My pregnant wife was on the floor with a bl:ee:ding lip while my mother pulled her hair. When I saw her phone still lit up, I found a note that said: “H:it on the cheek.” The worst part was discovering it wasn’t the first time.

The capture of Bernice and Tyler Harris did not happen with cinematic elegance. It happened in the dirt, under the blinding searchlights of a Customs and Border Protection UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.

At 4:15 p.m., the K-9 unit from the San Diego Sheriff’s Department picked up their scent near a dried wash three miles east of the Campo border fence.

Tyler had completely fallen apart.

When the tactical deputies stepped out of the scrub brush with carbines raised, Tyler was sitting on a rusted corrugated drainage pipe, crying hysterically, his designer sneakers caked in thick desert clay, clutching a half-empty bottle of convenience store water.

Bernice, however, did not cry.

Even in the desert, surrounded by six armed law enforcement officers, a German Shepherd straining at its harness, and the deafening roar of helicopter rotors kicking up sand around her, my mother remained true to her monstrous nature.

"Do you know who I am?!" she shrieked at the arresting deputies, her voice captured clearly on the bodycam footage that Mark Vance and I would review forty-eight hours later. "Keep your filthy hands off me! My son is Christopher Harris! He’s an executive! He will have all your badges for this!"

"Ma'am, step forward and place your hands behind your back," Deputy Miller ordered, his weapon lowered to low-ready. "You have an active felony warrant for your arrest."

"It's a lie!" Bernice screamed, thrashing wildly as two female deputies moved in, grabbing her wrists and forcing them behind her back. "That whore bewitched him! She staged everything! Tyler, tell them! Tell them she attacked me!"

Tyler didn't say a word.

He lay flat on his stomach in the dirt, his hands locked behind his neck, sobbing like a terrified schoolboy while a deputy knelt on his back to click the steel handcuffs into place.

"You're a coward, Tyler!" Bernice spat at her youngest son, her face twisted in a mask of pure, unadulterated hatred. "You’re just as weak as your father! Both of you are useless!"

"Bernice Harris," the deputy recited calmly, ignoring her tirade as the double-locking cuffs clicked shut around her wrists. "You are under arrest for attempted murder of an unborn child, felony assault resulting in severe bodily injury, grand theft, and forgery. You have the right to remain silent..."

As they dragged her toward the waiting tactical transport truck, her hair wild and graying in the dust, her clothes torn, Bernice turned her head toward the sky, toward the helicopter searchlight, and screamed my name into the night.