Perhaps nowhere else could such a road sign have been born.

A ghostly silhouette of a mother, father and little girl running, their bodies leaning forward as if into the wind. The child’s pigtails fly behind her as the family dashes across a stark yellow background, accompanied by one word: CAUTION.

Caltrans posted several of these signs along San Diego freeways beginning in 1990, when the city was a funnel for undocumented immigrants headed north. The signs were intended to warn drivers they might encounter people frantically darting across lanes of traffic as they tried to evade border security.

Dozens of immigrants were struck and killed from the mid-1980s to early 1990s, some in front of horrified family members, as stunned drivers failed to stop in time.

The freeway deaths ended long ago, but the signs remain. And, in the intervening years, the silhouetted image has quietly taken on a life of its own.

Today, the running family is found on T-shirts, coffee mugs, stickers, book covers and CDs, in fine art and even hanging in an exhibit at the Smithsonian.

The characters have been reinterpreted carrying surfboards and wearing Pilgrim hats. One depiction shows them being followed by a man with a gun.

The image has become a Rorschach test for how people feel about illegal immigration and immigrants in general. Some have claimed it as a symbol of Latino identity. Others wear it as a badge of anti-immigrant sentiment.

“It has become an icon that signals immigration and the political issues surrounding immigration, which are far from resolved in our society,” said Otto Santa Ana, a professor of Chicano studies at UCLA.

And yet some see it as nothing more than a quirky regional souvenir.

“Come to San Diego,” one T-shirt reads. “Bring your family.”

The assignment to create the road sign landed on the desk of Caltrans graphic artist John Hood in the late 1980s. He was asked to design an image that, in the blink of an eye, would alert drivers to the unexpected sight of pedestrians in their headlights.

Text signs that had been posted on Interstates 5 and 805 near the border, urging “Caution Watch for People Crossing Road,” proved too wordy to register with motorists. Meanwhile, close to 100 undocumented immigrants had been killed on county freeways over a five-year span.

One particularly deadly spot was on Interstate 5 at Camp Pendleton, south of the Border Patrol checkpoint. Immigrant smugglers would stop their vehicles and order everyone out, instructing them to cross the freeway toward the beach. The idea was for the immigrants to walk north and then, once they had skirted the checkpoint, cross the freeway again to the vehicle, which would be waiting on the other side.

People who had never seen a freeway were crossing up to eight lanes of traffic, often at night, with little idea how fast the tiny, distant headlights they saw would be upon them.

Parents were killed in front of their children, children in front of parents. Drivers who hit these people were left emotionally wrecked. One was haunted by the sight of an anguished face flying across the windshield. Another swore he had hit a bear.

Before Hood began drawing the sign, he and his supervisors met with Highway Patrol officers and saw photos of accident scenes. What got to him most were the deaths that involved families.

“Graphically, I wanted to show a family,” said Hood, who lives in San Diego. He chose to include a pigtailed girl, rather than a boy, because “there is something about a little girl running across with her parents that we are more affected by.”

Imagination at work

At first he drew detailed figures, with faces that showed “a little bit of fright.” But, in the end, Hood and his supervisors decided on a silhouette.

“When you are looking through headlights, that is what you see,” Hood said, “an outline of the image itself.”

As he sketched, Hood tried to imagine the despair that might drive such a family across the border and onto a forbidding foreign highway.

He drew from his own experience fighting in Vietnam, where he had seen families run for their lives as villages were attacked. He remembered stories his Navajo parents had told him about ancestors who died trying to escape as U.S. soldiers marched them onto reservations.

The drawing was finished in a week. Even without faces, the characters conveyed a sense of urgency in their flight.

“It doesn’t just mean they are running across the freeway,” Hood said. “It means they are running from something else as well. I think it’s a struggle for a lot of things, for opportunities, for freedom.”

The first signs were unveiled in September 1990 at Camp Pendleton. Almost immediately, reaction came from all sides. Some Latinos felt insulted by the faceless silhouettes, which they found reminiscent of animal-crossing signs. Anti-illegal immigration advocates were angry that a state agency would be trying to protect people who had broken the law. Some people feared the signs would be misread as indicating safe places to cross.

