Devon was still looking back at Tanya when a loud pop rang out on the other side of the door. The bullet slammed into the back of Devon's head, just above his right ear, severing his right eardrum. Tanya heard water running and realized it was Devon's blood. She screamed.

His body slumped forward, and Devon crumpled to the ground. He felt something warm against his face. A pool of his own blood spread out in a ring around him, three full pints stretching nearly four feet across. The person on the other side of the door continued firing. Bullets zinged around the room. Tanya stood frozen in the corner screaming. The shooter shoved hard against the door but Devon's body wedged against it, preventing the door from opening. An arm with a gun in its hand snaked through the opening. Fuck, Devon thought, they're trying to finish me off. The person on the other side fired wildly. Other shooters joined in. Bullets ricocheted around the room, shattering the window and lodging in the ceiling. Police later found nearly 50 rounds in the hallway.

Devon never even saw the shooter's face.

Devon's mother, Linda Blood, arrives for our interview in a vintage, black two-seater Volvo. She's a pretty 52-year-old with bright red hair and well-manicured nails. Born in the San Francisco area, Linda was a teenager during the city's cultural revolution in the late '60s. She hung out at concerts by Black Sabbath, the Grateful Dead, and Led Zeppelin and talks about "positive energy" like someone raised in the Haight-Ashbury district. She has nine children, seven girls and two boys. Devon, the oldest boy, was conceived in the back seat of her ex-husband's car in the parking lot of San Quentin. "We were just feeling it, I guess," she laughs. Linda gave Devon his first tattoo. "I told him how my girlfriends and I used to tattoo each other with a sewing needle and some India ink," she recalls. "He wouldn't let it go." She finally relented and hand-poked "Devon" vertically on her son's calf with a cross at the top and the bottom. He was still in the seventh grade. "His teachers flipped out," she remembers.

After bouncing through a series of schools and adult-education programs, Devon dropped out of high school. He started tattooing in '99 and eventually moved to the Bay Area to work at Industrial Tattoo in Berkeley. Later, he relocated to Sacred Tattoo in Oakland. When he wasn't tattooing, he painted and played drums in local bands at Gilman Street and other clubs. But no matter how well his life in San Francisco felt, Linda saw a black cloud. "I always knew that he would be my project," she sighs. "I just knew something would happen."

Linda was home in Fairfeld when she received the call that her oldest son had been shot; she was 45 minutes from Highland Hospital where Devon would be taken.