The Gospel of Luke

The unconventional life, and death, of Luke Horgan

On a sunny summer day 10 years ago a young man with a curly mess of blonde hair, eerily clear blue eyes, and a one-dimple grin that came easily and often was sitting on the embankment outside the Starbucks in downtown Manhattan Beach.

A pair of 18-year-old girls walked by on their way to get coffee. He looked at them, silently getting their attention before speaking.

“What is love?” he asked.

Emily Kinni rolled her eyes and continued on her way. She was having none of it. Her friend stayed behind to talk to the stranger. When Kinni came back outside, coffee in hand, ready to leave, she found her friend knee-deep in conversation.

“He kept trying to get me involved,” Kinni said. “I was like, ‘I don’t have time for this.’ But it worked. By that evening we were dating.”

Luke Horgan was 24 years old, tall, lithe, and tan, possessing a natural ease in the way he did nearly everything. He’d grown up four blocks away and was, as Kinni would later recall, “kind of a loiterer. He would just show up and kind of linger around places.”

He was also one of those people who was good at whatever he chose to do. He played piano and clarinet and made up oddly poetic rap songs. At the age of 7, he got into cycling and won his age division in the Manhattan Beach Grand Prix; at 10, he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player. Around the same time, he announced to family and friends that he was going to be an artist, though his repertoire at that point was limited to stick figures. By 16, he was an admired underground graffiti artist who went by “Luker” (until he realized that was a bit too easily identifiable and switched to “Oner” and a variety of other names). By his early 20s, Horgan was a sought-after artist commissioned to do murals throughout Los Angeles.

But the Luke Horgan who was sitting outside Starbucks that day was foremost a seeker.

His life by that point had taken some decidedly non-idyllic turns. His mother, Robin, died suddenly of brain aneurism when he was 16. He was in juvenile detention at the time, let out only to attend her funeral. He took the loss, and his absence when it happened, extremely hard. He spent much of the next half decade in out and of jail, mainly on drug charges, except once, at 17, when he beat up a dealer who’d sold cocaine to a girlfriend and was sentenced to his first adult jail time. He thus came into adulthood imprisoned, and spent the rest of his life seeking freedom.

“What is love?” was no idle question. It never had been in Horgan’s life. Despite the often unsteady circumstances that engulfed him, he left a deep, lasting, and emphatically loving impression on nearly everyone who knew him well.

His encounter with Kinni on that summer day in June of 2006 finally led to a long talk and and a walk back to Horgan’s sanctuary, a sunlit, wood-floored room that was formerly the sitting room in his family’s house. The room, painted light yellow, seemed to glow; the word “love” was hazily sketched on one wall, “peace” on another. A hatch with drop-down stairs from the ceiling led to the attic, where he slept. The tumult of his teenage years had given way to a strict sobriety and a period of intense spiritual study. He meditated, practiced yoga, and grew roses in the yard surrounding the room, which he would deliver to friends he felt in need of love.

Kinni was overwhelmed, if a bit wary.

“He had painted encouraging words all over the room, and beautiful imagery, and there were a lot of books,” she recalled. “It was basically set up to meditate. This cord hung down from the ceiling, which led to the the attic where he slept, which was super cozy and cute. I was freaked out. I was so skeptical. He was this beautiful, loving, almost holy freak, doing cleanses, sober…I was just not having any of that.”

They would, of course, fall deeply in love, a relationship that would come and go but never really end.

Two weeks ago, Horgan’s life came to an end. A homeless man called police from a convenience store in Torrance to report that Horgan’s lifeless body was under a bush beneath the 405 Freeway overpass at the Normandie Avenue exit. The apparent cause of death was an overdose of methamphetamines.

Adell Shay, a former Redondo resident who now lives in Sedona, Arizona, was close to Horgan both when he found and subsequently lost his sobriety, a four year period that lasted from 2004 to 2008. She and her husband were unable to speak for a day after receiving word of Horgan’s passing.

