EVEN NOW, FAMILY MEMBERS of the boys who died in the Sespe tragedy can't let go of the most difficult question: Why were the boys taken out into the storm? "If only they had left them alone in the cabin," Jan Cassol says. "They killed my kids. I believe it to this very day: They killed my kids." She slams her fist on the table. "It eats at you," she says, her eyes flashing. Debra knows a terrible, monstrous mistake was made. But she wants to let the anguish go, to forgive, and she can't quite bring herself to heap all her anger on Larson, Sears, and Greenhill, the would-be rescuers, for what happened. "They died as well," she points out.

The days following the tragedy were a blur of confusion for Pat Larson. She moved with sons Steve and Mark to her parents' house, back in Taft, the dead-end town Chet had escaped. "I was scared to death," Pat says. She had to tell her two young sons that their father wasn't coming home. A few days after the accident, Chet's parents told her his body had been recovered. They wanted her to help identify him. She refused. "I can't go. I'm not supposed to. It's not him," she told her angry and grieving in-laws. They took Chet's younger brother, Max, instead. Max walked into the morgue and saw the left hand of the corpse sticking out from under a sheet. There was no sign of a wedding ring. Pat had been right: It wasn't Chet. It turned out to be Robert Samples. The body had been so battered beyond recognition it was hard to identify. "Of course, they never found his body, but I knew they weren't going to," Pat says.

Pat was relieved that Chet had disappeared, as if he had been transported straight to heaven. And she drew at least some peace from the knowledge that he had died doing something that made him happy, and not in the oil fields. "He loved being a sheriff," she says. "He was a Christian, and he was ready to go."

In a way, the Larsons were lucky. Chet was a husband and father, but his family didn't see him as a victim, and he was a man who had made his own choices. For the Donatos, Rauhs, Cassols, and Salisburys (who also lost two boys, Danny, 13, and Eddie, 11), there would always be anguish and unanswered questions.

Before I left California, I managed to track down Pat Salisbury. He had been 17 and one of seven children when his younger brothers died. Today he is a burly 56-year-old contractor who still lives in the area with his wife and three children. His parents are both dead, buried next to Danny and Eddie. But Pat, who still has a very hard time talking about the accident, explains how it blew his tight-knit family apart. "We all just kind of went, This can happen at any minute," Salisbury says. "It was devastating, absolutely devastating."

Pat struggled for years with rage and alcoholism. It was only after a counselor in 2003 stumbled on the fact that his two younger brothers had been tragically killed decades earlier that he was given the belated grief counseling he needed. "People are afraid of death, but death is a part of life," he says now. "Enjoy every day you are alive, because you never know when you will end up on a bulldozer. You just don't know."

Steve Larson found a kind of balance, too. Growing up, he never liked cops, and he wondered all his life whether he would have liked his father and whether his father had been a hero or responsible for the deaths of six young boys. Retracing Chester Larson's tragic march to the final crossing has helped him see his father through the shroud of death. He knows now that Chet was a decent man who made a terrible yet honest mistake. He knows now that his father, and Greenhill and Sears, were preoccupied with completing their mission and that what none of them realized was that they were in the midst of the heaviest rains ever to fall in the area. In four days, more than 16 inches of rain poured down the hillsides into the Sespe Creek bed. Dulled by cold and exhaustion, they simply failed to comprehend the brutal, unholy potential of the flash flood that would result.

Later Steve writes me: "Life is a series of calculated risks. I no longer accept that his death was ‘meant to be.' Maybe I will have a better understanding of the greater purpose of his death someday. For now, I have a wife and two children who need me (as he did), and I am going to put them first and make sure I make it home at the end of the day."