“Either you liked it or you hated it,” said Steve Saville, a veteran Caltrans spokesman. “It was an extraordinary measure to deal with an extraordinary situation.”

T-shirts and surfboards

Entrepreneurs liked it, sensing the makings of a good California souvenir. It helped that the image is public property, so no one had to pay Caltrans to use it. By the mid-1990s, the running family was turning up in gift shops throughout the state.

Bemused Caltrans employees from San Diego began seeing the image emblazoned on T-shirts, stickers, even tote bags, while traveling as far north as San Francisco and Monterey. In Laguna Beach the characters had silhouetted surfboards tucked under their arms, as if sprinting toward the waves.

Today, a hipster boutique on Los Angeles’ trendy Vermont Avenue stocks a couple of T-shirt versions, including one depicting the immigrants in place of the grizzly bear on the California state flag.

In San Diego, the characters are found on T-shirts and stickers sold in souvenir shops. They carry surfboards on mini-road signs that locals have posted in some beach communities.

Those who make and sell these items say they don’t dwell on the road sign’s history or the controversy surrounding illegal immigration. To such novelty T-shirt manufacturers as Jake Haughty, owner of San Diego-based Chingón Gear and Accessories, the sign is just a quirky slice of Southern California life.

“When I first moved here from the East Coast, I thought that was one of the funniest signs I had seen,” said Haughty, whose company prints a version of the characters carrying surfboards. “I don’t really know what it means, other than it’s just kind of funny.”

Still, the running family on a T-shirt doesn’t amuse everyone. When first-generation Mexican immigrant Juan Ruiz spotted one in a Los Angeles gift shop last year, he didn’t see local color or generic silhouettes. He saw himself.

Ruiz was riding in a smuggler’s car late one afternoon in 1987, headed for Los Angeles after crossing the border in San Diego. Suddenly the car screeched to a halt. The smuggler ordered everyone out onto what Ruiz thought was “a very wide avenue” and barked orders to run. Ruiz ran blindly, his heart beating in his throat.

“I didn’t know if I was coming or going,” said Ruiz, now 48 and in the country legally. “I lived it. So, when I see these things, they make me sad.”

People familiar with the hardships that drive many immigrants to leave home aren’t likely to laugh at the image on a T-shirt, said Jorge Mariscal, director of the Chicano studies program at UCSD.

Yet, for others, the desperate action the image depicts is so far removed from their own reality that it is incomprehensible, and the characters become mere cartoons.

“It depends on how privileged you are,” Mariscal said. “If you are pretty privileged, it is very amusing. It can only be received humorously if you don’t understand the dire situation of these people running across the freeway.”

Protest art

The grandchild of immigrants, Mariscal was taken aback when he saw the image on a T-shirt in a La Jolla souvenir store. But he admits he was amused when he saw a different version on a T-shirt for sale more recently, this time during a festival at Chicano Park.

“I did perk up,” he said, “when I saw the one with the Pilgrims on it.”

In that version, the silhouettes are drawn in Pilgrim attire, with the father wearing a tall hat, a sly poke at the Mayflower passengers’ lack of permission from Massachusetts natives to move in. It’s just one way in which Latinos have turned the image into protest art, embracing the running family as their own.

In El Mercado, a cavernous three-story shopping center in East Los Angeles, a stall sells car window stickers of the original silhouettes with a logo that reads “Powered By Mexican.”

“It’s against la migra,” said sticker vendor Jesús Flores, who sells them mostly to second-generation kids in their late teens. “It’s like a sign of rebellion for them, like, ‘Let people say whatever they want (about us).’ ”

Latino artists have incorporated the figures into paintings, cartoons and other works, portraying them as Day of the Dead skeletons, even as religious figures.

Los Angeles painter Rosa M. Huerta-Williamson depicted them as a modern-day Jesus, Mary and Joseph in 1994 when she painted “La Sagrada Familia en Aztlan,” which features the characters running beneath a flaming sacred heart and cross.

