A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (6 page)

Two thoughts went through Van’s mind:
I hope Reggie’s okay
, and,
Valley View Drive can get real slick when it’s wet. It must have been one of those bad roads.

The boy reporting the news to Van had no further information—was Reggie okay, had anyone been hurt?
Shrug
. Van glanced out the window, into the seminary, a Mormon teaching center where students are allowed to spend a period each school day learning the gospel and earning credits toward seminary graduation.

Van tried to put these thoughts about Reggie out of his head, even as the rumors continued to swirl throughout the day. But Reggie had graduated only eighteen months earlier. And this was a small town in every conceivable way—size, population, culture. They supported one another, helped out in all the small-town ways. There were also dark secrets people didn’t much talk about, along with a gray market of gossip that could spread the ill-informed rumor as fast as any IM or text network.

TREMONTON HAD BEEN CLOSE-KNIT
since it was settled in 1888 by folks of German descent by way of Tremont, Illinois. The settlers were largely Protestant, as compared to their Mormon neighbors. In 1903, when they formally incorporated as a township, they called their new home Tremont. But the postal service in Utah feared confusion with the town of Fremont. Hence: Tremonton.

Then Tremonton started to receive a heavy dose of Mormons, spreading out from Salt Lake City. They made significant outposts in Brigham City, just twenty minutes from Trementon, at the base of the mountains, and in Logan, the region’s hub, which held a larger temple. It was a place for marriages and sacred ordinances, not an everyday churchgoing experience.

Logan was at the base of the mountains, too, the ones that defined Utah in so many ways. When the prophet Brigham Young reached the base of the Wasatch Mountains, he reportedly declared, “This is the place.” The mountains proved a natural border of sorts. They helped explain why the community could grow so close, the families in the cities so interdependent, and their ideas in some ways so insular. It wasn’t easy to go over the mountains—either coming in or out, bringing ideas or taking them away.

Tremonton lay on the valley floor, making it good for farming. For many years, it had an odor, a pleasant one—sweet and a little moldy. That was the product of the sugar beet plant located two miles north of town, its aroma carried easily even with a light wind. The farms, like the seven-hundred-acre one that Reggie’s maternal granddad, Wilford, once tended, grew beets, mostly, and corn and wheat. There were cattle ranchers and dairy farmers, too.

Everyone knew everyone, proverbially, and, in the case of the Shaws, it was probably closer to literally. Mary Jane and Ed had gone to school there, and married at a little reception center on Main Street when she was barely eighteen and he was nineteen. Wilford, Mary Jane’s dad, who was known widely as Wit, was gregarious and easygoing, a pillar in every way.

Ed’s family had a rougher go. His mother had had a debilitating stroke when Ed was eleven; one of seven children. The four older ones had more or less left home, but that left Ed at home with a mother who had lost her ability to speak and walk, and a father with a serious drinking problem. He wasn’t a binge drinker, and not a mean drunk, but he’d be tough to match for consistency. He managed to get himself to work every day, as a driver and odd-job doer for one of the town’s wealthy businessmen, and then he’d come home at night and head for the bottle.

His drink was whiskey. He’d hide it in the car. Every night, numerous times, he’d say: “I’ve just got to go to the car.” He thought he was being sneaky, but he fooled no one.

With his eye on the bottle, it wasn’t on Ed. The young man would spend many nights away from home with friends; his absence, he said, unnoticed. He smoked cigarettes, and he drank. He stayed in school, mostly to play sports.

Then he met Mary Jane and got married, and she got pregnant. He was determined to be a more attentive father than his father had been to him. He swore off smoking and drinking.

As a family, Mary Jane, Ed, and their six kids had a reputation for kindness and for their love of sports—the kids playing, and everyone watching and rooting. They’d go to the Utah State football games and travel to Las Vegas for the regional basketball conference championships. The TV was always tuned to some game or another. They never missed a game of Reggie’s.

While he wasn’t a star, Reggie was a good enough athlete to develop his own modest reputation in the sports-crazed community.

Maybe that’s why, on the morning of September 22, news spread so quickly that Reggie Shaw had been involved in a bad wreck. Maybe it’s because everyone thought that Reggie was such a good guy.