Shay, a fellow spiritual seeker, noted that there was nothing about Horgan’s  death that could be explained so simply as an overdose.  

“There isn’t any end to life,” Shay said. “There couldn’t be, in this oneness of life. He’s still here, and I’m really grateful he’s not encumbered by a body. He’s just able to do what I think he was trying to do. He’s just one now.”

“He hung the moon”

Luke Horgan was born March 24, 1982, the son of Edward and Robin Horgan, a couple with an extraordinary love story of their own.

Edward was born in Inglewood in 1928, a child of the Great Depression and of alcoholic parents. His biological father, whose last name was Luker, left when he was an infant and he was adopted and raised by his stepfather, which is where the Horgan name came from (Luke’s full name was Edward Luker Horgan). He served in the Korean War and returned to the South Bay to become an electrical engineer for Northrop Grumman as well as a general contractor.

He met Robin at Northrop. She was 20 years younger, and had likewise emerged from a troubled family life —  the second oldest of six children whose mother was an alcoholic. Robin from a young age took charge of helping raise her siblings, and left home at 18 to escape abuse. Edward and Robin married five years after meeting and didn’t begin having children for another eight years. They built their own home, on Ardmore and 13th in Manhattan Beach —  every night and weekend for seven years, they worked on it, laying brick and concrete, roofing, flooring, every last detail.  

After Luke was born, they wasted no time, and his little sister, Jamie, was born 16 months later. Both parents had strong ideas of how they would raise their children; the idyllic childhood Luke and Jamie would experience did not happen by chance.

“My mom worked full time through my childhood, but would wake up at 3 a.m. to be at work at 5 a.m. so she could pick us up from school by 3 p.m.,” recalled Jamie. “Then she would help us with our homework, do house chores and cook dinner. We sat and ate dinner at the table nearly every single night. Most nights, my Mom would wrap up the leftovers she cooked and we, as a family, would walk over to the local post office and leave the food for a homeless woman who lived there at the time.”

The idea of service was built into the family. The Horgans adopted families every December.  The kids would pick out presents, and —  often packing up a Christmas tree —  head to East LA to surprise some kids in need.

The Horgans realized Luke had special gifts very early on —  he had a photographic memory, and could learn practically anything very quickly —  and enrolled him in Montessori school, where he excelled.

Luke, Jamie, and their cousin, Candice, grew up together, a close little family unit who wandered Yosemite National Park every summer and secretly deemed themselves an imaginary crime-fighting “three amigos” with secret names for one another: Ninja Luke, Karate Canners, and Nurse Jamie.

Candice and Luke were a few months apart in age and did everything together; Jamie was two years younger, a tag-along who idolized her big brother, and would later follow in his footsteps, in ways both good and bad.

One quality that struck most people who encountered Luke as a child was his sense of calm.

Once, when they were about 10, Candice and Luke had thrown themselves fully into learning how to boogie-board, and found themselves pulled out past the Manhattan Beach Pier in a rip current. A lifeguard came to rescue them and reached Luke first. Luke calmly waved him off, and pointed to his cousin. “Go get her,” he told the guard. “I’ll be alright.”

“He just sat there and waited patiently,” Berry recalled. “That memory always stuck with me, because it was so like Luke. I thought it was so sweet of him, thinking of someone else, even though he was scared, too. It’s a prime example of his generosity and his deep connection to other people, really caring about their well-being.”

“He was very unassumingly Zen. It was almost as if he were beyond his years. He had this innate wisdom about him, a certain level of calmness that was different. Even those younger years, he just understood certain things about life.”

Jamie just wanted to be like Luke. When the family went to Yosemite, the kids were allowed to bring one thing home; when Luke chose an amethyst quartz, Jamie chose the same. At 7, when he won the Manhattan Beach Grand Prix bike race for kids and his victory photo was being taken, she jumped into the frame, trying to share the victory.

