The Outsiders
The unofficial leader of Amarillo’s punk scene looked and dressed and acted different. His nonconformity made him an easy target—and it may have kept the football player who killed him from going to jail.
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Not long after, at the age of seventeen, he moved out of his parents’ house and took up residence in an apartment above a now-defunct punk club, the Egg, making ends meet by washing dishes at the Catfish Shack. Once he had scraped together a few hundred dollars, he decided to see what lay beyond Amarillo. With a stray dog in tow, he and Jennifer hitched rides up and down the East Coast and lived by their wits, collecting cans and polishing rigs at truck stops for spare change and occasionally dumpster diving for dinner. After four months on the road, Brian and Jennifer returned to Amarillo. Brian began working for Marsh in 1997, putting fake road signs—some with curious paintings on them, others with absurd sayings such as “Road Does Not End” and “Lubbock Sucks Eggs”—around town as part of a project dubbed the Dynamite Museum. Brian thrived in its carnivallike atmosphere; the sign crew rode around town in a surrealist caravan, blasting bull-fighting music out of a pink 1959 Cadillac and a Yellow Submarine—themed hearse, accompanied by a pig named Cinderella and Marsh in a top hat reading poetry. Brian worked door-to-door, trying to persuade Amarilloans to place Dynamite Museum signs in their front yard, and his brash charm worked on even the most resistant of adults. “He looked bizarre, but he could walk toward people with his hand out, grinning, and they would like him before he got to their front door,” Marsh explained. “I called him Sunshine. He was boisterous, optimistic, fun—so Sunshine just stuck.”
Brian assumed a larger-than-life stature among the punks, bringing traveling bands to town with the money he earned through the Dynamite Museum and making the Eighth Street House a refuge for kids who had nowhere else to go, providing them with food and a place to sleep. “Brian’s main goal, and he had saved a whole lot of money for it, was to start an all-ages place for bands, poetry, art, theater,” said Brady Clark, a former Bomb City Skin. “He wanted to have a place where kids could hang out, be in their own element, and not get harassed by a bunch of drunk rednecks. He wanted to give everyone something constructive to do with their free time.”
Brian could have used something constructive himself. In his own free time, he drank heavily; his blood alcohol level on the night he died was .18 percent, nearly twice the legal limit at the time. That night, he had spent the previous few hours at his brother Jason’s house, listening to records and drinking beer, before deciding to drive up to Western Street. Whatever Brian’s motivations were when he joined the fighting—whether it was out of loyalty, vengeance, or drunken bravado—Jennifer is sure that he didn’t expect to die. “I remember after he was hit, there was a cheer,” she said flatly, steeling herself against the heartache of the memory. “We ran to him as soon as he went down. He was trying to talk, but there was too much blood coming out of his mouth. Jason put his arms around him and held him while he died.”
AS THE CADILLAC SPED AWAY from Western Street, Elise Thompson sat in the back seat in stunned silence, her panic slowly giving way to a profound sense of dread. Her mind reeled; the enormity of what had happened seemed impossible to grasp, but she knew, as the car headed down the freeway toward home, that the boy on the pavement was dead. Dustin Camp raced toward Wolflin, turning down one of its wide streets before breaking the silence. “Y’all don’t have to go down with me,” he offered, his voice filled with alarm. “I’ll tell them you weren’t in the car.” Rob Mansfield nodded solemnly from the front seat, agreeing that perhaps that would be best. “But we were in the car,” Elise said firmly. “Nancy,” Rob urged her, calling her by her first name, “I don’t think you understand how serious this is.” Upon hearing his friend’s assessment of the situation, Dustin lost his composure and broke into choking sobs, banging his head repeatedly against the steering wheel.
It was not the face he usually presented to the world. Relentlessly upbeat, he often wore a confident grin, his close-cropped blond hair framing a boyish face. “Dustin has a million-dollar smile and a sense of humor that’s contagious,” said a family friend. “He laughs with his whole body. When he enters a room, the mood lightens, people smile.” In the locker room at Tascosa High he regularly ribbed other players as they suited up, keeping them in stitches before the game and at halftime. “He used to joke around in class a lot and make everybody crack up,” remembered his friend Jesse Sierra. “At dances, he danced real wild. He’s laid-back, never serious.” When football season was over, he spent his afternoons lifting weights and his weekends mountain biking in nearby Palo Duro Canyon; during the summers, he worked at the auto repair shop that his parents owned, fixing cars with his father.
