Playing baseball when you're a teenager,
is so much more than just a game.
Safe!
Every season brings new life lessons.
You had a good season, though, Andrew.
But when a junior high school team's star pitcher
is murdered...
friends on and off the field
must confront the fact that evil...
...is living among them.
This is a special place
because you play T-ball, you know,
when you're six years old.
I come back to Davis a couple times a year,
just kind of take it in.
A lot of memories.
This is the majors field.
There's a train.
It's eerie. It's this train noise
reminds me of that night.
The tragic event and just how he died.
It's just...
I think a horrific event that...
you're going to remember some parts of it forever.
♪ I hope someday ♪
♪ It'll all work out ♪
♪ I hope someday ♪
Davis was and is a super small town.
Everything pretty much focuses
around the university and the students.
You could get around anywhere on your bike.
You could leave your car unlocked, your home unlocked.
I remember it being a safe town.
Don't fall.
Growing up in the late '80s, early '90s,
it was a simpler time.
There was no social media.
There was no cell phones that everybody had.
Nobody was, you know, doomscrolling.
Everybody was face to face.
I had to memorize a bunch of phone numbers.
You know, sometimes you just go over to the house and knock
on the door. You know, can you hang out?
It was nice 'cause when you're out,
nobody could contact you.
So, they just had to trust that you would eventually come back.
Got into a bit of trouble.
Mostly just fun, innocent stuff.
We used to go out to this dirt bike range,
have like BB gun wars out there.
Which is like, nobody does that kind of stuff anymore.
So my core friend group was John and Andrew
in the neighborhood.
There was Nick. There was Eric.
Our friend group came together very organically.
I was sort of part of the rocker crowd,
and Jason, Andrew and I said,
"We need to start a music project," you know?
The name of the band was Dead End.
We wrote all our own music.
Andrew was someone who fit into actually
many different groups.
Through him, a lot of people
from different factions would kind of come together.
OK, come on, connect.
Andrew and myself played on Holmes Junior High School
baseball team.
Andrew was one of our best pitchers,
and he shut 'em down with that curveball.
Bases loaded. Andy Mockus on the mound.
The delivery. Strike!
He just completely baffled like all their hitters.
My earliest memory of Andrew is
watching him pitch.
Back in the late '80s and early '90s,
youth baseball was really a dominant part of
everyday life for these kids.
Which curveball did you enjoy throwing the most this year?
Uh, when I shot the guy out on the giant.
I played first base.
I remember baseball back then being incredibly competitive.
But you have relationships with many of the players you're
playing against, 'cause they also lived in town
and everybody knew everyone.
Davis was a pretty small town, so you know, even if you didn't
know someone personally, you probably knew their brother
or sister or their parents or something.
I appreciated being able to feel like I had tabs
on everything that was going on in my town.
It was a good place to grow up.
And there wasn't such fear about all the, you know,
all the things that could go wrong.
We were sneaking out at night, maybe going and seeing if
someone would buy us beer,
you know.
Starting at like 14, 15.
We would go out and do a thing called shoulder tapping,
which means, you know, you get some guy at
the convenience store who's obviously of age
and you tap him on the shoulder and ask him,
"Can you buy some alcohol?"
and give him an extra amount of money.
So we were drinking at, you know, pretty early age.
April of 1992, it was the end of eighth grade.
We were about to go into our last year of junior high,
which other places, that's typically the start of
high school, but in Davis, ninth grade is junior high.
It was sort of business as usual.
We'd end up, going out, going out to the park,
you know, seeing all the different friend groups.
You want to be out and you want to be with your friends.
So that's what everybody in my town did.
April 24th, Friday evening, I went over to Andrew's house.
His dad had told me he had just left like five minutes earlier.
He went out with some of his other friends,
and I just missed him.
That night I went to 7-Eleven to shoulder tap
and get the initial kind of cadre of alcohol that we were
gonna have for the night.
