On June 22, 2018, campers at Malibu Creek State Park campground were awakened in the hour before dawn by the sound of gunshots, and a child mournfully crying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Tristan Beaudette, a thirty-five-year-old father, sleeping in a tent with his two- and four-year-old daughters, had been shot in the head, and killed.
That summer, I started reporting on the case of the Malibu shooter, and eventually wrote about it for this magazine. Nearly five years later, a man named Anthony Rauda was convicted in Beaudette’s killing. Rauda had shot from outside the tent, firing multiple rounds. The state asked for first-degree murder; the jury, not convinced that he had acted with premeditation, found Rauda guilty of murder in the second degree.
Rauda was a drifter who had been living in an encampment at the margins of Malibu Creek State Park, in the barren hills behind the sheriff’s station. Rauda didn’t know Beaudette, a research scientist based in Orange County, who was taking one last Southern California camping trip before he and his wife, Erica Wu, moved their family to the Bay Area. The shooting appeared to be completely random. But, authorities would later contend, Rauda had long been terrorizing the park, firing on campers and at passing cars on nearby Malibu Canyon Road.
Beaudette’s murder was deeply unsettling—to anyone who has ever entertained notions of sleeping in a tent, but especially to the residents of Malibu, one of the wealthiest, safest, and most heavily touristed communities in California. After the killing, eight additional victims came forward, alleging that they, too, had been shot at; one man had been struck in the arm, requiring surgery. The victims had reported these incidents to rangers and to the local sheriff’s department, but, until Beaudette died, officials issued no warning, and the park remained open. The public was unaware that there was a shooter, or shooters, at large in Malibu.
In the months after the murder, there was a series of burglaries in the same area. Video footage showed a man dressed all in black, carrying a rifle and a backpack. He was mainly stealing food. Scouring the park and the surrounding hills, deputies eventually followed a trail of clues from one burglary scene to Rauda’s encampment. They arrested him—a probationer and a felon illegally in possession of a firearm—and he was eventually charged with Beaudette’s murder, along with ten counts of attempted murder and five counts of armed burglary. Two of the attempted-murder victims were Beaudette’s little girls.
During the trial, Rauda, who pleaded not guilty, waived his right to be present. Throughout the years-long pretrial proceedings, he had been violent and verbally abusive in court; he’d called one judge a bitch, and had been found guilty of attacking two deputies while in custody. (He was tried for that crime, convicted, and served that sentence, all while waiting for his murder trial to commence.) Last week, for his sentencing in the Malibu Creek State Park murder, Rauda was in court, in a restraint chair, wearing an orange jumpsuit with a black-mesh spit guard over his face.
Erica Wu, Beaudette’s widow, was also in court, flanked by three of her sisters and her brother-in-law Scott McCurdy, who had been with his own small children, sleeping in the tent beside Beaudette’s, at the time of the murder. Before delivering the sentence, the judge invited Wu to address the court. She stood, a slim, determined woman, clutching a small packet of tissues and a sheaf of papers. Wu and Beaudette had met when they were eighteen; she described him as the love of her life. “We lost the entire future that we had planned,” she said. “The family that we were and the family that we would’ve become.” Wu had been home, in Orange County, studying for her medical boards, when her husband took the children camping, but she spoke at length about the scene in the tent, as she imagined it: the new stuffed animals her girls had, their pink and purple sleeping bags. She imagined that her two-year-old would’ve slept through the shots, only to be awakened by blood soaking through her pajamas and diaper. Her cries would have awakened her four-year-old sister, who had started calling for their dad. Wu wondered if her husband had had time for a last thought; if so, she said, he would have sent “some sort of message out to the universe to please keep his girls safe.” As she spoke, tears streamed down her sisters’ faces. She asked the judge to impose the maximum possible sentence.
In addition to Beaudette’s murder, the jury had found Rauda guilty of three counts of attempted murder: the two children and a man, Ian Kincaid, whose Tesla had been shot up while he drove on Malibu Canyon Road early one morning four days before Beaudette’s murder. The jury also found Rauda guilty on the five burglary charges. Regarding the other shootings, which had been committed with a different weapon—never located—they found him not guilty.
After Wu spoke, the judge turned to Rauda.“I can say without hesitation that not only is Mr. Rauda a danger to the community, he’s an extreme danger to the community,” she said. “This case was chilling. It was violent. It was cold-blooded. There’s absolutely no remorse. It’s like somebody’s worst nightmare.” She went on, “I’ve been around a long time as an attorney, as a judge. I’ve seen many, many dangerous, dangerous people, from gangsters up to domestic terrorists. I’ve seen everybody. And I can say that Mr. Rauda, you ranked amongst the top with regard to your dangerousness to the community.”
For those reasons, the judge said, she would not exercise her discretion to lessen the time for the gun charges. She sentenced Rauda to a hundred and nineteen years to life in prison. (Later, in a statement e-mailed to the Times, Rauda’s lawyer confirmed that he was appealing the verdict.)
As Rauda was wheeled out, Wu glanced fleetingly at him, then looked away. One part of her ordeal was over. Now she just has to go back to the reality she described in her statement to the court, “a void that I feel every single day,” and the daily heaviness of parenting alone—“making every decision, giving every hug, drying every tear, knowing that I’m it for them. Well, also knowing that I’m not enough, because he should be here, and he would be here if it weren’t for what happened that night.” 
The Trial of the Malibu Shooter
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