Football was an all-consuming passion for Dustin (who declined to be interviewed for this story, as did his parents), though he was not blessed with the physique for stardom. He was slightly built—a shortcoming he worked hard to overcome, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches between meals to bulk up and lifting weights with a determined intensity. “He wasn’t anyone we noticed initially,” recalled Tascosa High JV football coach Alan Hunnicutt, “but his desire to play was 110 percent.” The Camps were enthusiastic supporters, attending every game of the season and sounding an air horn whenever the team scored a touchdown. But by his junior year, Dustin was still playing JV football while many of his friends—including Rob—played varsity and excelled at the game. If he felt any frustration, he deflected it with jibes and jokes, sitting with the varsity team at lunch and trading wisecracks with them in the weight room.
Dustin knew well what it meant to be on the outside looking in: Though he was well regarded by the teenagers in Tascosa High’s ruling elite, he was not one of them. He was from a family of average means, an inescapable fact that set him apart from the old-money crowd. His Cadillac was nearly fifteen years old, and his parents’ house, though in Wolflin, sat on its edge, one block from a lower-income part of town. Yet rather than rejecting a world to which he could never fully belong—as had the punks, whom he and his friends scorned—he embraced it. Standing at the fringes of the in crowd, he perhaps longed for a sense of identity; by distancing himself from the “freaks,” he and his friends could delineate their own social standing within Tascosa’s stratified society, a place where each clique eyed the others with equal suspicion. Such antagonisms were often fueled as much by drinking as by any real aversion to one another; in the hours before Brian’s death, Dustin drank a few beers with a friend, and in his Cadillac was a partially empty eighteen pack of beer and a nearly empty bottle of whiskey left over from the week before. Of course, the night that Brian died was unlike any other. “It was pandemonium,” said one parent. “One of Dustin’s friends had a concussion; another had his head laid open with a chain. A few boys went to the hospital, and the rest came home screaming.”
Dustin had returned home that evening for a restless night’s sleep, but Elise and Rob—after a tearful discussion—decided to wake their parents and drive down to the police station. Their accounts of what had happened made for damning evidence against their friend: At dawn, police officers arrived at Dustin’s house and arrested him on a charge of murder. He would first claim that he had been alone in his car; he would also say that he had been trying to help a friend who was being beaten by Brian and that Brian had fallen under the wheels of his Cadillac after slipping on ice. “Dustin’s fault that night lay in intimidation and fear, not hatred, but what he did was still wrong,” Elise observed. “A lot of people tried to defend him, but you cannot defend what he did.” The event devastated Elise, who went into a severe depression, unable to get out of bed during the weeks that followed. “I didn’t feel like I should be alive,” she said. “I felt so guilty. I ran those few moments over and over again in my mind, trying to figure out what I could have done different. People tried to comfort me, but they didn’t understand.”
This May, during Tascosa High’s graduation ceremonies, Elise startled her fellow students by delivering an emotional valedictorian speech about the night of December 12, 1997. “On that evening, a boy lost his life and with him a part of many people died,” she announced to the assembled crowd of five thousand, while some students shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. “Nothing else I have experienced has so greatly molded who I am and what I think. I hope its message can penetrate your heart.” Describing how the fatal fight was waged between “two groups of people who wore different types of clothes,” she urged her classmates to rethink their own prejudices toward one another. “So I challenge you and me, all of us, to break through the stereotypes with which you may have been raised. I challenge each one of us to see the art, the beauty of humanity, in others.”
THE TRIAL BEGAN ON AN UNCOMMONLY hot, windless morning during the last week in August this year at the Potter County Courts Building, a monolithic building of concrete and granite that seems out of place amid the classic limestone facades of downtown Amarillo. On the left side of the aisle that divided Judge Abe Lopez’s courtroom lay a familiar tableau of suburban life: Broad-shouldered boys in khakis and button-down dress shirts, accompanied by their girlfriends; Mike Camp and his wife, Debbie, who greeted their son’s friends warmly; a pastor from the First Presbyterian Church; and several older, smartly dressed relatives whose pleasantries and courteous manners were reminiscent of a Sunday afternoon church function. Across the aisle sat Mike and Betty Deneke, holding hands in silence, and behind them were three rows of punks: a ragtag bunch that, despite having removed their piercings and wallet chains and dog collars for the benefit of a metal detector, looked distinctly out of place in the formality of a courtroom. Dustin sat at the defense table with his back to them all, his hands folded neatly. He would register little emotion for the duration of the seven-day trial, though he occasionally flushed with embarrassment when his friends took the stand.
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