Everyone was congregating at this location on a hill
that was very isolated.
But there was a bunch of older kids out
doing the same thing we were.
I do remember having a pretty large group that night.
Andrew was there, Jason was there, Ted,
seven or eight girls, 13 or 14 guys.
A lot more people than anticipated showed up.
So when we were running short on alcohol,
those three guys took off on their bikes.
And so I went to one of our friend's house
where we were all gonna meet.
People trickled in over the next couple hours,
but those three didn't come back.
Didn't think anything out of the ordinary when
they didn't return.
It was kind of normal for people in such a big group
to just section off and go do something else.
I probably hung out maybe another hour.
I biked home.
I fall asleep.
In the morning, the phone rings.
I remember my dad answering, and then maybe ten seconds
later, hearing my mom scream in a way
I'd never heard her scream before.
I instantly knew something was terribly wrong.
And I remember running downstairs, and then my dad
broke the news to me.
Andrew Mockus died last night.
How is-- how is that possible?
I was just with-- like, are you sure?
A complete state of shock.
I don't remember ever being afraid in Davis until 1992.
I couldn't believe something like the death of Andrew,
you know, could happen.
I remember trying to find out what exactly happened,
who was involved,
who was there.
Why did this happen?
2
Saturday morning, I called Andrew just to, you know,
go out and play.
That's when his uncle Val told me that he was killed.
He was 14.
I was in my mom's garage just calling all my friends
on the landline just crying and just trying to, like,
tell them, and they were just like, "What happened?"
I just remember being like, "Wow," like I was in shock.
I just... yeah.
John didn't know what happened. He didn't have any information.
I remember just thinking like, "Oh my gosh, maybe he got sick
"or something happened,
like a medical kind of situation or a car crash."
I never would have thought that
there would have been... that he would have been killed.
I was with him hours before, and I was shocked,
and I just wanted answers right away.
I remember we all met at some park bench.
We just spent the whole day in the park just,
you know, talking with each other.
There was a lot of speculation in the beginning because,
you know, nobody really knew.
You grow up in a place like Davis,
and how could something like that happen?
I was a daily columnist for the "Davis Enterprise,"
you know, the local town paper.
But my kids were the ones that told me about Andrew's murder.
That there had been a fight was the way they explained it.
And that was the first I heard.
And of course, working for a newspaper,
you flip into journalism mode.
We learned one of Andrew's friends went and found
a UC Davis police officer.
And along our railroad tracks,
that officer discovered the body.
And his bicycle right there on the ground next to him.
But it's now late at night,
and there was nobody else around.
Andrew's dad, Al Mockus, had called the police
'cause that was the first time
Andrew had not been home on time.
Around midnight, the police showed up at his door
and ask Al if he would
identify the body as Andrew.
I can't-- I-- I can't even imagine.
When I first heard about Andrew, you know, my heart just
broke for his father and his mother and his brother.
And how do you-- how do you deal with a tragedy like this?
The police, when they discovered this body,
all they knew was the kid died in a bad way.
It could be a homicide, it could be an accident,
or somebody being a daredevil.
Their job was to really pull out the facts
and find witnesses.
Davis is a town, like, you pretty much know everybody.
I remember hearing that Andrew and a group of his friends were
downtown near the train
and that he had gotten beaten up,
and that he had gotten pushed into a train and died.
So from that point, it was a lot of talking about it,
trying to figure out exactly what happened and who was
involved and who was there.
I didn't know of him having any enemies.
Andrew was basically everybody's friend.
Nobody had-- nobody had anything bad to say about him.
I remember hearing lots of names and lots of people,
but never understanding exactly
what was true and what wasn't true.
And I think that was just because so many people
in the community were trying to figure out what was going on.
And so we kept going to newspapers and television
to try and figure out what was happening.
Andrew was an honor student at Holmes Junior High School.
Very happy kid and just a great future.
Now many lonely people are
trying to make sense out of a senseless death.
Initially, some of the witness reports were people that
seemingly had maybe witnessed the fight,
witnessed the start, but hadn't witnessed
the actual death.
So it's hard because everybody has a different story.
Our friend Jason was there.
And I remember, you know, obviously asking,
"What happened? You went off with him.
You know, where did you guys go?"
I pressed him, I wanted to know answers, but at the same time,
I don't know that he was capable of even
remembering it all.
That day, Jason, he wouldn't talk about it.
It was clear he was devastated.
I didn't just lose one friend.
In a way, I lost, you know, a good handful
of friends. And we were really tight.
It was the easiest way for me to cope with things, so I--
I moved away.
I haven't really
spoken about this incident to many people,
and I never have publicly.
And, uh...
I saw, I watched Andrew's body go limp
when it hit. And...
It's like an out-of-body experience almost.
The only thing I really, really, really, like
absolutely remember
is the exact incident that it happened.
It's clear as day, and I'll never be
able to shake that.
2 14-year-old Andrew Mockus' shocking death
has a town on edge.
Will any of the shell-shocked teenagers
tell police the truth?
Or is there something or someone standing in the way?
That morning, the detectives came
and woke me up. I believe I was in shock.
Uh...
It was just like a bad dream.
I was 13 years old, so I had to have an adult and all that.
And I remember telling the cops what happened.
It was just a typical
Friday night plan, you know.
We went to go hang out by the railroad tracks
and try to be cool, and we were drinking some beers.
I don't remember why, but we were all separated.
So it was just three of us in our friend group hanging out.
That's when the assailants came up to us.
The people that did this came out of nowhere for no reason.
Well, they just jumped us
and started beating us and I got knocked down.
We were younger and smaller, and it was scary,
and so we all were trying to get away,
and Andrew went one way,
and they all followed after him.
They chased him up to the railroad tracks.
And when I looked up,
Andrew was at the railroad tracks with his bike
trying to get away.
The train blew the whistle.
They just kept hitting him and they...
pushed him into a moving freight train.
The way a body looks when it gets hit by a train...
There's no, "Is he all right?"
You know what I mean? "Is he gonna make it?"
He was my best friend.
And within a blink of an eye,
it was over.
I was just too young, that's where everything fades to black.
The conversations talking with the police,
were just like a fog.
Nothing's gonna bring Andrew back.
They were gathering information
and just trying to do their job.
Andrew's friends were very cooperative with the police,
but not everything was as easy for the police.
There was a lot of stuff on the news, trying to piece
together who was involved, who was there.
Investigators believe more witnesses saw what happened
and hope those people come forward.
I was with him hours before.
And the guys that killed him,
they were with a bunch of people that night too.
I would like to believe that
people offered whatever evidence they could.
But I'm sure there were people that
were afraid to speak to the police
and worried about retaliation and being called a snitch.
Somehow or another, my friends got word.
There were some in that group that started to spread the word
about what really happened.
And there were a couple in that group
who were trying to cover for the murderers.
The police apparently were able to identify the names
of people who might have been the perpetrators.
But when first questioned by the police,
one of those people convinced his girlfriend
to create an alibi for him
and say that he wasn't there.
Thankfully, I think that some of them who had a conscience
actually gave the correct account of what happened.
The police getting witness statements,
end up piecing it together.
So it was quick police work.
And initially, the community reaction was sort of this,
"Well, the kid that did it,
"they must have just moved to town.
They're not really from Davis."
Like, "Our kids would never do that."
Well, three teenagers were arrested.
In the pictures in the paper, they were all from Davis.
And I think it was just really sobering.
There have been tragic accidents,
but this was about friends
killing friends.
A lot of us were afraid walking around, questioning
how this happened, why it happened.
There's nothing else you can do except try to find someone
to blame and get revenge on.
2 I haven't been on this street in probably 30 years.
Yeah, I haven't seen you, Jason, in a long time.
We were tight back then.
You know, after that happened, it was an unfortunate path that
I took, but it was...
It was one of those things, you know, 'cause I wasn't able
to process it, really.
You would never think anyone would take it to an extreme
like they did. Like that was unheard of.
Kids would fight back then, you know, it is what it is,
but that wasn't a fight. That was an attack.
Pointless.
Couldn't have picked a worse person to single out.
I remember it came out in, I think, the "Davis Enterprise,"
the "Sacramento Bee,"
that there had been arrests.
And I think that
It felt like we were all glued to the newspapers
and the television.
8:30 Friday night, Mockus and two of his friends
were riding their bikes through this dry creek bed
near the UC Davis campus
when three other teenagers began to chase them.
Investigators believe the boy bounced off a train
going 50 miles an hour.
Three boys ages 13, 16, and 17 face murder charges.
If the boys are tried and convicted as adults,
the charge could bring the death penalty.
We knew the three people. Andrew Childs.
Mike Johnson and Josh Bettencourt.
Andrew Childs
and Mike Johnson were older,
and Josh Bettencourt was
in our age group. He played baseball too.
I knew Josh Bettencourt from youth baseball.
He went to Emerson Junior High.
Josh was an intimidating person, but I was shocked.
I remember there being a lot of discussion
about why it happened.
I wasn't there, but Andrew and I went to Holmes
Junior High School.
So a couple of days before Andrew was killed,
we played the rival Junior High School
Emerson in baseball.
Let's play ball.
And Josh Bettencourt played on Emerson baseball team.
Come on! Get your head in the game!
One more! One more! One more!
Andrew pitched
and struck out Josh Bettencourt.
Strike three!
We beat them and it felt good to win.
Whoo!
It was just any other game,
but, you know, against your rival.
So Josh was not happy when we were shaking hands.
He was talking shit to Andrew Mockus.
Yelling at him, saying he's gonna beat him up.
And that was just a couple of days before.
Motive has a lot to do with people wanting to understand.
It doesn't change the fact.
Strike!
Striking out doesn't justify murdering somebody.
Josh Bettencourt, Michael Johnson, Andrew Childs.
Those names became household names in the worst sort of way.
It's a small town, so you kind of know everybody.
It was just like a plague over the whole city.
I was 12, and we moved from the East Coast to Davis
in January of 92 and started school at Emerson Junior High.
I was in seventh grade at that point.
I remember when I learned about it,
going to school on Monday morning.
And I was like, "Josh Bettencourt did what?"
Everybody, of course, was talking about it.
I had been familiar with Josh Bettencourt,
and there was just a general fear of this guy.
Everybody kind of tried to act like they were friends
with him, and he was cool.
He was dating the preppiest, blonde,
cheerleader type at the school.
He was on the football team.
The teachers in the administration all were
extremely behind him.
And I had seen him be extremely vicious to people.
I knew Bettencourt.
I must have met him at like some kind of party
or something, you know?
One night, Jason and I snuck out.
We were sitting under this tree, and we were just talking.
And Josh Bettencourt comes up.
He calls out and he says, "Who is that?"
I said, "It's Eric."
And he says, "Oh man, I was gonna mess
with you guys."
He had like a folding knife that was like that long.
He thought that I was cool,
so he didn't want to mess with us that night.
And I remember saying to Jason, I was like, "That guy is
gonna be a problem."
But I didn't think it was gonna be our problem.
Davis is a very compassionate town in terms of
feelings for the families of those kids.
The funeral was just a few days later.
All the baseball players in town came,
musician friends, but also families, just--
people just had to see other people and grieve with people.
Holy [bleep].
The funeral.
I guess you don't know how much you care for a person
until they're actually gone.
That was gut wrenching.
Three days after that Sunday arrest,
the day after Andrew Mockus' funeral,
all three of the suspects
were released on a technicality because the police hadn't been
able to get their case together.
