Sunset on a Murder

The evening that marked the beginning of the end of the Sands-Ramirez friendship started out like many another entourage Saturday night. Sands, Ramirez, Gomez, Debergerac, and Mark Nikolov, another old friend, had drinks at a bar then called Curve, on Third Street near SBC Park. With them were four college girls. It was three days after 9/11.

According to Brooke Bittiker, one of the college girls interviewed in the police report, when the group left the bar, "Ramirez was acting tough." As they walked down the street, two physically unimposing computer programmers, one blond, the other dark-skinned, were walking toward them on the sidewalk. The programmers' names were Robin Clarke and Sean Fernandez. According to statements taken from Bittiker, Clarke, and Fernandez -- the only people who claimed to have seen what happened next -- Ramirez purposefully broke away from the rest of his group. Then, they say, he walked between the two techies and shoved them both, hard.

The programmers stopped and looked at each other in astonishment. Fernandez was ready to let it go, but Clarke was livid. He admittedly tackled Ramirez, screaming, "Why did you do it?"

According to police reports, Ramirez yelled, "Because you're a white nigger, and he's a fucking Arab, and we are going to fuckin' kill all you Arabs!"

"But I'm not Arabic," Fernandez protested. "I'm Spanish Catholic!"

Somebody punched Fernandez, he fought back, and some of Ramirez's group jumped into the fray, statements taken by police say. Then, just as things were beginning to break up, Clarke told SF Weekly, Sands punched him hard in the chest. He was surprised that he felt no pain from the blow. Abruptly, both programmers say, their opponents scattered, leaving only the girls and Ramirez, who then all jumped into a white SUV parked at the curb. Fernandez and Clarke blocked the truck's path with their bodies, frantically spelling out the SUV's license plate number to 911 operators, begging them to send the police.

Ramirez eventually gave up trying to chase Fernandez and Clarke away from the front of the SUV and took off on foot, leaving the girls to deal with the situation.

Suddenly, Clarke found he couldn't breathe and collapsed on the sidewalk. A homeless man with a long gray beard who happened to have been standing on the sidelines put his jacket under Clarke's head and held his hand. Gasping for air, wondering what was wrong with him, Clarke managed to unzip his jacket. His shirt was drenched in blood. He'd been stabbed.

Five days later, police interviewed Ramirez. According to police reports, he said he hadn't known about the stabbing until later that evening, when the entourage, minus Sands, met up at a party in North Beach. Debergerac had told him Sands had confessed to stabbing Clarke. So Ramirez had called Sands and demanded, "What would make you do that?"

"Because I was drunk, and he hit you in the head," Ramirez said Sands told him.

When police interviewed Gomez a week later, he told police that Sands and Ramirez had come to his house a few days after the fight and Ramirez had again asked Sands why he'd stabbed Clarke.

"I'm just trying to do my thing," Sands had replied, according to Gomez.

The following day, Sands was arrested and charged with the stabbing.

The prosecution's case appeared to be weak. The only person who claimed to have actually seen the stabbing was Elvis Jessie Presley, the homeless man who had held Clarke's hand. But in Presley's account, the stabber had blond hair, and the weapon was a Phillips screwdriver. Sands has black hair shaved close, and although a screwdriver was found near the scene, there was no forensic evidence that could tie it definitively to the crime.

If the case did go to trial, the prosecution's most potentially damning evidence would be Ramirez's statements to the police, and those attributed to him by Gomez. None of the other witnesses, Debergerac included, admitted questioning Sands directly about the stabbing.

Debbie Ramirez told her son to "do the right thing." Ramirez was still on probation from his Kezar assault conviction and couldn't afford to anger the DA or the police by refusing to testify. But all his life, Ramirez's uncle had instilled in him the belief that if there was one thing you didn't do, it was rat on your friends. "Those kids would know from hanging out with us what was right and what was wrong," Crowley, the one-time SDI member, says. "I would hope that he would not [testify]."

Meanwhile, Sands had been let out on bail, and he and Ramirez avoided each other. Word within the group was that Sands felt betrayed. "[Sands] felt like, 'Robert, it was your fight. I did it for you,'" says Jo Jo.

The trial was repeatedly postponed for a year and a half, and the judge ordered Ramirez to be present at a string of court dates where he was forced to sit before his childhood friend, appearing as if he'd already rolled over on him. Although those close to him say Ramirez hadn't given any indication of what, if anything, he would say at Sands' trial, they noticed that beneath his tough exterior, he was a nervous wreck.