The Rise And Fall Of Gator Rogowski
By: Reginald Ben-Halliday
Tags: Justice, True Crime, Crime, Murder, History

Gator was born in Brooklyn, New York, but moved with his mother and older brother to San Diego, California at the age of three after his parents’ divorce. The family ended up in Escondido a sun-baked, middle-class suburb in northern San Diego County. It was there Gator began skateboarding.

As a child, Gator was considered to be a social outcast among his friends, because his family didn’t have a lot of money. Gator started skateboarding at the age of seven and, while most of his friends were hyped on trends concerning surfing, Gator was practicing at a local skate park. At the age of twelve, he was picked up by local skateboarding teams to compete in amateur tournaments.

He began winning local tournaments, attracting bigger sponsors, endorsement deals, fame and wealth, and at the age of fourteen he became known as a professional skateboarder. In 1982, he won the Canadian Amateur Skateboarding Championships in Vancouver, Canada, his first major title. He made $4,000 to $8,000 a month from selling clothing and skateboard equipment. By 1987, Gator had secured a deal with Visions to use his name on their merchandise. The company was selling around 7,000 decks each month including clothing, shirt, videos, and stickers — earning Gator around $14,000.

Gator enjoyed significant fame in the 1980s. Whenever he was on tour, he’d be greeted by a long line of adoring fans waiting to see him. On one of those tours, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1987, Gator met two seventeen-year-old blondes, Brandi McClain and her good friend Jessica Bergsten. Gator and Brandi partied an entire weekend and fell in love with each other.

Gator would always call or send Brandi love letters from San Diego to Arizona every single day. Few months later he asked Brandi to move in with him and she agreed.

Gator bought a ranch in the mountains and both of them moved into the ranch. But Brandi became bored of the place, so Gator decided that they move to Carlsbad by the beach. Gator sold the ranch months later.

Gator and his girlfriend were inseparable. They both attended every kind of party in Carlsbad together, drank and enjoyed each other’s company. They were the hottest couple in the beach at the time.

Gator would take Brandi everywhere he went, from competitions, to filming for advertisements and promotional videos for Vision. They appeared in Tom Petty’s music video Free Fallin’.

Gator was known to have anger issues and a drinking problem. It was said by his friends that he drank to control his anger, but Gator was known to have anger issues and a drinking problem. On one of his tour in Australia in 1989, Gator had spent the day making demos. When he was done, he was completely worn out and frustrated. A child came up to him, asking him for an autograph but Gator wasn’t in the mood and tried to avoid him. The child kept on asking and this enraged Gator, causing him to hit the child in front of many people. Due to the assault, his sales around Australia dropped.

Around that time a new type of skateboarding was challenging the dominance of Gator’s genre. It was called street skating, where skaters choose urban obstacles likes curbs, garbage cans and stairways over traditional skateboard parks. Gator found it difficult transitioning from his genre to the new generational skateboarding and his career began to sink.

Gator wasn’t the only one affected by the new trend. Vision, the company that he had spent majority of his career with, began to file for bankruptcy.

In 1990, during a world cup event in Germany that Gator and the Vision skateboarding team attended, Gator attended a party and got so drunk that he went missing. His team Vision manager recalled looking out his window seeing Gator climb what looked like a construction crane and then diving down from a two story hotel. He landed on a wrought iron fence, impaling his neck, face and thumb. Gator showed up at his manager’s hotel room, drenched in his blood.

On the way to the hospital, Gator was in serious pain and was so drunk that he couldn’t be controlled. The next day, he couldn’t remember the reason why he was on the hospital bed or how he got all the stitches he had.

After the incident, seeking to reinvent himself, Gator changed his name from Rogowski to Gator. He explained that Rogowski was his father’s name whom he had never really known. Gator later made friends with Augie Constantino, an ex-surfer turned born-again christian, who preached the word of God to him.

Gator gave his life to Christ and began preaching the word of God to his friends. Though his friends thought that this was a faze for him that he would get over it soon. But Gator, looking back at how messed up his life was, really wanted to find direction. He tried to get Brandi to convert with him, but she wasn’t ready to drop the fun life she was having.

