This happens to other people.

He was a friend. But I hadn’t seen him in more than 20 years.

The era of Facebook and Twitter and other networking make it possible to connect with people you thought you’d lost touch with. We’ve all been there. You get that invitation to become a friend. You look at the picture. Yikes. Why has everybody changed?

Brian Randone and I had trained for a marathon together. We’d sung together – in the stairwell of the Chicago Avenue subway, in the dining room of Giordano’s Pizza near Water Tower Place.

He was always smiling – one of those guys who had such a presence of the Holy Spirit in his life (or so it seemed) that he could be standing at the counter in McDonald’s, look the clerk in the eye, and start a conversation about God. For me, it wouldn’t work. For Brian, it did. He was younger by several years, but I looked up to him. He just had that something about him.

When I’d been married a year or so, I got a cassette tape in the mail from Brian and it was his voice saying hello, then a bootleg recording began of a song saying, in a variety of ways, “thank you for giving to the Lord.” I think he was in seminary at that point.

I’m not sure when I first saw the news story. It eventually ended up in the Los Angeles Times, but I think it popped up first on AOL news or another search engine, picked up from a TV report or wire service.

I saw the name and thought, “Can’t be.” It sounded the same, but L.A. is a big city – lots of names, lots of people. So I looked real hard at the picture. And my mind tried to peel away the years from that photo to the college-age guy I’d run the streets of Chicago with.

He was under arrest for murder. And the murder, police said, had been beyond brutal. The woman who had been killed died slowly – tortured, the report said. Brian was the one who had called 911 about her death. When police responded, his answers to questions were strange enough that he became the prime suspect.

Reports said Brian had been living with the woman, Felicia Lee, for several months. He’d met her by the pool at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.

She had been an actor in porn films and had done modeling. In fact, her face and body were all over the news reports -- moreso than Brian's picture. Stuff like that sells ads. But I wanted to know why. How could my friend have drifted so far? Had he?

The news reports said he had been part of a TV reality show about handsome eligible bachelors. That fit what I remembered about Brian, sort of. He'd been a kind of star-studded type in the ranks of single men at Moody Bible Institute where we were students together. I can't remember if he was dating anyone while I was there. But I was only there a year, part of a grad program that later expanded to a larger course of study.

A web site called "True Crime Report" carried updated news about his trial and plea (not guilty). It also carried dozens of comments from people who had known him for years. Some said they couldn't believe Brian could ever do it. Others said it didn't surprise them in the least. The ones who weren't surprised were the ones who had known him most recently — mentioning alcohol, illegal narcotics, jealousy, temper, and overall bad sense of judgment about himself and others. Most mentioned charisma: that same something I'd noticed in him at Moody.

It took me a few weeks to get his booking number and details about how to visit him at Men's Central Jail in downtown L.A. When I got there on a weekday afternoon, I expected short lines because I figured people would be at work. I was wrong. The lines were long. And it was mostly women — older teens and twenty-somethings, some with children. There were Moms, too. The day I was there was a few days before Halloween. One kid was in a witch costume. A girl sitting across from me looked to be in her mid-teens, holding a toddler.

The arrangement was a lot like the DMV. Too much work for too few people. When it gets crazy like that, when the lines get long and tempers wear thin, the people waiting cease to be human. They're being treated like numbers, objects, barriers to the peace and quiet needed to get stuff done. So they take on the identity. They act like irritants to an overworked and underpaid staff.
It becomes the law of the playground all over again. Big kids against the little kids.

When you're face to face with people who hate their jobs and hate those who make their jobs harder than they already are, you're smart to say little and know what to do before you get there. Without knowing it, I was breaking all the rules. I didn't know what to do. I needed help. And that's irritating.

So I went 0-2 in the space of four days trying to see Brian. At my second failure, I got on the phone and tried getting some answers. I got few. But I did get the sense that seeing Brian had become less about him and more about me.

When I got home, I put the Moody yearbook down on the floor of my office, put the bail bond card I'd gotten from Jaime (parking garage entrance) by my Bible, and decided I'd pray for Brian a while.

God was at work. It was time for me to get out of the way.