doesn’t,” Clanton said, “since San Diego is big and growing fast, we have a strong dose of this notion that urban problems have been imported from somewhere else. That somewhere else is almost always Los Angeles.”

The riots that erupted in Los Angeles in April only solidified that perception, Clanton said.

“I feel that what happened in L.A. gave some implied license or validation to these (gunmen) that they could do this to Brian Sullivan,” said Sam Crockett, who worked with Sullivan at U S West Cellular of California.

“I know this is speculation,” Crockett said. “But perhaps this (killing) came about when they shot and thought, ‘What the heck? We can do that. Why not?’ ”

Scene after scene of violence, of mayhem seemingly without regard for consequence, dominated television screens during the riots. In San Diego, by contrast, the streets remained civil.

“That reinforced the notion that those kinds of problems are not our problems,” Clanton said. “Because (the feeling is) San Diego is different.”

And that, he said, explains why Brian Sullivan’s death still evokes a powerful emotional response in San Diego, even though three months have passed since he was slain. Time works to intensify the community outrage at a pack of gunmen from Los Angeles who descended upon La Jolla, particularly since all the assailants remain at large.

“You read about mindless crime all the time,” said Michael Lopez, 20, the cashier at Harry’s Coffee Shop, where La Jolla locals gather.

“But that’s just it,” he said. “You read about it. Like, from L.A. You can never understand it, but you read about freeway shootings or whatever, and it’s there, not here. For something like that to happen here is unconscionable.”

With time to kill before he was due at his mother’s house on the afternoon of May 10, Sullivan walked into J. Jessop & Sons Jewelers about 2 p.m.

“Brian was very sentimental,” Linda Sullivan said. “Jessop’s is where he bought my wedding ring. He loved that store. He loved to shop.”

Brian and Linda Sullivan had been married four years. They met while working together at an electronics store, where he installed stereos and she was the cashier. On their first date, Linda said, “it was like we were going to be together forever. We both knew it immediately.”

He eventually went to work for U S West, where he installed and maintained cellular phone relay sites. She became the manager of a linens store. They bought a condo in Tierrasanta, but put off having children for just a bit, intent on time together first. He doted on her. It was not unusual for her to find presents from him in her purse, she said.

Moments after Sullivan entered the jewelry store, the three robbers burst in, as if on a commando raid, San Diego Police Capt. Paul Ybarrondo said. Two of them were armed with handguns, police said.

At the same time, half a block away, another black-clad “commando squad”--three men armed with shotguns--bolted into C.J. Charles Jewelers Ltd.

At Jessop’s, Sullivan, the only customer in the store, turned his head toward the door. One of the robbers shot him.

“It wasn’t as if he didn’t follow the bad guys’ directions or resisted or interfered,” Police Lt. John Welter said. “They just shot him immediately.”

There was no shooting at C.J. Charles. At both stores, the robbers smashed their way into display cases with claw hammers, scooped up whatever was in reach and raced to waiting cars, a blue Buick and a gray Oldsmobile.

“They were in and out in less than 30 seconds,” Ybarrondo said.

Police have declined to place a value on the stolen goods. The cars, both stolen the day before, were found a few hours after the robberies in Pacific Beach. A seventh accomplice was seen in one of the getaway cars, police said.

Preparing for the Mother’s Day family get-together, Marilyn Sullivan got a call telling her to hurry to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. Linda Sullivan, at work, got the same call.

There, Brian Sullivan’s family learned he had been shot in the head.

“As time wore on, we discovered that half his brain was gone,” said Jim Sullivan, his father, a leading San Diego lawyer. “By the next morning, we were told that it was unlikely he would make it. And that if he did, he’d basically be a basket case for life.”

Sullivan never regained consciousness. Four nights after he was shot, he began to develop pneumonia. Sitting by her husband’s bed that night, Linda Sullivan had a vision.

“I got the feeling that Brian was having this chat with God, to decide whether Brian was going to be able to live any kind of decent life,” she said. “The two of them decided that it just wasn’t in the cards. That night, maybe about 2 in the morning, at that point things started getting bad.”

Eight hours later, Sullivan died. At the funeral Mass, at All Hallows Catholic Church in La Jolla, Jim Sullivan, 69, could take it no longer. He had served as a Marine Corps officer at Iwo Jima, one of the fiercest battles of World War II--but this was different.

“I’m not a weakling,” he said. “I’ve seen people killed. But I couldn’t take it. I cried. And I cried. I couldn’t even say hello to old friends.”

Friends posted a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. CrimeStoppers, a San Diego-based victims assistance group that agreed to administer the reward fund, added another $1,000. The $26,000 remains unclaimed.

“I want those bastards put away,” Jim Sullivan said last week.

Because of the way the two robberies were orchestrated--in broad daylight, by masked thieves who smashed, grabbed and fled--detectives suspect a Los Angeles-based ring that has used the same signature method to attack jewelry stores around the nation, said Sgt. Lou Boozell of the Los Angeles Police Department.

“We put a stop to it here,” Boozell said. “Unfortunately, these people have started to look for what they perceive to be softer targets.” And, said Welter, the San Diego detective, Los Angeles jewelry thieves see San Diego as a nearby “lucrative market.”

In January, robbers executed a similar “counter-smash” theft at a Chula Vista jewelry store. Police believe that two men still at large in the Chula Vista robbery may have carried out the La Jolla crimes. But detectives declined to identify those men or disclose any details, saying it might jeopardize their investigation.

“We have some idea as to who may be involved in this crime,” Welter said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have enough hard evidence at this time to make an arrest. As a lot of these cases go, you’re hoping for a major break.”

Calling the shooting of Sullivan “so sad,” Welter added: “I have often thought, ‘Why couldn’t I have been shopping there, been off duty but had my gun in my waistband when these guys came out of Jessop’s?’ At least then they could have taken on a guy better prepared to defend himself. Of course, there’s really no answer to that question.”

Linda Sullivan said: “Somebody said to me that I might not ever find any answers to any of this. I mean, nothing good came out of it.

“Everyone’s telling me, this is going to get better, that time heals things,” she said. “In my case, I don’t think it has. I think I feel worse now than I felt before.

“You talk about your heart breaking,” Linda Sullivan said. “I thought that was a phrase. It’s not. You can just feel this physical pain. And it doesn’t go away. It’s always there.”