“What I was trying to do was indicate that this could be the sacred family and we wouldn’t recognize them,” said Huerta-Williamson, who sold the painting to a Mexican-American professor and his wife. “As long as these people don’t have faces, white Americans don’t have to think about the fact that they have feelings.”

At the opposite end of the illegal immigration debate, others not so sympathetic have imbued the image with their own meaning.

A Web site called xtremerightwing.net sells T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, aprons, even men’s boxers printed with a version of the running family almost true to the original, except the characters are being followed by a man with a gun.

“It’s an AK-47, which is typically associated with terrorists,” said John Martin, the Livermore entrepreneur who owns the site. “The man with the gun is not stalking the people; he is following them in. The point of the design is to illustrate how porous our borders are.”

Seen as metaphor

That a piece of highway safety art has come to mean so many things to so many different people indicates the image has achieved icon status, said UCLA’s Santa Ana, who studies how Latinos are portrayed in society and media.

“When it becomes iconic,” he said, “is when people pick up and run with it.”

Some people literally have picked up and run with a sign. At least one has been stolen. One woman recently called Caltrans to ask whether she could have one.

Caltrans isn’t giving them away. But there are no plans to replace stolen signs or to install new ones as the originals age.

Not long after the signs went up, Caltrans placed tall fences in the center divider on I-5 at Camp Pendleton and farther south to deter freeway crossers. And beginning in late 1994, the federal government started Operation Gatekeeper, which fenced off the border south of San Diego and has pushed the brunt of illegal immigration – and its casualties – east.

Highway maintenance crews sometimes find a belt used as a handhold dangling from a divider fence. But the Border Patrol can’t recall any immigrants having died crossing local freeways since the late 1990s. The road signs have become relics.

Peter Liebhold, a curator for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, said the museum wanted to acquire a sign for its permanent exhibit on transportation, which opened a year and a half ago, but curators found the 5-by-7-foot sign too large for the allotted space.

The Smithsonian settled on a photo of the sign instead. It hangs one floor down from the original 1813 Star Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired the national anthem.

“It transcends its local history,” Liebhold said. “Its importance is as a metaphor for undocumented immigration into the United States.”

Hood, the Caltrans artist, a modest man by nature, didn’t set out to create anything of the sort, just a road sign to help save lives.

Over the years, he has watched the transformation of his simple creation into souvenir, protest art, icon and metaphor with a mix of amazement and amusement, wishing only that some of the money being made from it today were generating funds for public safety.

Hood earns no royalties. He’s lost track of his original sketches. His wife filed them away, but he’s not sure where. Not that it bothers him. His road sign, or at least some version of it, isn’t hard to find.

“That was my baby,” he said. “It has its own life now.”

On May 14, 1990, Dahmer moved to 924 North 25th Street, Apartment 213, and the killing began in earnest.

During the following fifteen months, Dahmer went on a killing binge that cost twelve men their lives. The pace of Dahmer’s murders accelerated to a frenzy in May-July of 1991 when he was killing almost at a rate of one man a week. All but three were black; one was white, one was Laotian and one was Hispanic. Most, but not all, were homosexual or bisexual. The youngest was Konerak, age fourteen, and the oldest was thirty-one. Many of the victims lived what police call “high-risk” lifestyles. Most of the men had arrest records, often for very serious crimes, like arson, sexual assault, rape, and battery. The listing below appears in Anne Schwartz’s The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough:

• Edward Smith June, 1990
• Ricky Lee Beeks July, 1990
• Ernest Miller Sept., 1990
• David Thomas Sept., 1990
• Curtis Straughter Feb., 1991
• Errol Lindsey April, 1991
• Anthony Hughes May 24, 1991
• Konerak Sinthasomphone May 27, 1991
• Matt Turner June 30, 1991
• Jeremiah Weinberger July 5, 1991
• Oliver Lacey July 12, 1991
• Joseph Bradehoft July 19, 1991

Three psychologists examined him and concurred that Dahmer was manipulative, resistant and evasive. Hospitalization and intensive treatment was recommended.

