On Monday, February 28, 2000, just before 10 o'clock in the morning, a 58-year-old man named

James Patrick Riley, who went by Pat, pulled into a parking lot at the Irvine Spectrum

office complex. Pat was a biotechnology researcher at this cutting-edge biotech company.

It seemed like just another

ordinary Monday morning until he got out of his blue Audi and saw a man dressed in black

wearing a hoodie. The man walked up to him fast and shot him point blank in the side of the head.

Pat was covered in blood. The shooter ran up to the side of a van that

had pulled up really suddenly. Witnesses in a bank nearby rushed out to help. Everyone was

screaming and it was panic. They said the door of that van opened up. The shooter jumped in and the

vehicle fled the scene. Pat was bleeding. but he got lucky because the bullet missed his

brain. It went into the side of his face, into his cheek and bounced off of that cheek,

fracturing his cheekbone. The bullet exited right above his lip. Then that same bullet went into the

window of a bank. People inside the bank ran out screaming, according to an

article on salon.com. Even though Pat had been shot point blank in the head, he only really had a

flesh wound. Pat called his business partner, 49-year-old, Dr. Larry Ford. He knew that Larry was

already at work inside the building. Larry rushed out to help his

friend. He applied pressure to the wound. And amazingly, it seemed like Pat got very lucky because even though

he had been shot point blank in the head, it was only a flesh wound. Pat and Larry had been

partners for years. Larry was the genius researcher who was working on all these biotech breakthroughs,

including suppositories for women to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.

Pat was the consummate salesman.

It appeared to be a partnership that was going really well.

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