When they release them to do more investigation
probably means you weren't sure you had something
you can take the DA
that would, you know, lock solid, get convictions.
So we're gonna release 'em, we're gonna drop the charges.
It's not gonna go away, but it allows us more openly
to do investigation because a case like this,
you want convictions. This was to build the case.
I feel like the system
let Andrew and his family down.
I just remember being real angry.
Every little
thing that would come out in the paper
was the worst, 'cause it wasn't justice.
My friend that was part of that group, after he found out
what happened, he disowned that entire group.
And he told us what he remembered
about the situation, but we didn't know
who actually pushed Andrew.
Three weeks later, Johnson was rearrested for murder
and Childs for assault.
Bettencourt was not arrested.
It was hard for me to understand why.
Right at that moment, my life was in a tailspin
and nothing mattered except justice for Andrew, the truth.
I do remember our friends, we were on the hunt.
We wanted to find who did this and we can't bring Andrew back,
but we can go take matters into our own hands.
You know, the newspaper said
"One youth charged with murder." And it's Johnson,
Childs charged with assault as a youth
and Josh Bettencourt will not face charges.
The superintendent of the school said
that he's totally allowed to come back to school.
And I was like, "Oh my God.
"This is a dangerous person.
This person shouldn't be out in society at all."
I mean, if you don't have any consequences,
you just keep going with this behavior.
And that certainly was the case with him.
With justice still pending,
the impact of Andrew's shocking murder
reverberates throughout the community.
And with one of the suspects allowed to remain free,
teenagers across Davis fear that decision
will come with a dangerous cost.
2 How you doing, buddy?
- How you doing, man? - I'm doing all right, man.
Dude, how are you with the train?
Took me a while to get over that sound.
I just was recalling like,
you know, where it happened up the tracks.
Have you been back here since you left Davis?
- No. No, no. - No, OK.
You remember watching Andrew play?
- Yeah. - I remember batting off of him.
- He was good. - Really good.
- Yeah. - Yeah. Yeah.
I had forgotten that I actually played ball as long as I did.
Yeah, it was pretty much like right before all this happened
that I just stopped playing, but I had a real hard time
because of how I felt. - Well you said--
You said you had some guilt, like, "Hey, we could have
saved him," which, like, you should never have felt.
It's like a cliché or whatever when people say,
you know, "It's not your fault," and it's like, "Well, you know."
- What if-- - Dude, there's nothing-- there's nothing different
that you could have done or, you know?
It's easy to just--
always feel like I should have done something different
or I could have done something different.
I could have saved him. I could've...
It took most of my
young adult life to
accept the fact that there was
nothing I could have done to save him.
That was a hard pill to swallow for a long time.
Jason wouldn't talk about it.
But whatever Jason did,
I'm glad he did it,
'cause he's still here.
I haven't told him that, but I, um, I--
I think tonight I will.
Yeah. Yeah.
A case like this,
you want convictions.
And so they realized the bicycle wasn't mangled,
which was a key piece of evidence.
And his injuries were consistent
with hitting a side of a train.
So there was a murder.
And if you're a participant and somebody gets killed...
...you could be charged with first degree murder.
They could have said to Josh Bettencourt,
"Even if you did not push him into the train,
"you're as responsible for that murder
because of the events leading up to it."
And he probably says, "How about we make a deal here
and I'll tell you that Michael Johnson pushed him."
Most of us kind of expected that it was
Bettencourt who actually pushed him, but it wasn't.
Johnson was interviewed the first Sunday that he got
arrested, and within three hours
he had said he pushed him into the train.
He wasn't a clever operator, you know.
Michael Johnson and Andy Childs, you know,
played their part.
But my opinion is none of this would have happened
if Josh Bettencourt didn't run into Andrew.
But Josh got immunity.
Josh had the best view, and he hadn't been drinking.