When Brandi couldn’t deal with the new ways Gator wanted them to live, Gator broke up with saying she should fine someone like her. After they broke up Brandi moved to her parents’ house in San Diego.

The break-up frustrated Gator a lot more than the accident in Germany. He began drink a lot more than usual. Things became worse when Brandi found a new boyfriend, a young surfer. Despite his newfound faith, Gator’s reaction was un-Christian. He became obsessively jealous and he began stalking Brandi. He would call her mother’s house incessantly and leave messages on the answering machine, calling her all sorts of names.

One night, Brandi returned home to find that someone had broken in. The thief had taken everything that Gator had bought for her, including her car. She and the police suspected Gator.

The last thing Gator said to Brandi was that he would take her somewhere, commit every sexual act with her and dumb her body somewhere in the dessert. Brandi became scared of him and moved to New York telling no one except her parents, she didn’t even tell her best friend Jessica who was moving to San Diego at the time.

Jessica called Gator on the phone asking him if he could show her around San Diego. They spent the day together on March 21st, 1991, after having lunch outside they picked up some movies, few bottles of wine and went to Gator’s home. After drinking and getting drunk, it was finally time for her to leave, Gator left her alone in the living room to go check up on something in his car.

He came back to see Jessica staring at a picture of him plastered on his living room wall. Gator grabbed a metal steering-wheel lock, snuck behind her and hit her two to three times on the head. When she fell to the floor, she bled so much that it soaked the carpet.

After knocking her semi-unconscious, he handcuffed her and dragged her to his bedroom on the second floor. He shackled her onto the bed, and raped her for two to three hours. Committing every sexual act he could think of.

Jessica, still conscious begged for Gator to stop. She screamed as loud as she could, hoping the neighbours would hear her. In an attempt to shut her up, he pulled a surfboard bag from his closet and stuffed her head into it. She screamed that she couldn’t breathe. He placed his hands around her neck and strangled her to death.

A photo of Jessica Bergsten

Gator drove out to the desert and dumped her body there. When he came back he rented a carpet steamer to clean up every spot of blood he could from the carpet and flipped over the mattress to hide the blood that was there as well.

Few weeks later, the police came to question him about her disappearance. They couldn’t find anything suspicious from him. Jessica’s father was unsatisfied of how the police were handling the issue of his daughter’s disappearance and decided to fly to San Diego to look for her himself. He plastered the entire county with posters of his missing daughter. He asked Jessica’s friends about her whereabouts, he even met with Gator asking him about his daughter. But he shook his head and told him he hadn’t seen her.

Gator would have gotten away with murder if it wasn’t for his guilt, he went on to talk to his friend Augie Constantino, and told him everything that had happened. His friend convinced him that he needed to turn himself to the police. The police were surprised that someone was turning himself in for a murder that they had no idea had happened.

The next morning Gator took the police detectives to the desert to where he had buried the body. They found the body in the desert, decomposed and barely recognisable. Gator went on to tell the police what he did to her in his room. The police investigated his home and found evidence of blood in places Gator had missed cleaning.

In his confession, Gator said he killed Jessica Bergsten to get a misplaced sense of revenge towards Brandi, calling Jessica the ‘mold Brandi was made out of’.

March 6th 1992, Gator pled guilty to a first-degree murder and rape, thus avoiding the death penalty or life without the chance of parole. He later wrote a four page statement apologizing to Jessica’s family saying he was sure he was only seeing a glimpse of their pain and that no family deserve to have their loved ones taken from them.

He also acknowledged that, at first, he wanted to pin the responsibility of what he had done, on God and Jessica. But by the end of his statement he said that “God has changed me, and it was no typical jailhouse conversion. I sincerely hope that they can accept my apology for my carelessness.”

Gator was sentenced to thirty-one years in prison in California for the death and rape of Jessica Bergsten.

Gator was denied parole on the 7th of February, 2011, and would be eligible for a parole again in March 2023.