Sunset on a Murder

When Debbie Ramirez got a call from S.H. administrators warning her that Robert was hanging out with a bad crowd, she talked to him about it, but saw no cause for alarm. "I didn't know about the fights. I never saw bruises on his face or anything," she says. She thought she was on top of things, eavesdropping on his phone calls, rifling through his drawers. Nothing, she says, ever seemed out of the ordinary: "I thought they were maybe mischievous, but not trouble."

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The members of the Sacred Heart entourage graduated in 1997, but their behavior seemingly didn't improve. In 1999, Ramirez was living with his mother and laying data wire for Metropolitan Electric when he took part in the post-basketball game assault near Kezar Stadium. The San Francisco Chronicle ran multiple stories about the incident, describing Ramirez's friends as an "Irish gang" and referencing SDI as the group's predecessor. If there was ever an opportunity for the Sunset to own up to its legacy of hooliganism, this was it. But the negative publicity had the opposite effect on the young men, their families, and their friends. The west-siders became apoplectic about the use of the term "gang"; in their minds, Ramirez's clique -- and SDI before it -- was simply a group of friends who liked to party.

Ramirez's uncle, Jimi Crowley, a freelance photographer with a partiality for rock star subjects, was a member of the fabled SDI in his youth and a role model for Ramirez. In Crowley's memories of SDI's glory days, which he often shared with his nephew, the group was an adventurous, swashbuckling entourage that protected other kids from the Sunset like brothers and sisters and didn't take crap from anybody. SDI's members certainly weren't anything so sinister as gangbangers. "We wore no gang colors, made no gang symbols," says Crowley. Apparently, neither did Ramirez or his friends.

And the distinction -- between entourage and gang -- seems desperately important to those involved. When the subject is raised, the west-siders are quick to note that neither SDI nor Ramirez and friends had the defining characteristics of a gang, as cited by sociologists: There was no hierarchy, no leader, no initiation rituals, no drug-selling or other organized criminal activities.

The Kezar case struck the Sunset crowd as highly exaggerated. Where the authorities saw thuggery and racism, they saw politics. The mother of the victim, Richard Bailey, was dating a man whose mother was friends with then-Mayor Willie Brown. Debbie Ramirez felt Bailey's political connections had blown what was just a fight after a basketball game "way out of proportion." She was enraged when her son was forced to miss work for court hearings, and then spend 30 days in jail following the assault conviction.

Other members of the clique brushed up against the law in ways that could easily have been seen as ominous -- but weren't, at least not on the west side. In 1998, Philip Sands was busted for selling pot out of his car in the Sunset. (He completed a drug diversion program, and the charge was dismissed.) That same year, Michael Debergerac was convicted of burglarizing the homes of several of his former classmates; he spent a year in jail.

Acting on a tip that Sands might be in possession of some guns that Debergerac was thought to have stolen, two police officers asked Sands for consent to search his house, which, because he was living with his parents, also happened to be the home of former San Francisco Sheriff's Deputy Leo Sands. Philip refused to let them in, and his father told the inspectors to back off. "Leo Sands said that the cops were always harassing his son," reads the police report on the incident, "and that he did not want to talk to us." (Leo Sands refused to comment for this story.) The two inspectors left and did not return with a search warrant. Police deny that Leo Sands' status as a retired law enforcement officer had anything to do with what could be viewed as light-handed treatment. "We had several individuals we were looking at," says Inspector John Cleary, who worked on the case. "We didn't know if he had the guns or not."

Over time, Philip Sands' life became increasingly dark. Two months after the above incident, police were again called to the Sands residence, after Philip, according to police reports, tried to kill himself in the bathroom using one of his father's guns but failed, firing the bullet into a neighbor's living room. The younger Sands had, according to police reports, "a reputation throughout the avenues for carrying guns." He was also hanging around with seedy characters. After being expelled from S.H., he graduated from Lincoln High School, where he had been dating a long-haired Cambodian girl whose brothers, sources close to the murder investigation say, were associates of a violent group of Tenderloin crack and Ecstasy dealers.