“He liked Darth Vader, so I liked Darth Vader,” she said. “He loved He-Man, so I had to like She-Ra.”

Perhaps the first great shock in Luke’s life came when he entered Manhattan Beach Intermediate School (now Manhattan Beach Middle School) after spending his elementary years in Montessori school and then tiny Manhattan Academy. He went from classes with three kids in his age group to 30, a school with a few dozen to hundreds of students.

“It was also right at that age when you have the social pressure on you to be cool,” Jamie said. “To find an identity.”

Luke started acting out. This was when his graffiti career began and when his drinking and drug use began. He went to juvenile hall for the first time at age 12; he would be in and out of the criminal justice system the rest of his life. His sister estimates that by the time of his passing, Luke had spent a third of his life jailed.

Yet he always had time for the people he loved. His cousin Candice, who was a tomboy, kept hanging out with Luke and his friends. One day, when they were 13, he told her, gently, that she really was going to need to learn to skateboard if she was going to keep up with everyone.

“Oh my god, he was so patient,” she said. “I was so awful at it, and he’d sit there for hours and hours teaching me. He really wanted to share the things he loved. One time he was teaching me how to ‘ollie’ [getting air on a skateboard] and I just had this epic fail, and it just didn’t faze him at all. He was such a teacher.”

And then, at 16, their mother died. Luke had been in juvenile hall for a few months when she fell suddenly ill. As Jamie recalled, for three weeks, she’d stopped eating and sleeping regularly. Her behavior became erratic, and their father took her to a hospital —  where they checked her into the psychiatric ward, despite his protestations that she was experiencing physical effects, such as tingling in her hands.

On her second day in the hospital, when her mother had a moment of clarity, Jamie was able to speak to her on the phone. “She told me she was going to die that night,” Jamie recalled. “I said, ‘No, no, you are going to be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.’  We got the call the next morning.”

Luke, though he was released from juvenile hall for the funeral, was wracked with guilt that he’d not been able to protect his mother. Jamie would utterly lose herself for the next eight years.

“Literally, funeral day I got wasted,” she said. “I was 14, and until I was 22, I was drugging and drinking almost nonstop.”

Luke’s most serious jail time occurred during this period, but he emerged in his early 20s into a period of light. His renown as a graffiti artist transferred to mural work, in homes and offices throughout LA. One commission was at a yoga studio in the South Bay operated by Julie Rader, one of the foundational yoga instructors in the area, a teacher of teachers who has been a key figure behind the explosion of yoga locally.

Rader was struck by Luke’s presence from the moment he stepped into her studio.

“He was very spiritual,” she said. “He was meditating and really had this spiritual aura about him. It was who he was. He didn’t have to try for it.”

The two dated for a while, and at one point Luke travelled with Rader to an international yoga conference in Colombia. He was less into the physical aspect of yoga and more into mediation, but like everything else, Rader said the practice of yoga asanas came extraordinarily easy to him.

“Luke lived every day to the fullest, and was so present,” she said. “It was such a beautiful thing. Nowadays it’s not uncommon to be out for dinner and look over at the table next to you and everyone is on a smartphone. Not Luke. He was fully there, and present, which I really appreciated about him.”

In his artwork from that time, words are frequently embedded, almost subliminally. Among the most frequently appearing words were “love” and “Jamie.”

His sister was nearing a point of oblivion. She didn’t see Luke often. She was estranged from her family, and he didn’t directly intervene. But he remained available to her, in his gentle way. At one point, two years into his own sobriety, he ran into her, and pulled out a CD he’d made for her that he’d been carrying around. It was labelled “The I Love Jamie Mix.”

“It had hearts drawn all over it and the letter ‘A’ in my name was a heart,” Jamie said. “It had five songs on it, and the last song was called, ‘Hold Your Head Up,’ by Macklemore.”

Five months later, she went sober. She came back to the family house, where he had his sanctuary at the time.

