Sometimes, you can't help but wonder where the anger comes from, what might push a person to get inside a cage and try to beat another person into pancake batter.
On Saturday night, Cole Escovedo will fight in his 17th professional mixed martial arts bout, an event at the Fresno Fairgrounds called "Disturbing the Peace."
At 27 years old, Cole has already had a heart attack and been paralyzed. He has driven a race car 180 mph and jumped from a plane at 30,000 feet and climbed Half Dome. (He wants to climb it again and BASE jump off of it, even though that's illegal.)
But all of that is nothing compared to what he truly has survived, trauma that is almost impossible to imagine.
No, people who know Cole Escovedo do not ponder the origin of his anger.
A man makes his own path, but he's also forever tied to where his journey began. Cole knows that. He is not in denial.
His biological father is in prison for horrifying crimes.
"He'll probably be there for the rest of his life," Cole says. "He's in Folsom [State Prison], I think. He kidnapped and raped a bunch of girls."
The trial of Larry Escovedo, a Madera man, was one of the more prominent local stories of 1995. On Oct. 6, 1995, Larry was convicted on 13 counts of kidnapping and sexual assault and sentenced to 68 years to life in prison.
He is inmate #J88950 and will never get out. Cole's mother, Laura Robitschek, recently used her last appeal, even though she knows her ex-husband did those terrible things. She says Larry was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.
"Yeah, I was trying [to get him out]," she says. "I would put him somewhere he could get help. I wouldn't let him out on the streets.
"He really was a great father. He was probably the only person who sent money out of prison for his boys' clothes. Make no mistake, though, he's a bad dude."
Cole was an elementary school boy that night when all those squad cars raced up to their ranch house at 2 a.m., demanding to search the place. Laura and her two sons, Cole and Cody, had no idea that their husband and father had been arrested, or what he had been accused of, or what he had done.
"Cole never cried," his mother says. "He went into the cage."
He did not, literally, start cage fighting at age 12, but you know what she means. As a teenager, he fought all takers and did drugs and misbehaved to the point where the principal at Sierra High asked Laura to come to the school and she walked into a gathering of all his teachers in a room with a sheriff's deputy outside.
When she started to bolt, the principal told her Cole would be expelled if she left, and then she did it anyway. Laura Robitschek is a proud woman who broke wild mustangs and rode motorcycles and stood behind her husband when he was accused of atrocities.
"I've seen some stuff in my life," she says.
Cole got his GED and entered the police academy, where he was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a condition that causes electrical signals in the heart to get to the ventricles too soon.
Since he was young, Cole had been in martial arts, and inevitably he found his way to cage fighting, where he started 7-0 and became the first featherweight champion of World Extreme Cagefighting. The WEC is owned by the same company as the more famous Ultimate Fighting Championship, but has a smaller octagon and is mainly for the smaller weight classes.
In late 2006, Cole says, he got an irritated bump on his arm, which was treated at a local hospital, but it later turned out to be a staph infection that spread to his back and paralyzed him until he couldn't feel his arm or toes. He lost control of his bladder, then his legs. His brother carried him into another hospital.
"I knew he was dying," his mother says. "I knew he had been treated for the forearm infection. He would lie in bed and scream at night. I said, 'Something's gotten into his blood.' "
Cole says he has lawsuits pending against the first hospital and has been advised not to give many details. There is certainly no doubt he had back surgery, and you can see the 17 staple marks on his spine where they went in to clean out the infection.
As he started the recovery with a walker, he didn't know whether he wanted to fight again, only that he wanted the option to fight again.
"It was proving that if I wanted to, I could," he says. "That I would be able to."
In May, at Tachi Palace, Cole Escovedo won his first fight in nearly three years. Saturday will be his second bout since the comeback. He is focused, he says, in a way he never was before. And once his fighting days are over, he wants to be a California Highway Patrol officer.
He stopped visiting Larry several years ago. "I just sort of lost interest in visiting my father in prison," he says.
He can never fight off his beginning, but he doesn't have to carry it around, either.
His mom says this: "God only gives you things that make you stronger. Do I say, 'Why me?' No. I'm no one special. Stuff happens to people. It's called life."
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