Boyle, the defense attorney argued that Dahmer was sick and needed treatment, not prison. He praised the fact that he had held a job. “We don’t have a multiple offender here. I believe that he was caught before it got to the point where it would have gotten worse, which means that it is a blessing in disguise.”

Dahmer himself spoke in his own defense, blaming his behavior on alcoholism. He was articulate and convincing, for someone who had secretly murdered several men by that time. “What I have done is very serious. I’ve never been in this position before. Nothing this awful. This is a nightmare come true for me. If anything would shock me out of my past behavior patterns, it’s this.

“The one thing I have in my mind that is stable and that gives me some source of pride is my job. I’ve come very close to losing it because of my actions, which I take full responsibility for… All I can do is beg you, please spare my job. Please give me a chance to show that I can, that I can tread the straight and narrow and not get involved in any situation like this ever again… This enticing a child was the climax of my idiocy… I do want help. I do want to turn my life around.”

A marvelous performance by a true psychopath! The judge fell for it, stayed his sentence, and put Dahmer on probation for five years. He was ordered to spend one year in the House of Correction under “work release,” which allowed him to go to work during the day and return to the jail at night.

So, on September 25, 1988, Jeffrey moved into an apartment on North 24th Street in Milwaukee. The very next day, he got into serious trouble. He offered a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy $50 to pose for some pictures. He drugged the boy and fondled him, but did not get violent or have intercourse with him. By incredible coincidence, the boy’s last name was Sinthasomphone; he was the older brother of the boy that Dahmer would kill in May of 1991.

The boy’s parents realized there was something wrong with their child and took him to the hospital, where it was confirmed that he had been drugged. The police picked up Dahmer at his job at the mixer of Ambrosia Chocolate. He was arrested for sexual exploitation of a child and second-degree sexual assault. On January 30, 1989, he pleaded guilty, although he claimed that he thought that the boy was much older than he was.

While Dahmer awaited sentencing and was living again at his grandmother’s house, he met a black homosexual named Anthony Sears, 24, at a gay bar. Like the others, he offered the aspiring black model some money to pose for photos. When they reached Dahmer’s grandmother’s house, Sears was drugged and strangled. Dahmer had sex with his corpse and then dismembered it.

Anne Schwartz describes what happened next: “…he kept the head and boiled it to remove the skin, later painting it gray, so that in case of discovery, the skull would look like a plastic model used by medical students. Dahmer saved the trophy for two years, until it was recovered from Apartment 213 on July 23, 1991. Later he explained that he masturbated in front of the skulls for gratification.”

Dead Rising 2 is set several years after the infamous zombie invasion of Willamette. Unfortunately, the zombie virus was not contained at the conclusion of Dead Rising, spreading unchecked throughout the United States and Dead Rising 2 depicts a country where zombie outbreaks continue to strike. Former National Motorcross driver Chuck Greene is the star of this one, I personally think he looks a lot more bad ass then Frank, although I will miss the photography.

According to Capcom, Dead Rising 2 is a “Volume up”, from the first. The only thing that would make the game better for me is if it were first person, but, ol well, I’ll still have a blast.

He killed his second victim, Steven Toumi, in a hotel room in September of 1987. The two of them had been drinking heavily in one of the popular gay bars. Dahmer didn’t know how he killed him, but when he awoke, Toumi was dead and blood was on his mouth. He bought a large suitcase and stuffed the body inside. After he took Toumi’s corpse to his grandmother’s basement, he had sex with it, masturbated on it, dismembered it and threw it in the garbage.

Several months later, he selected his third victim, a fourteen-year-old Native American boy named Jamie Doxtator, who hung around outside the gay bars, looking for relationships. Dahmer’s methods had become established by that time. Normally, he would meet and select his prey at gay bars or bathhouses. He would lure his victims by offering them money for posing for photographs or simply to enjoy some beer and videos. Then he would drug them, strangle them, masturbate on the bodies or have sex with the corpses, dismember the bodies and dispose of them. Sometimes he would keep the skulls or other body parts as souvenirs.