“I just wanted what he had,” she said. “He was so happy, so strong.”

A week into sobriety, Jamie took huge fall, fracturing her elbow and some ribs. Luke drove her to Harbor UCLA —  she had no insurance —  and spent 16 hours waiting in the emergency room by her side.

“He took care of me for two weeks after that,” she said. “He fed me every day, gave me my pain medicine every day….and would leave money if I needed anything while he would go do things, painting murals and stuff.”

“I just remember feeling so special, because at that time he had so many other things he could be doing. I had just gone sober, so I was like a rebel to my family, still a lot of wounds to heal, even the hurt I’d caused him through my drugging. He just kept giving me love.”

With her arm in a sling, she needed to find ways to keep movement, to prevent her bones from calcifying. Luke introduced her to Rader, and to yoga. One Wednesday night, he asked her to pack her bags for a four day trip, beginning the next morning. He wouldn’t tell her where.

“Just know you are going to be okay,” he told her.

“He’d do weird shit like this all the time,” Jamie recalled.  “I’m like, where am I going?”

He drove her to Malibu, for four day meditation retreat. He’d already paid $600 to attend it himself, but gave her his spot. Rader was also there. Jamie had a grueling time —  she was in pain, newly sober, and had also just quit cigarettes. “And now I can’t even talk?” she remembers thinking.

But she came out the other side. Soon she was practicing yoga three times a week, and within three months, she enrolled in Rader’s Mukti School of Yoga in order to become an instructor. Now 10 years sober, Jamie is among the most well known and popular yoga teachers in the South Bay. Like her brother, she is tall, and almost otherworldly in her gracefulness. Unlike her brother, sobriety lasted.

“Her transformation over the years was into this really mature, beautiful, inspirational yoga teacher who is really living and walking what she is teaching,” Rader said.

Rader said the bond she witnessed between Luke and Jamie was among the more beautiful things she has witnessed.

“Oh my gosh,” she said. “Luke hung the moon for Jamie. He really did.”

“My brother,” Jamie said, “saved me.”

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Darkness/light

Signs of Luke’s unravelling began showing in 2007. What occurred wasn’t yet a fall from sobriety, but a break from reality.

He and Emily Kinni spent a golden summer together in 2006. Every day was a new adventure; he’d show up, tell her what to pack, and take her off on a mysterious voyage —  dancing all night long one night, taking an impromptu road trip and a fully clothed, ecstatic ocean plunge the next day, making art all along the way.

“Even going to the DMV would be exciting,” she said. “…Within two months, or two weeks really, he knew me better than I knew myself. He was able to help me become a better version of who I was, which I think is always the goal when we are in love with someone. I was really unevolved; he really helped me evolve. Being around him felt like the single most right thing I could do. Just watching him exist was out of control, just beautiful.”

She left that fall to attend Western Washington University in Bellingham, just south of the Canadian border. He visited frequently, and even lived and worked there for months at a time, finding work as an artist’s assistant.

But sometime that winter something jarred loose. They had a mild disagreement on the phone, and, unannounced, he arrived less than 24 hours later in Bellingham, a window in his car busted out, all dressed in white.

“He walked around campus with no shoes in the middle of winter,” she said. “It got intense fast. It was terrible. He was the most clear person you ever met, so crisp, so emotionally in tune. And then he turned, and it was like, ‘Where is the panic button? How do I jolt you back? How do I wake you up? Nothing worked.”

It’s unclear exactly what happened but sometime in 2006, Luke had a mystical experience of some sort with the spiritual community he was a part of in the South Bay.

“If you look at the [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], at the descriptions of mental illnesses, an enlightenment experience and a dramatic experience of psychosis —  a split —  have exactly the same signs,” said Adell Shay, a fellow member of Luke’s spiritual community. “They are precisely the same. Whether you are enlightened or mentally ill depends on who you tell.”

Shay said in the mystic tradition, such an experience would likely lead to a journey, perhaps to a desert or a mountain or to the presence of a teacher; in the psychiatric tradition, it leads to medication, perhaps hospitalization. Whatever Luke experienced, none of this happened.

“So Luke was this incredible seeker,” she said. “I witnessed what some would call a psychotic break, but that was not my experience of it. My experience is that for whatever reason, he was not able to come back and get shelter in a spiritual community, so he was not able to integrate that experience, and make it part of him.”

Kinni was unaware of whatever had happened. They tried to make things work, but after 14 months, she had to take a break from his increasingly erratic behavior.

“It got to a point where it became clear if I was ever going to get him back, I had to detach from him,” she said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Much of what occurred in subsequent years is likewise unclear. What is clear is that sometime in 2008, he lost his sobriety, at least episodically. What would follow were periods of homelessness, more stints in jail, and a steady decline into outright mental illness.

Kinni moved to New York City, for school and later to work as a photographer, but a couple times a year she’d return to the South Bay to visit family and go look for Luke. She would just drive, and inevitably find him.

“Anything to get a pulse, to see that he was still with us,” she said. “He could be doing well, living at home, or he could be living under the pier, or living in somebody’s garage, or out of his car, or whatever it was…”

“I knew he was living a life very different from most. He said to me many times over the years that he wanted to achieve sainthood before he died.”

His sister tried to do what he’d done for her and just stay ready for him, to always be ready to talk, but he drifted further and further from her. A shell went up between them.

“He got stuck in a reality that he felt was illusory,” Jamie said. “I don’t know. He wasn’t like the real Luke anymore, most of the time.”

He told Jamie several times over the last years of his life that he needed a miracle. He didn’t know what form it would take, but his hope for it was never extinct.

“He wanted something to happen for him,” she said.

That miracle may have occurred in front of his eyes without it truly registering. He had one great love left in his life.

Sometime in late 2009, a barista at the Starbucks in downtown Manhattan Beach named Jessi Cervantes noticed a tall man coming in for coffee with increasing frequency. He was always shrouded in a hoodie, and everyone in the store knew his order when he arrived. He’d be in and out of the store as quickly a wind passing through.

“On Thanksgiving, he actually waited in line and I saw his hair for the first time and noticed how attractive he was,” Cervantes said. “But it was the way he smiled at me that drew me to him, and from then I was hooked.”

He didn’t reappear until January 7. Cervantes took a smoke break, and they talked. She read him a quote from Quincy Jones about love.

Luke looked up at the sky, and told her that he loved her. “Who does that?” she thought to herself. But she believed him, and spent every day for the next several months with him. At this time, Luke was living back at the family home, but no longer in his sanctuary —  he and his father had built a shelter underneath the back deck, and Luke made a lair for himself, and then Jessi, that they called “the shed.”

Within the first month, she became pregnant. Luke was ecstatic. He would not leave her side throughout her pregnancy.

“He’d get me to climb rooftops with him or go to abandoned settings and paint with him,” she remembered.

They named their daughter Luna. She and Luke had an unusually tight connection; he often called her “Moon.”

“Moon had such a bond with him,” Jessi said. “He cut her umbilical cord… She constantly made him tear up with joy.”

Luke and Jessi had a tumultuous life together, largely due to his increasingly uncommunicative ways and their constant financial struggles.

“We were happy but he became more controlling and he rarely had normal conversations with me,” she said. “He would constantly dig into my past but I could never get anything out of him. At times this would enrage me until I’d slap him to get some reaction, and it helped  —  he’d snap out of it and be very apologetic and loving for some time.”

He worked, sometimes two jobs. In 2012, they rented a two bedroom house in Lawndale. She gave birth to a son they named Jonathan. The following year Luke emphatically abandoned all attempts at sobriety. He quit his jobs and started selling cocaine, and from there things spiralled out of control, including a series of ugly incidents in which he broke into her family’s home and threatened her parents. In 2014, after one such incident, he served nine months in jail. He didn’t contact Jessi again until Febuary, 2015. He was so ashamed even after he got out of jail he lived in a Metro station for a while, afraid to go anywhere near those he loved.

