One year ago, in a motel room near the Mexican border, Miles Dabord wept as he told his girlfriend a fantastic, almost biblical tale of brother-on-brother anger that ended in self-defense and murder on the high seas.

Dabord said he had to kill his younger brother, former Denver Nuggets center and forward Bison Dele, after weeks of fighting aboard a catamaran in the Pacific Ocean got out of hand.

Two weeks later, Dabord himself was dead and the truth about what happened on board the Hukuna Matata seemed lost with him.

But while all the details of the deaths of Dele, his girlfriend and the catamaran captain will likely never be known, the FBI has, for the first time, released some conclusions about how two exceptionally talented brothers ended up dead on different sides of the world.

"From his cellphone to the Lincoln Navigator that he drove, everything Miles had belonged" to Dele, said FBI Special Agent Elizabeth Castaneda, who has spent the last year investigating the case surrounding the two starcrossed brothers.

"He was, in our opinion, going to assume his brother's identity."

Patricia Phillips, the mother of the two siblings, has endured a year of anguish and confusion that began the day 33-year-old Bison Dele, the child she knew as Brian Williams, was reported missing in the South Pacific in August after a sailing trip that began in late June 2002.

During two days of interviews with The Denver Post, Phillips said that today she feels a little closer to knowing what happened between her sons in the Pacific. She knows for certain only that she has cremated one, and the other has never been found.

But she has some opinions about most of the earlier law enforcement and media reports as well as Dabord's Mexican border confession: