Scott Dyleski, was arrested at the home of a family friend in Walnut Creek, where his mother dropped him off Wednesday evening.
"His mom dropped him off so his dad could come get him," said the friend who asked not to be named.
Vitale's husband, defense attorney Daniel Horowitz, said he's done a significant amount of free legal work for a family Dyleski lived with on Hunsaker Canyon.
School pictures show the transformation from a smiling, fresh-faced freshman to a glaring sophomore with hair covering half his face — not an uncommon example of teenage angst.
But Scott had tragedy in his past.
His sister Denika Dyleski, five years older than Scott, was killed in an August 2002 car accident in Lafayette. They shared the same father, Kenneth Dyleski.
Scott's mother was a registered owner of Cafe Esperanza in Lafayette, although the business address is now that of another cafe with different owners.
An Internet site, registered to Fielding, says she does "DNA Activation, Gene Replacement, Core Belief Work ... powerful tools for healing the physical body, the mind and the soul."
In the three years since his older half-sister died in a car wreck in Walnut Creek, Scott Dyleski distanced himself from the adults that knew him best, wore eccentric, dark goth clothing and according to a police source, may have recently gotten involved in an illicit marijuana cultivation scheme.
But the former boy scout, ball player and ambitious 16-year-old college student also liked to cook vegan meals for his housemates and guests, took a heavy course load in his first semester at Diablo Valley College and immersed himself in art and music.
"He's a very bright kid. He just drifted," said a close family friend who spends a lot of time at the Hunsaker Canyon Road home where Dyleski lives with his mother, a long-distance healer who believes that DNA strands can be activated to alleviate disease.
The crowded home, shared by three families and recently, invaded by mice, is just down the one-lane rural road from the modular home where Vitale lived with her star-attorney husband, Daniel Horowitz, next to the palatial house they have been building.
Dyleski slept on a thin mattress on pallets through his middle school years, until the landowners, Kim and Fred Curiel, built a house using ecological materials in 2002 and they all moved inside, Marcus said.
"He never really liked his dad, he never really talked about him," Marcus said.
Dyleski's father, who lives in Antioch was not available for comment. His former step-father, Glen Hirschberger, who lives in Sebastopol, said Dyleski was an industrious kid who helped his mother at the Lafayette bakery where she worked. He wanted to be a sound engineer.
"He was relatively normal when I talked to him years ago, but he kind of started to become gothic-like," Curtis said. "He was part of a pretty big group of people in (Stanley) Middle School that was basically the goth group."
Friends said Dyleski started to change about the time his father's daughter, Denika Dyleski, and a 19-year-old boy were killed in a car crash while driving on Ygnacio Valley Road. A 17-year-old friend was driving too fast and flipped the car on a curve, hitting two other vehicles.
After that Dyleski started wearing dark clothing, entered a gothic, Marilyn Manson phase and stopped talking openly, Marcus said.
"He was very sad for a long time," Marcus said.
"To me, they seemed kind of different, more a Berkeley style," she said.
A family friend said the family is very tolerant and gave Dyleski space.
"They wanted to give him that freedom," he said.
Neighbors said Dyleski was a misfit who sounded a sinister note when, as a freshman, he posed for the Acalanes High School yearbook in a black outfit he designed himself.
"Anyone can go to the mall and buy the latest fashion, but it takes an artist with a creative mind to revive a fashion," his yearbook quote said. "I just want everyone to understand that the ones that do are just being themselves and your judgments will never stop them."
After the attack, the teen drank a glass of water, showered to cover his tracks and took a shortcut through the canyon to his home about a mile away, cops said.
Detectives searching the couple's 12-acre property later found clothing that had recently been washed in OxyClean, a household cleanser that breaks down bloodstains, according to the Contra Costa Times.
The high-powered defense attorney had done "a significant amount of free legal work for the family the teenager lived with," the Contra Costa Times reported. Just what kind was unclear.
Dyleski does not appear to have a record.