Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306140195
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There'd been a fight at Hardy Road Trailer Park, and Hagy had scuttled down a big hill to see what was going on. He ended up smack dab in a huge mud puddle.
Sutliffe thought it was hilarious. He and Hagy started talking. They ended up staying up until 3 in the morning shooting the breeze. They were friends from then on.
Sutliffe, Hagy and another buddy, Larry Bryant, 15, became inseparable.
On Friday night at a swimming pool in Vinton, Sutliffe and Bryant watched their best friend shoot himself to death. It was a freak accident. Hagy, 18, didn't know the gun was loaded when he pulled the trigger.
"It still feels like he's gonna come home - he's just gone for a week," Sutliffe said late Saturday, 24 hours after his friend's death.
"We planned on doing everything together - getting a job together, taking a vacation this summer, going to the beach."
Sutliffe and Bryant said all three of them had been kicked out of school, but they were working together to get their lives on track. They said Hagy told them he had been kicked out of Staunton River High School in Bedford County after an altercation with a principal.
Hagy had been planning to go back to high school this fall or sign up for the Job Corps.
"He got into a little bit more trouble than most people - from his past history," Bryant said. "When he was hanging around us, he didn't get into trouble. He was trying to get himself back together, I guess."
Hagy was easy to get along with, and most people took to him, his friends said. Hagy liked to joke and roughhouse. "People he didn't know, he kept calm and quiet and stuff, until he got to know them," Sutliffe, 18, said.
Hagy would do wild things sometimes. The guys would go to downtown Roanoke, climb up the rooftops and jump from building to building. One day, he rode his bicycle right through the big fountain in front of the Hotel Roanoke.
"We hung a boy by his feet off the top of a parking garage," Sutcliffe says. It was a friend - and it was in good fun. Despite the crazy stuff they'd do, Sutcliffe, said, Hagy wasn't reckless or mean.
They stayed friends even after Hagy moved away from the trailer park near Vinton. For a while, Hagy lived with his girlfriend in Troutville, then he moved to Moneta.
Hagy's little brother was just 4, but Hagy didn't mind him tagging along. "We got him lifting weights, playing football, helping fix on cars, just little things," Sutliffe says. "His little brother looked up to him like he was everything in the world. He couldn't go to sleep at night if Billy wasn't there."
Hagy would always tell Mike and Larry that he'd whip them if they ever got into a fight. They'd laugh and tell him: No way, you're crazy.
"He didn't have many enemies," Sutliffe said. "If he did, they settled it the old fashioned way: They'd either fight it out or talk it out. Most of the time, they'd talk it out."
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB