By 2004, I had entered a phase of what I charitably referred to as “freelance mobility,” which meant I was broke, semi-employed, and willing to say yes to any gig that covered gas money and came with the promise of a couch to sleep on. This time, it was a short tour with an indie-folk band out of Fresno. I won’t name them because they didn’t make it past the summer and also because, despite their best intentions and inoffensive banjo usage, their music sounded like a group of recovering camp counselors working through collective trauma via harmonized nasal whimpering.

Still, a gig’s a gig. They were paying me, technically, and I’d get to do a loop from Fresno to Long Beach, then up to Sacramento, then back down. The tour was booked through Myspace, which tells you everything you need to know about the era and the caliber of professionalism we were operating at.

I got to Fresno on a Wednesday, giving us a couple of days to rehearse before hitting the road Friday morning. We were holed up in the Tower District, which is Fresno’s vaguely bohemian enclave. Think vintage stores, tattoo parlors, panhandlers with poetry chapbooks. The whole place smells like coffee grounds and car exhaust. It was, for lack of better comparison, Fresno’s answer to Berkeley. If Berkeley had lost a bet and been forced to move inland, away from any bodies of water or viable employment opportunities.

We spent two long days going over the setlist in a dusty practice space above a shuttered Chinese restaurant. The band’s drummer had brought a crock pot and some kind of vegan chili that made the whole building smell like a compost heap. I was just trying to make sure their gear wouldn’t short out when we got to Long Beach. The lead singer kept asking if I could “make the sound more sepia-toned,” whatever the hell that meant.

Friday morning came fast. We were due to roll out at 10 a.m., hit the road by noon, and make it to Long Beach with enough time to load in before soundcheck. I was double checking cables in the parking lot when we heard the first siren.

Then another. Then three. Then what felt like every emergency vehicle in Fresno, all converging somewhere just a few blocks away. The air got tight. The sound hit the buildings and bounced off with that eerie Doppler warble that always makes your stomach twist. When it reached a certain pitch, just past curiosity, before panic, you know something’s really wrong.

We stood around awkwardly, each of us trying not to be the first to ask what the hell was going on. Then, like in a movie, someone ran out of a shop clutching a radio and we all instinctively leaned in. The local station was breaking in with news: there was a hostage situation unfolding nearby. Armed standoff. Possible domestic violence call turned deadly. Not just a routine police call, but something uglier.

We kept packing. That’s what you do. Unless the bullets are flying in your direction, you keep moving. That’s the rule when you’re young, broke, and on tour. You’re always in a hurry to outrun whatever mess the town you’re leaving is trying to bury.

As we drove out of the city, barely ahead of the noon sun, I kept one hand on the dial, flipping between AM static and FM chaos, until the story started to come into focus.

The name Marcus Wesson came up. A local fixture. A familiar face in the Tower District. People knew him as eccentric, maybe even spiritual. He had dreadlocks down to his waist, walked with a strange gravitas, like a street prophet or cultic wizard. He talked about God a lot. He wore long robes in public and referred to his family as “his flock.” Nobody questioned it too hard. Not in Fresno, where weird just means “keeps to themselves.”

But what the police had found in that house wasn’t weird. It was something out of a nightmare. The kind you wake up from sweating, trying to remember which part was real. As we passed the southern edge of town, the full horror started to spill out over the radio in pieces. A standoff. A family held inside. Shots fired. And then the part that made me pull over and turn the volume up, just to make sure I’d heard it right.

Nine bodies. Children and young adults. All shot once through the eye. Stacked in a pile of coffins that Wesson had already built.

Let that last part sink in. The coffins were already there. Pre-cut. Measured. Built. Stored. Just waiting.

This wasn’t a crime of passion. This wasn’t a drug deal gone bad. This was an orchestrated family annihilation, meticulously prepared and carried out in eerie silence while the police waited outside.

It’s hard to explain the silence that took over the van. For a while, no one said anything. Not even the bassist, who usually couldn’t go five minutes without a weed joke or trying to make everyone listen to his unreleased solo project. We just stared out the windows as we barreled south, trying to shake off the static of that broadcast, trying not to picture the stack of bodies described in clinical tones by the newscaster.

When the story made national headlines later that week, the details only got worse. Wesson had been fathering children with his daughters and nieces. The family tree was a Mobius strip of incest and brainwashing. He’d convinced them all that he was God’s chosen conduit and that death was preferable to separation. And when the police came knocking over a custody dispute, Wesson saw it as the beginning of the end.

So he ended it.

I don’t remember much about the Long Beach show that night. I don’t remember the crowd or the lighting or the venue name. I remember checking the exits, though. I remember scanning the audience for weird expressions. I remember wondering if any of them had once lived next door to a guy who built his own coffins.

That’s the part that never quite leaves you – not the moment itself, but the tension between what you saw and what you didn’t. Because I wasn’t in that house. I wasn’t even on the same block. But I’d walked those same streets just days before. I’d eaten at a taco stand four blocks from that nightmare. I’d passed people on the sidewalk who knew what was hiding in that house, even if they didn’t know they knew.

They say trauma is contagious. That even secondhand exposure leaves residue.

Maybe that’s what I keep collecting. Not trauma exactly. Not in the clinical sense. But some kind of static cling of catastrophe. Like when you brush up against something awful and it leaves a charge in your skin.

We kept touring. Fresno faded behind us. By the end of the month, we’d be up in Eugene, Oregon, arguing over whether the band should switch to a more “electro-ambient direction.” The horror show in Fresno was replaced with late-night diner stops and arguments about mic placements.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about those coffins.

They were already there.

That haunts me more than anything. Not the gunshots. Not the control. Not the mess left behind. But the preparation. The deliberation. The fact that he planned to bury his family – and then did.

As always, I’d just missed it. Just slipped past the moment of catastrophe like a hitchhiker in reverse. Another entry for the scrapbook I never wanted to be writing.