Profile Emerges of Suspected Salon Killer

When longtime friends of Scotty Dekraai saw him being carted away by police on live TV Wednesday, they scarcely recognized him.

Gone was the trim and lovable Wilson High grad who fished the local waterfront and worked gritty port docks. In his place was a disheveled, aged, perhaps bloated figure, accused of gunning down his ex-wife and eight others at a Seal Beach hair salon.

Interviewed late Wednesday, friends and a former boss recalled Dekraai as a passionate sportfishing captain who worked waterfront jobs so dirty and demanding that you had to love the fishing and the ocean. But it was on one of those docks, they said, that the seeds of Wednesday's unfathomable destruction might have been sewn.

In 2007, Dekraai was involved in a gruesome accident that killed a deckhand -- cutting her in two as Dekraii tried to save her -- and nearly severed Dekraai's legs, according to friends and news accounts.

"I saw him two years later, and he was like a ghost of who he was," recalled a Pierpoint Landing co-worker.

Aside from family, nobody knew Dekraai--an embattled, thrice-married father so disabled he needed a caretaker--longer than Don Ashley. Widely known among anglers as the owner of the Pierpoint Landing charter operation, Ashley went to Rogers Middle School with Scotty's parents.

When Scotty was about 12, Ashley put him to work on the docks of his charter business. After graduating Wilson High, class of 1987, Scotty rose to 2nd captain and delighted customers and crew.

Ashley was also neighbors with a woman named Michelle on 14th Street in Seal Beach.

"Hey, I married your former neighbor Michelle," Scotty told Ashley years later, after he'd moved on to Catalina Express and the tugboats of Foss Maritime.

Michelle had two children before meeting Dekraai and together they had a son.

****

Megan, a cop who asked that her last name be withheld, was a teenager when she worked beside the avid fisherman they all knew as Scotty, who she said treated her like a little sister, "and my Dad like his own, calling and checking on him."

He was passionate, emotional, and a painter who was "just a pleasure to be with, to work with." When she got into law enforcement about a decade ago and DeLraai went on to commercial and industrial boating, she saw Scotty less frequently but someone in the small world of sportsfishing and local boating had usually seen him.

 She had only met his second wife Michelle three or four times, their son only once or twice. But her best friend had Michelle cut her hair for years, and finally "things got so tense between Scotty and Michelle that she went somewhere else. She didn't want to be in the middle of it."

A co-worker at the salon until six months ago told her friend, Patch fishing columnist Philip Friedman, that she saw a very different Dekraai, who was mean to Michelle, she said, afraid to give her name. And he was odd. Recognizing there are two sides to an ugly divorce, the former salon worker said she overheard two salon workers who said Dekraai scared them with his argumentative anger and , temper.

On his street in Huntingon Beach Wednesday night, “I just waved at him this morning on my way to work, and he seemed fine,” said DeKraii’s next-door neighbor, Stephanie Malchow. “When I came home, I didn’t know what had happened until I saw police digging through our trash.”

It’s hard to reconcile the image of Orange County’s worst mass murder with the friendly neighbor who shared gardening tips and plants, gave birthday gifts to newborns and joined the neighborhood watch, said Malchow.

“I don’t want people to think he is just an evil monster. He’s a nice guy, but he must have snapped,” Malchow. “If he was in a custody dispute, that would explain why he snapped. He loves his little boy more than anything else in the world.”

DeKraii doted on his son, playing with him in the front yard and worrying about him when the boy went to stay with his ex-wife. He complained bitterly about her to Malchow. He said he didn’t trust her parenting, and complained she did things like drop their son off at school too early in the morning, said Malchow. According to friends and witnesses, Dekraii’s ex-wife worked at the salon and was among the eight people killed in it by the Dekraai.

“His son is such a sweet little boy and an innocent in all this. It’s so sad to think that he is going to suffer the most out of everyone. He is just a poor kid -not even 9, and his family is gone from him,” said Malchow. “He’ll never be able to get far enough away from all this. He’ll be that kid at school who all the kids point at and say, “that’s the kid whose dad did that horrible thing.”

DeKraii recently married his wife, Mindy, in the backyard of their Huntington Beach home and invited all the neighbors. After moving into the neighborhood, the couple quickly became popular for their thoughtful gestures, said Malchow. When DeKraii went fishing, he shared his catch with neighbors. When Malchow left her garage door open, DeKraii knocked on her door and pointed it out, warning her about burglars. The succulents lining Malchow’s house are from cuttings that DeKraii shared.

 “I can’t make sense out of any of this,” said Malchow. “I still think he is a nice guy, but just when you think you know someone, this happens.”

Megan, the officer, said that DeKraai was known to have violently loud screaming matches with Michelle. Ashley said the last time he saw either was at Long Beach Memorial, where Scotty was undergoing treatment on his legs and his mother, also named Michelle, got into a loud argument with his then-wife Michelle.

The friends said Dekraai could not drive after his accident, and Foss provided for a caretaker. He fell in love with her, and she is the wife with whom he lived, they said. They felt he was well taken care of, but said Megan, "he was just never the same after the accident. It physically destroyed him and I saw on TV where the police asked hin to stand up and he couldn't. And it emotionally devastated him. Piper was like his little sister, too, and he could not save  her."

-- Patch columnist Philip Friedman contributed to this story.