So, these things made him a good witness.
And also, he had all of this backing from people.
Newspaper had an interview with Josh Bettencourt's
former employer, and he said, "I just can't believe this.
"He was super hardworking.
He was extremely intelligent." He said, "Recently, I saw him
"walking across the street with some kids after he quit
that didn't look like his crowd."
And it really painted this picture
about how, like, he was the young one.
And he was maybe impressionable.
He did something that was out of character.
But I know there was another side of him
that he liked to fight.
Police, they really wanted to at least get the killer,
the one who actually did the pushing.
Somebody took our friend from us, our innocent,
amazing friend.
I don't think it was necessary for any of the three guys
to get the plea bargain. We wanted justice.
The Andrew Mockus murder trial against Mike Johnson started.
At that point, Bettencourt was supposed to be the smoking gun,
and Bettencourt had gotten immunity in exchange
for his testimony.
So there was this kind of like
real anticipation for this testimony.
And then he got up there, and he changed his story.
He said that he knew Mike's character now because he had
spent 48 hours behind bars with him, and he couldn't have
pushed him.
You know, even though he saw him push him earlier,
he now thinks that must not have been what happened.
It didn't make sense.
They wanted to hear, "Hey, I was sober.
"I saw Mike push the guy into the train,"
and he refused to give 'em that.
He hinted that maybe Johnson was trying to pull Andrew back
from the train.
Like, suddenly he had become a good Samaritan.
There's no jury in juvenile. It was just a judge trial.
And they were kind of going through with the judge
what Josh told the police he said to Johnson
right after Andrew died.
Bettencourt told investigators Johnson went up and pushed him
into the train.
And Bettencourt yells, "Jesus Christ, Mike,
you just [bleep] killed him!"
He said that on the record, I remember this well
because the judge asked him to repeat that.
"You said he just [bleep] killed him?"
It was the showstopper moment in the trial.
And the judge found Michael Johnson
guilty of second-degree murder.
And then Andrew Childs
decided he was going to plead guilty to assault.
I know that they got the maximum sentence for what
they could get for being minors.
Dealing with juveniles, and juvenile justice
is different.
There's restrictions on sentencing.
You can only be held up to age 25
by the California Youth Authority.
So Johnson got seven years for the second degree
murder charge.
And Childs got four years for pleading guilty to assault.
Everyone was mad about the sentencing.
Everyone.
Watching the justice system kind of fail Andrew was
real hard for all of us,
and I think that that was a big part
of what changed everybody's lives.
I know you're young, but show some remorse.
"Hey, we [bleep] up."
But like nothing. Nothing.
Josh was accepted by a high school in Sacramento.
I mean, little did they know, I mean, they were living
amongst, you know, monsters.
He was on the baseball team, and so he got to play
against Davis.
And he got to sit there across from some of my friends
and was flipping 'em off.
Smiling, I mean, laughing about it.
I mean, did-- the audacity that, like, who is this?
What kind of individual? It's sick.
A few years later I heard that Bettencourt killed someone else.
I think it was a road rage incident and it just shows
that, you know, like, that by them deciding to plea bargain
him, you know, basically, they had cost
another innocent life out there.
The ripple effect of
violence when you're that young,
is bigger than people can imagine.
Andrew was always the best out of us
and I think about him all the time.
And you know, as years go by now,
it's like I remember good things when I think about him.
And it's great remembering him.
Not what happened, but remembering him.
So being here, I'm flooded with memories,
because a long time ago when I was a young person,
I coached Little League here.
And Andrew sat right there on this bench with me.
Go on, y'all did a good job.
You know, you hear like "only the good die young."
He was robbed of his time, but I think he lived in a way
that he made the absolute most of all his years.
What a senseless act of violence.
Why did this happen?
It didn't need to happen.
Years later, people are still talking about it.
And whenever I had a problem with someone,
I just remember thinking,
"It's probably better just to avoid conflict."