“I agreed to meet him and my heart broke when his children couldn’t believe their father was back in their lives,” she said. “All four of us slept in my van for two months until I was able to move us into an apartment. He helped me take the kids to school and daycare and take me to work so I didn’t push him to do anything as long as he was sober.”

The peace didn’t last. Somewhere in this time, he plunged into methamphetamines. Whatever remnants of what Jamie called “the real Luke” that had yet remained utterly vanished.

“He slowly lost all the best practices of his talents,” Jessi said. “When I found him last year, he did very little other than drive the kids or play video games.”

Sadly, she made him leave, and he stayed away until June of this year. He wanted to see his son and give him a birthday present. They met in a Toys R Us parking lot, and he gave his son a Star Wars stormtrooper outfit, and went and played with him in a nearby park. But that night he reappeared at Jessi’s apartment out of his mind on meth. She had to call the police, not because she felt in any way threatened, but because she just needed him to be gone.

It was the last time she’d see him. Six days later, after she received the phone call that Luke had died, Jessi couldn’t escape a lingering feeling that she’d never really seen the man she’d loved for seven years.

“He was gone long before I met him,” she said. “I pushed him too long to squeeze out the most of what he had left. He knew one day we’d be without him… he was always cautious with his words. He never included himself in our plans.”

The Weight

The week after Luke’s death, on June 23, a song playing at a grocery store where Jamie Horgan was shopping almost made her fall to her knees. It was “The Weight,” by The Band, which includes a character named Luke.

“Go down, Miss Moses, there ain’t nothin’ that you can say

‘Cause just ol’ Luke and Luke’s waitin’ on the Judgment Day

“Well, now Luke, my friend, what about young Anna Lee?”

He said, “Do me a favor, son, won’t you stay an’ keep Anna Lee company?

Take a load off Annie, take a load for free

Take a load off Annie, and you put the load right on me…”

In New York, Emily Kinni heard the same song, and quickly googled its meaning. She discovered that the songwriter, Robbie Robertson, had been watching films by the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

“He did so many films on the impossibility of sainthood. People trying to be good…people trying to do their thing,” Robertson has said. “In ‘The Weight’ it was this very simple thing. Someone says, ‘Listen, would you do me this favor? When you get there will you say ‘hello’ to somebody, or will you give somebody this, or will you pick up one of these for me?”

Luke Horgan’s Manhattan Beach family has never truly been connected with the young family he created in the last years of his life. On Saturday, July 9, at noon, the strands of his many loves will finally come together from noon to 3 p.m. on the beach at 20th Street. The family has established a fund to help care for Luna and Jonathan.

“I often say they are the embodiment of everything wonderful about him — his passion, his wonder, his rhythm, his dimples!” Jessi said.

His cousin, Candice, and Jessi exchanged messages for the first time last week.

“He was lost and confused,” Jessi wrote to Candice. “He shared very little about his family or personal experiences….my skewed impressions of the people he knew have been changing and solidifying in the past week. I’ve been finding the words and courage to tell the kids… Seeing you all will open a new world for them about whom he once was. He gave them all the beauty and wonder he knew. If you met them blindfolded you would feel his presence in their personalities.”

Jamie hopes the miracle Luke was waiting for will take the form an embrace only a community can provide. She hopes Luna and Jonathan can finally see “the real Luke,” who will persist in their lives through love he gave before he lost his struggle.

“I think he helped others, so that he wasn’t trapped inside his own darkness. So he spread light,” Jamie said. “I also think Luke just wanted love in return, so he gave it away. He also just wanted to be understood. Not judged, but instead seen.”

“He’s kind of like a myth,” said Kinni. “But he was real for a while.”

For more information on the fundraising campaign benefiting Jonathan and Luna,