Sunset on a Murder

On Oct. 16, 2003, Sands was arrested while sipping coffee with his lawyers at Caffe Roma, across from the Hall of Justice, and charged with murder. He had been en route to appear before a grand jury investigating Ramirez's death.

One of Sands' lawyers, Laurie Savill, maintains Sands is innocent.

"All they have is circumstantial evidence," Savill says. "There is an alibi defense I can't comment on ... it's my information and belief that [Ramirez] was using a lot of cocaine and had debts in that regard. He also had a gambling problem, and had debts outstanding. ... His normal pattern of behavior was to go out and get drunk and get into fights."

The medical examiner's report revealed that Ramirez, indeed, had cocaine in his bloodstream when he was murdered. But friends and family members interviewed for this story deny that Ramirez had enough money to do much cocaine or gambling.

Savill's last assertion, however, is harder for people who knew Ramirez to deny: He did drink a lot, and he did get into fistfights. He and his friends had been doing it for years, and it was no big secret. It was part of their identity as Sunset guys.

The murder of Robert Ramirez devastated the Sunset, where Ramirez, tough-guy persona and all, had been much loved. Hundreds of young men and women who had grown up with him came by Ramirez's house to offer their condolences and packed his memorial service. Conspicuously absent, however, was Sands.

"All the cops were asking about Phil," says Gomez. "I thought, 'There's no possible way he did it.' ... But he didn't show up at Robert's funeral, and everything changed after that. If I didn't do it, I would come to the funeral to prove it."

Sands' parents did attend the memorial, however, and, according to Debbie Ramirez, kneeled at Robert's casket. Afterward, Marie Sands handed Debbie a card that Philip Sands had written, which read, "Robert was like a brother to me."

Now, Debbie Ramirez spends a lot of quiet moments thinking about the "what ifs." What if the District Attorney's Office and the judge hadn't forced Robert to appear at all those court dates in front of Phil? What if Robert had left North Beach with Michael and Maria that night, rather than with his cousin? What if Robert, rather than waiting for Michael to come pick him up, had just tried to drive home? If life had taken a different direction at countless signposts, her son might be alive today.

She doesn't play the "what if" game about the stabbing incident at Curve in 2001. Ramirez's friends told her that it was all an accident, that Gomez and Ramirez had been goofing around when Ramirez "was pushed" into the programmers. She never questioned the explanation.

St. Cecilia's pastor, Monsignor Michael Harriman, says he never knew Ramirez to be anything but polite and responsible. Gomez's mother, Pat, laughs at the newspaper's description of her son being in "a gang." She has, she says, "no idea where they got that from." Lt. Murphy of the SFPD gang task force says that Ramirez's friends and SDI before them, despite what the papers reported, were not and never had been considered gangs by his department. "They were just drunk idiots," says Murphy in describing SDI.

But what parents, teachers, and law enforcement weren't willing to admit, the Sunset kids themselves knew. There was something seriously wrong with their community, and by the time Ramirez died, it was too late to address it.

"I care about those guys a lot. When I went away to college, I was concerned for their welfare," says former St. Cecilia's student Debbie Ribera. "It's definitely been a tradition in our neighborhood that there's a certain kind of person that's like a male role, that the popular kids sometimes are expected to fill. I know it started a long time ago. I don't know if it's still going on today."

She need not wonder. In June 2003, a group of five Chinese-American teens were, according to court testimony, jumped by a group of white kids in the Sunset. One of the victims, a former student at the private Drew High School named Paul Wong, said he and his friends were going to get some dessert at J.T.'s Diner at 19th and Taraval the evening after high school graduation when they were accosted by two white males. Unprovoked, one of the whites poured beer over one of Wong's friends' head, called the Asian boys "dumb Chinamen," and then began to punch the beer-soaked student. Suddenly, according to Wong, approximately 20 Caucasian boys encircled them, and when Wong and one of his friends tried to escape, two followed and one began to punch Wong in the face.

When the police arrived, all the white kids scattered, except for two. Wong identified one of them as the boy who had punched him. He was a student at Sacred Heart. The case, in which the boy (a juvenile) has been charged with five counts of felony assault with hate crime enhancements, is being litigated.