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.
Now Dyleski is in Contra Costa Juvenile Hall on suspicion of beating Pamela Vitale, a 52-year-old neighbor, to death and carving a double crossed "T" into her back.
"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.
Sheriff's deputies arrested Dyleski on Wednesday night at another family friend's Walnut Creek home while he was waiting for his father to pick him up.
Dyleski and his mother moved from Sebastopol to the Lafayette hills about six years ago and set up a lean-to on her friends' property.
"The lean-to got more and more elaborate as time went on," said another family friend, who agreed to be identified as Marcus.
Marcus took Dyleski golfing and to the movies and tried to be a male role model.
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.
Daniel Curtis, 15, another neighbor, said he met Dyleski about six years ago when he moved into the canyon.
"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.
Marcus tried to stay in Dyleski's life. He visited the house on Hunsaker Canyon, where Marcus's sister also lives, and in April he and his wife took Dyleski to Disneyland.
Dyleski's interest in the Boy Scouts also waned in 2003 and he dropped out last year, a scout leader said.
Mom sounds like a very stable and sensible influence in her son's life.
My father in law is a successful entrepreneurial business owner today in spite of his "tough" life. Mom died when he was 9, Dad became a loser drunk, he and his sibs wound up in the orphanage. Other family members could have taken them in and didn't. Had rheumatic fever and was in bed for about six months in the wonderful state-run orphanage. Eventually they got out and lived in local abandoned shacks and scrounged food from nearby orchards. Dropped out of school in 8th grade and has been working ever since. He's a hopeless redneck in a few respects but he would rather poke pins in his eyeballs than take government assistance or expect anyone to give him anything. After learning what HIS childhood was like I simply don't want to hear any excuses from anyone.
who was the 17 year old kid? did the lawyer get him off from criminal charges?
LOL, that's a pretty strong comment coming from California!