Over the years, Bruce and the rest of his family have slowly found a way to come to grips with what happened -- and the fact that no one was arrested for the killings.

"You kind of do the best you can to put things in perspective as time moves on and to put tragedies of whatever magnitude in a little cubby hole in your mind," he said.

Four years ago, Harrington's feelings of frustration and anger were replaced by hope when an Orange County detective called him to say that a new DNA technology had linked the killing to three or four others that happened around the same time. Ultimately, through DNA evidence, police linked the case to a series of more than 50 rapes and murders throughout the state. But they have never matched the DNA to any actual suspect.

For Harrington, the new information marked the beginning of a foray into political activism that reached a climax this year when he pledged almost $1.8 million dollars to sponsor Proposition 69, called the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act. The act proposes to expand the state's DNA databases to include all convicted felons — and, in 2009, to also include those arrested on any felony charge.

"We are trying to move the trend in public policy toward harnessing DNA to solve these crimes," Harrington said. "If we can solve [my brother's killing], that's what 69 is all about in the back of my mind. But the probability of 69 providing a resolution is probably pretty low."

Harrington's political activism began in 2002 when he testified before a Senate Public Safety Committee that was debating how much force law enforcement agents could use to extract a DNA sample from convicted felons.

That testimony led to a series of meetings with Senators Jim Brulte and Jackie Speier and Attorney General Bill Lockyer. They wanted to enlist Harrington's help in their push for a DNA database for all convicted felons, which they could run against the more than 50,000 unsolved murders and rapes in the state to see if they got a match.

"It didn't take a whole lot of convincing for me to show up and make a hard pitch," Harrington said.

His murdered brother Keith was the youngest of four brothers — 11 years younger than Bruce -- and a medical student at UC Irvine. He had married Patti, a pediatric nurse, just three months earlier and was waiting for the end of summer to move up to San Francisco and begin an emergency room residency at UC San Francisco.

"They were both great kids," said Bruce.

Currently, the state requires DNA identification only from those convicted of a specific set of 36 violent felonies, such as murder, sexual assault and manslaughter. According to Harrington, the issue of expanding to an all-felons database was brought before the state legislature three times in the past couple of years, only to run into a brick wall. None of the bills ever made it out of committee.

Harrington's hope reverted once again to frustration.

That is when Harrington, a successful real estate developer and lawyer, decided that it was time to bring the issue to the people of California.

"I basically said enough is enough," he said. "We went through legislature and it didn't work."

"Pretty much through frustration with the legislative process, Mr. Harrington decided to take the issue to the ballot," said DNA Yes campaign manager Beth Pendexter.

Proponents of the measure call DNA identification the fingerprint of the twenty-first century. They say that expanding the database will increase the chances of solving crimes, current as well as older, unsolved crimes like Harrington's. But critics say that DNA information is personal and that collecting samples from those arrested but not convicted is treating the innocent like they are guilty.

"There's a privacy issue and there's a due process issue," said Bob Kearney, associate director of the ACLU of Northern California. "DNA is much more than a fingerprint. It has some of our most personal, private and intimate information."

Kearney also said that the measure goes too far by including arrested felons, and could have been written to only include those convicted or to have the samples automatically expunged when an arrestee is found innocent.

But Rock Harmon, the senior deputy District Attorney for Alameda County and a national expert in DNA testing, said that adding more people to the database just increases the chances of solving a crime.

"Each time we have added more crimes, we have solved more crimes," he said.

Authorities call it a "cold hit" when they match DNA evidence from an unsolved crime to someone in their DNA database. Last Wednesday, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer announced that the state had obtained its thousandth cold hit. He said that when the DNA program first started in 1994, they got about one hit a year. Now they get about three a day. For the month of September the CAL-DNA Database set a record by getting 110 hits.

But Kearney and the ACLU are worried about the security of those samples and what might happen to them down the road.

"It may not be this year or today that its used for other purposes, but 5 years, 10 years, 20 years down the line, somebody's DNA can be accessed for any number of purposes to find out any number of questions about their personal, private life," he said.

Despite arguments from the opposition, Harrington is confident that Proposition 69 will pass.

"The only issue we have is how large the mandate is going to be in favor of Prop 69, not whether it will pass or not," he said. "We know it's going to pass, if you believe the polls."

Even with its passage, Harrington tries to be realistic about the chances of actually finding his brother's killer.

"It is pretty hard to imagine that this person is still walking around out there, because it seems to me that you don't stop a crime spree like that cold turkey," he said. "So the police officers are very candid and say that the guy either died under circumstances we'll never know or he is sitting in somebody's prison with a long term."

But with an ever-growing DNA database, Harrington knows there is still a chance.

"That's really the hope that we focus on is that he is still in the prison system and ultimately will have to give up his DNA," he said. "There may very well be one day [when we get] that final phone call that says 'we have a hit.'"