INDEED, FOR VAN, HIS
old basketball coach, Reggie stood out because he was, in addition to being a strong guard with the will to rebound, a decidedly decent person. Van and his wife, Lisa, a French teacher at the high school (her classroom is directly above her husband’s) privately said how they wished they’d find someone like Reggie for one of their daughters. To Lisa, Reggie was a model kid: friendly, widely liked, quick-witted, but never seeming to crave the limelight. He got B-pluses and A-minuses in French, and, even though he was a jock, he “didn’t mind being called on in class.” Lisa thought of him as “the all-American boy.”

As Van stood there waiting for the fifth-period kids to finish filing in, he flashed on a moment from nearly two Januaries earlier. It was a day that had started with such high hopes: the varsity hoops team busing to Salt Lake for the state tournament. The team had reason for optimism. They were stacked with talent—big, tough players, like Jason Zundel and Dallas Miller, and they had in Reggie a tenacious defender and supporting player. He was the guard who preferred passing to shooting, rebounding to glory, was best friends with the studs, a bit in their shadow; plus, Van thought, Reggie lacked the confidence to equal his talent and hard work.

For all the team’s talent, the state tournament did not go well. The team lost a heartbreaker in an early round and returned home the same day. Hours later, after it seemed everyone else had cleared out, Van walked into the locker room and heard the crying.

Reggie sat with his elbows on his knees and his face down. He looked up.

“I can’t believe it’s over.”

“That’s why I love you, Reggie. You’re so passionate about basketball.”

But Van knew Reggie’s reaction was about more than a game—the season-ending loss meant the end of relationships and feeling connected, something the young man seemed to crave. Looking back on that day, Van thought of Reggie: “He was almost as broke as you’d see with someone who lost a loved one.”

On the day of the accident, Van couldn’t get the idea out of his mind that something bad had happened to Reggie. When he got home after school, he called the Shaws. He got Mary Jane. She said Reggie was okay. She said there had been “fatalities.” It was a word that, for some reason, Van picked up on. She didn’t say “dead,” she said “fatalities.”

Reggie was upstairs. He’d not come down all day. Hadn’t eaten. Had entertained just two visitors: his brother Jack and his dad. There wasn’t much to say.

Van had a final question: “Was there anyone else in the accident from around here?”

“No,” Mary Jane answered. “They were from Cache Valley.”

THAT NIGHT, SHE AND
Ed talked about the questions Rindlisbacher was asking—suggesting Reggie somehow was at fault—and they were worried sick. Ed didn’t express it like his wife. But there was a story he’d heard about, maybe read about in the paper, that was running around his head—making him nuts.

It was this story about a kid in Idaho—two hours away, and in so many ways Utah’s cultural and political sibling. Not too many months before, Ed remembered that there had been this young man, eighteen years old or something like that, who had been arrested. He hadn’t committed a big crime, just some silly misdemeanor. But the cops had picked him up. Then they called the kid’s dad to come get him. The dad said: “Let him spend the night in jail; it’ll be a good learning experience for him.”

“In jail that night, some guys beat the kid to death,” says Ed. As he recalls his thinking at the time, his eyes mist. Then a tear rolls down his cheek and he clenches his teeth. “All I could think was: ‘I cannot let Reggie spend a single night in jail.’

“ ‘I will sell the house. I will do whatever it takes. But I will not let him spend a night in jail.’ ”

JACKIE HAD BEEN NUMB
all day at work, knowing the worst was to come. She had to tell the girls what had happened to their dad. After receiving news of the accident, she’d stayed at work until three in the afternoon. Then she went to school to pick up her oldest daughter, Stephanie, a real daddy’s girl. Jackie’s colleague Roy drove her in her own car over to Thomas Edison Charter School.

Jackie gave the news to the principal and to Stephanie’s teacher. Then she walked with Stephanie to her Saturn—just like Jim’s, a practical car, navy blue. Stephanie had on her school uniform, the khaki slacks and polo shirt, her blond hair in a protective braid because it was gymnastics day.

Stephanie saw Roy, her mommy’s work friend, and asked: “Are we going to gymnastics?”

“Sweetie, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Jackie sat down in the front seat and pulled her seven-year-old onto her lap. She realized Stephanie didn’t have too much understanding about death, or, at least, she didn’t have much experience with it, except for when they’d put Sandy, their chocolate point Siamese cat, to sleep two years earlier.

“Daddy was in a car accident.”

Stephanie looked at her with those deep blue eyes. She never thought she’d have a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl.

“He didn’t make it.”

Stephanie started to cry and now Jackie did, too. Stephanie curled up in her mother’s arms. “I was holding her, and I was hiding her.” From the world, everything.

“He’s gone to heaven.”

They sat there like that for a while, Stephanie not speaking, not even asking questions. She didn’t ask any questions. Jackie and Roy got her into the backseat. They drove to the day care center to get Cassidy, who was just a few months shy of four years old. On the way, Stephanie finally offered up a question: “So are we going to do what we’d planned this weekend?”

It surprised Roy, the sophisticated implication of the question: Will life go on as usual? A few hours later, people had begun to fill the Furfaro home. The phone rang. Jackie’s mom picked up. It was a reporter from the local paper. Jackie heard her mom say, “How the hell do you
think
we feel?” and hang up.

Jackie tried not to make a public show of her grief, trying to eat, not eating, shaking, trying not to shake, and thinking:
How am I going to do this alone?

It was already dark when Jackie carried Cassidy to the living room just inside the front door. A big TV stood in the corner. And there was a massage chair, from Sharper Image. It cost $2,100, but it was worth it to help with Jim’s periodic migraines.

Jackie and Cassidy curled up on the dark tan fabric couch. The little one was a mamma’s girl, who liked to lie on Jackie’s chest. By then, Cassidy had asked when Daddy was coming home, and Jackie was trying to find the right moment.

On the couch, she tried to calmly explain that Daddy had had an accident and had gone to heaven. “He isn’t coming home.”

She wasn’t sure how much Cassidy understood. And, if Jackie was honest with herself, she wasn’t sure whether she even believed it. “A small part of me thought: ‘Maybe it’s a mistake, and he’ll come home anyway.’ ”

ABOUT THAT TIME, OVER
in Logan, a woman named Terryl Warner pulled up in a blue minivan outside a gymnastics center called Air-Bound. The door pulled open and Terryl’s daughter, a sixth grader, chilly from waiting outside for a few minutes, climbed inside.

“You won’t believe what happened,” the girl, Jayme, started. “Cecily told us that Stephanie’s dad was killed in a car accident.”

Terryl paused and tried to catch up to the conversation. Cecily was the gymnastics coach.

“Which one is Stephanie?” she asked.

Jamie reminded Terryl that Stephanie was on her gymnastics team, the daughter of Jackie and Jim Furfaro. Terryl began to form a picture. She’d had modest interaction with the family but liked them. She remembered, three months earlier, the night before a statewide meet at Air-Bound, when Jim Furfaro and her husband, Alan, had to set up the fiberglass springs under the mat. They’d cut their hands on the fiberglass and had to go out and get gloves to finish the job.

Meantime, Terryl had been trying to make some posters for the gymnastics meet. The posters had flames on them, but Terryl’s drawings were so bad that they’d never be used. They were so awful, in fact, that Jackie had laughed in a friendly way at them, something Terryl appreciated; she tried not to take herself too seriously.

Terryl was shocked, of course, by news of the wreck. But she was used to hearing about tragedy. In her daily life, Terryl came across a lot of horrible situations. She was the victim’s advocate in Cache County, which encompassed Logan. It was a particularly low crime area, but it still had its share of particularly gruesome crimes, like rapes and child abuse. In Terryl, the criminals had a particularly ardent and zealous foe. She had a reputation for relentlessly pushing for justice, even among the prosecutors.

Terryl connected to people who suffered tragedy, in a very personal way. She spoke from experience. She’d been on her own improbable journey, a victim from a very early age, and she’d learned to fight back—for herself, for others.

When her daughter told her about the car crash, Terryl didn’t think about it in professional terms. After all, it sounded like it was just an accident. Besides, Terryl assumed it must’ve happened in nearby Box Elder County, which was home to both Tremonton and ATK Systems. Not her jurisdiction.

Mainly, Terryl thought:
Jackie’s going to be a single mom. What a terrible tragedy
.