Hours before he was killed, Nick Markowitz thought he was finally going home.
It had been a strange, often scary two-day odyssey since a group of young men snatched him off the street in his sleepy West Hills neighborhood and carted him up the coast to Santa Barbara, according to testimony before a grand jury in Santa Barbara County.
The kidnappers told Nick that his older half brother, Ben, owed one of them drug money, the grand jury transcript says, and they were taking the 15-year-old hostage until Ben paid the debt.
Nick had been beaten up, thrown into a van and later blindfolded and bound. But after the most threatening guy in the bunch took off--a tough-talking 20-year-old named Jesse James Hollywood--he'd been allowed to amble around some of the houses where he was taken, free to eat or watch TV.
The 750-page transcript released last week, which provides the basis for this story, offers the most complete account yet of Nick's kidnapping and death. Based on testimony taken in closed court sessions in October, the transcript sketches a tragic portrait of the boy's last days--when the pendulum seemed to swing wildly between the laid-back vibe of teenagers hanging out and the ominous sense that Nick was in terrible danger.
Much of the time he was barely guarded by his captors, and had he realized how dire his plight was, authorities say, he probably could have escaped.
On the night of Aug. 8, the pendulum appeared to be swaying back in Nick's favor. At a small party at a State Street hotel in Santa Barbara fueled by rum and Coke, cigarettes and marijuana, Nick and another teenage boy went swimming in the outdoor pool, according to testimony from a 17-year-old Santa Barbara girl who was there.
Over and over, one of Nick's alleged abductors, 20-year-old Jesse Rugge, had assured him, "I'm going to take you home. I'll put you on a Greyhound. I'm going to get you home," the girl, whose name is being withheld by The Times because she is a minor, told the grand jury.
Nick, she said, believed Rugge.
"He seemed happy," she said. "I talked to him about it, and he said that he would tell his grandkids about it, just the story."
But a few hours later, Nick was dead.
Authorities say Rugge and Ryan Hoyt, 21, marched the boy into the mountains in the middle of the night and that Hoyt shot him nine times beside a narrow trail. Graham Pressley, the skinny 17-year-old who had joined Nick in the swimming pool, was there too. He had allegedly helped dig the grave and was waiting in a car at the foot of the trail when he heard the burst of gunfire.
