Page 6 of 8
As the clerk rings up Williams' purchase, Temple jumps from a car at the curb, pulls a hooded sweater over his head, and walks up behind Williams, according to the grand jury testimony of two eyewitnesses.
One of the witnesses, Otis Gains, was on the phone in the store when Temple walked in. "He didn't say anything," Gains told the grand jury last November. "He just walked up to Jacky Williams and shot him."
Actually, Temple is alleged to have shot Williams twice at the base of the neck. The bullets didn't kill Williams immediately. One cut through a carotid artery. Both lodged in Williams' shattered jawbone, but somehow the dying man managed to stagger from the store and fall face up in a pile on the street. Temple finished the job, firing several more bullets into or toward Jacky Williams' chest. He fired so furiously that, the coroner's report will show, some of the bullets missed their target and ricocheted off the cement.
Before the air went still, Temple was back in the waiting car, manned by an accomplice still unknown to law enforcement authorities. The car drove off.
By the early 1990s Bernard Temple had developed a fearsome reputation not only for precision murder, but also for the art of turf-warrior ultraviolence.
Consider the 9th of September, 1991, three months after Temple whacked Williams. It's a clear day, and approximately 10 gangbangers from Hunters Point load up in several cars: a raggedy-ass brown Olds Cutlass; two Mustangs, black and green; another Olds Cutlass, stripped of paint and primer gray; a Buick Skylark; a Mercury Cougar; and a gray, two-door Datsun.
Bernard Temple is driving his girlfriend's four-door Honda. Riding with him are Danny Boy Williams and Robert Crittle.
The HP mob have armed themselves with golf clubs and guns. They aren't going to the driving range. The previous night a Hunters Point kid had his ass kicked by a kid from Oceanview.
It's payback time.
Their caravan rumbling into the rival neighborhood, Temple and his crew spot Andrew Isler and Robert Blackman standing at Randolph and Head streets.
"Is that the nigga?" one of the HP crew asks, referring to the two men.
The cars come to a halt and gunshots ring out. Blackman runs off, successfully evading his would-be attackers. Isler is less fortunate as he high-tails it up the hill on Head Street and dives under a car to hide.
"Should we kill him?" someone asks as the HP contingent spots Isler cowering under the car.
"Yes," the answer comes.
A furtive grasping of hands, and Isler is dragged out to what he thinks is his certain doom.
He feels a violent force strike the back of his head, and he thinks he's been shot. But Isler is in luck (which is, granted, an extremely relative concept at this point). He's merely being beaten into submission with golf clubs.
After the beating, Temple and his posse drive off looking for more action. They find their next victim, Russell Winston, waiting for a haircut appointment in front of a barber shop on Broad Street, three blocks from where the HP gang left Isler bleeding on the sidewalk.
Jumping out of Temple's car, Danny Boy confronts Winston, demanding money he says he is owed. Winston is less than forthcoming, and Danny Boy raps him over the head with a golf club. As Winston tries to escape into a nearby liquor store, Danny Boy whacks him in the face, severely damaging his eye and breaking the club.
Apparently satisfied with their violent mission, Temple and the other cars load up and head onto nearby Highway 280 toward the safety of Hunters Point. Screaming down the highway in clear weather, Temple flies across all lanes of traffic and loses control of his Honda, 150 feet from the Alemany Boulevard offramp. He sideswipes the center divider, spins out, slams head-on into the divider, spins 180 degrees, and, heading backward, hits the divider one more time, turning the front end into an accordion and his own head into a bloody mess. Temple and his passengers scramble across lanes of freeway traffic to jump into one of the other HP cars and head off for the hospital.
When police and state troopers show up at San Francisco General Hospital to investigate the Oceanside beatings and the hit-and-run accident on 280, they find a strange situation indeed. Temple and his passengers lie on gurneys in the hall outside the emergency room; inside, doctors are working to save Winston's eye and patch up Isler.
Despite all the mayhem of that day in September 1991; regardless of the negative opinions of Temple's probation officer, developed over two years of work with the gangbanger; regardless of the 2-1/2-year gang investigation by Officer Fowlie that established Temple as a gang leader; regardless of the man's widespread reputation as a hard-ass gang member, a killer, a soul-jacker; regardless of his well-known and pivotal role in the gang war frenzy in Bayview-Hunters Point; regardless of all these horribly incriminating realities, as a result of the mayhem of Sept. 9, 1991, Bernard Temple is required only to plead guilty to one minor charge: receiving stolen property, a beeper he took from Isler.
Temple is sentenced on Feb. 27, 1992, to 16 months in jail. Even that is eventually reduced to nine months of actual lockup in the county clink. By Christmas, he's back on the street.
Robert Nash is trapped in the worst imaginable way. Now that he has ratted on the Soul-Jacker and screwed the DA by recanting his testimony against Temple, Nash has a contract killer and a task force full of prosecutors and federal agents dropping him from their Christmas card lists. But lives have a way of getting tangled up like uncoiled fishing line when the federal government brings its power to bear.
