Word: rustica
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...stick to knocking over Burger Kings?) Tom had worked as a clerk at Nordstrom and--duh--someone recognized him when he and Ethan ambled in. So they walked out without taking a thing. They should have gone home, but after weeks of planning, they were primed. They settled on Rustica, a neighborhood Italian place with a nice sourdough. The petrified manager handed over $500, and it was in the heady aftermath that not far away Ethan shot himself...
...were ashen when they got to the hospital--"My God, they were white as sheets," friends would later say. The tale the boys concocted--some highly unbelievable stuff about a gang attack, followed by only slightly more believable stuff about a joyride gone bad--had made the cops suspicious. Rustica would be the inauspicious conclusion to a 12-month robbery spree by two boys who were, everyone thought, model young citizens...
Things aren't so special anymore for Ethan and Tom. They're in the county jail, where if you need a root canal, as Ethan did last month, your lawyer has to file a three-page motion. In November, a year after Rustica, Ethan pleaded guilty to three counts of robbery and promised to apologize to victims in all 20. Now 19 years old, he will spend 8 1/2 years in prison...
Even though police had been suspicious of Ethan's self-inflicted wound, it took them months to fully link the Chevy Suburban to the Rustica robbery and then to Ethan--and weeks more to confirm the connection with DNA tests. But by the following spring, authorities were finally ready to move. On April 16, 1998, they arrested Ethan at school...
That emotion is familiar to Pamela Hartley. She still is the manager at the Rustica, where she was eating a late dinner that ghastly night when Tom and Ethan burst in. One of them pointed a gun at her and told her to "open the f______ drawer." The experience is with her every night at the restaurant. "You know, people say they were kids, or they weren't really going to shoot, or whatever," Hartley says. "But they were in a very violent state of mind, screaming, just all over the place. They wanted everyone to think they would hurt...