‘YOU CANNOT TRUST ANYBODY’
The love of his life was lured into a deadly trap. And then six years later, so was he
To the hundreds of students who lined up outside the funeral home that April evening in 2010, Brian Betts had been a beloved Washington, D.C., middle school principal. A second father. An inspiration.
“R.I.P. Mr. Betts,” said their shirts and hoodies.
“Mr. Betts, We Love You,” read their signs.
But to O’Neil McGean, who stood in the Pierce Funeral Home parking lot in Manassas, Va., gripping a friend’s hand and fighting back tears, Brian had been so much more.
He had been the love of McGean’s life.
They had met at a stoplight, McGean’s personality so boisterous it took him only a few seconds to make a lasting impression. Soon they bought a house together in the District, fixing it up in the evenings. They were inseparable for almost a decade. And even after their breakup, after McGean moved to Mexico and Betts moved to Maryland, they remained good friends.
Then came the gunshots late one night inside Betts’s bedroom in Silver Spring, Md., and the phone ringing 3,200 kilometres away in Mazatlan.
A week later, McGean stood in front of his ex’s casket, wondering what had gone wrong.
“Why did this happen, Brian?” McGean asked aloud.
The answer came two weeks later when police arrested four men, one of whom had arranged to meet Betts via a telephone chat line only to rob him, shoot him and leave him to die.
The crime chastened McGean. He was already careful about living in Mexico. Now he grew wary of online dating.
But by Oct. 25, 2016, that caution had waned. After agreeing to meet someone through a dating app, McGean disappeared — as did US$16,000 from his bank accounts.
The question this time was less why than how.
How could McGean fall prey to the same trap that had claimed Betts six years prior?
How could the 53-year-old not see it coming?
The first messages weren’t alarming.
“Hola amigo, you there,” Jorge Guillen Gonzalez wrote on Facebook messenger on Oct. 26, 2016.
“Si, yo estoy aqui,” replied Donnie McGean, O’Neil's oldest brother. “All is good, and you?” “Not as good (as) I want.” They had met six months earlier when Donnie and his wife visited McGean in Mazatlan, a city known as the Pearl of the Pacific.
McGean had moved there in 2006 after visiting a few times. The same charisma that had made him the centre of attention as a kid in Chevy Chase, Md. — leading his little brother Chris and their friends through Rock Creek Park, referee- ing fights after school at Blessed Sacrament, captaining dodge ball games — made him popular in the gay-friendly resort town.
It was in Mazatlan that McGean met Gonzalez, a handsome young Mexican with dark hair, green eyes and a tattoo across his tightly muscled chest reading “Warrior of God.” They had dated for a short time before opening a café together in 2014.
Now Gonzalez said he was worried.
McGean had gone on a date the night before with someone he’d met on a gay dating app, Gonzalez said, and McGean wasn’t home yet, nor was he answering his phone. His two cherished dogs — Brandy and Guinness, named after McGean’s favourite drinks — hadn’t been fed.
Drug violence in the surrounding state of Sinaloa had crept into Mazatlan. So when Gonzalez said he was receiving strange Spanglish texts from McGean’s phone, Donnie told him to call the police.
“(I) really miss O’Neil. He is my life. He knows how much I love him. Hope he is OK, wherever he is,” Gonzalez wrote in broken English.
“My heart is broken,” he said later. “I just wanna die.”
“Hang in there. I will be there tomorrow,” Donnie wrote as he prepared to board a flight from his home in Maui to Mazatlan. “Our family is very grateful to have you as a friend of O’Neil. Without you, we would be nowhere right now.”