The Yuba County Five: Five Men Drove Into the Mountains and Never Came Home
On the evening of Friday, February 24, 1978, five friends from the Yuba City area of northern California drove east to the college town of Chico to watch a basketball game. The car was an old Mercury Montego that belonged to Jack Madruga, who was thirty. With him were Ted Weiher, thirty-two, Bill Sterling, twenty-nine, Gary Mathias, twenty-five, and Jack Huett, twenty-four. Four of the five men lived with developmental disabilities. Mathias, the fifth, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia years earlier, but he had been in treatment and on medication since 1975 and was described by those who knew him as stable.
The five had come together through a program for people with disabilities in Yuba City, and basketball was the thread that ran through their friendship. They belonged to a team called the Gateway Gators, and their own game was set for the next morning: a Special Olympics tournament they had been talking about for weeks. A win would have qualified them for a state final. They planned to be home early.
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