Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 17, 1993 TAG: 9312170209
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB LEWIS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CADIZ, KY. LENGTH: Long
It took only an instant.
Something, maybe a panicky tug on the steering wheel, made the little red car fishtail. The car and its occupants, heading back from Wednesday's dinner break to their after-school jobs making wooden turkey calls, smashed sidelong at windshield level into the nose of a heavy four-wheel-drive vehicle.
All seven teens, friends since early childhood, were killed. An eighth boy who often went along on the dinner breaks was spared because he couldn't squeeze into the car.
On Thursday, police looked for answers in the skid marks, the single body outline painted on the pavement in iridescent green, the bloodstains, the measurements and photographs of shredded steel and shattered safety glass.
Friends and family of the Trigg County High School students looked to each other and to God to try to understand.
"I'm not going to try to second-guess what the Lord's plan is for them," said David Hale, who had known all of the boys for years and had given them part-time jobs at Knight & Hale Game Call Products, his shop near Cadiz.
"These boys were working here because they were the top kids in this county," Hale said. "Their parents had taught them a work ethic, and they wanted a job, so we gave it to them. They were pretty much hand-selected."
"Part of the criteria to work for us was their grades in school. They were the cream of the crop," agreed Jim Strelec, the boys' manager at the shop. "We hurt for the families of these fine young men. We lost the best there was."
The boys, who were among 18 youths working at Knight & Hale, headed for the Pete Light barbecue restaurant a quarter-mile up the road as they commonly did at their 5 p.m. meal break. What was uncommon, Hale said, was that the teens packed into the four-seater that 17-year-old Steve Wallace was driving, instead of taking two cars.
"Our night supervisor last night said he'd never seen a time when more than three or four ever got into one car," Hale said.
Kerry Amis wanted to join his friends, but they couldn't make room for eight.
Timothy Wanke had been invited along for the ride, too, but passed it up because he had no food money, said his sister, Trigg High School senior Jennifer Wanke.
"It was Tim who told me about it last night. He said they were all loading up and said, `Come on, Tim, we've got room for just one more.' Because he didn't have any money, he didn't, and he had this sensation just after that he was glad he didn't go," Jennifer Wanke said.
Neither vehicle was speeding, Kentucky State Police officials said. And neither driver had been drinking, Trooper Chuck Robertson said.
The driver of the sport truck, Steven Richardson, 43, of Cadiz, escaped with face cuts, an injured right knee and a bruise across his chest where his seat belt stopped him. Nobody in the small car wore seat belts, which are not mandatory in Kentucky.
Sheriff Randy Clark was the first officer to see the carnage. Hours later, he still struggled not to weep as he tried to describe the scene. The force of the impact had ejected one boy from the car; his body was on the highway. Three other lifeless bodies were dangling from the wreckage.
Clark, the sheriff since 1985, had coached one of the boys in Little League and knew them all: young Wallace, who'd been driving; Dale Garner, 16; Jeremie Gordon, 16; David Lawrence and his cousin, Jessie Lawrence, both 16; Patrick Perry, 15; and Joey Rogers, 17.
All were from Cadiz except Rogers, who was from nearby Gracey. Wallace, David Lawrence and Garner were only children. In another measure of the small-town tragedy, Richardson's daughter had been dating Wallace.
"I was looking at several of those boys and thinking to myself, `Why aren't you alive, why can't you talk to me?' It's pretty hard to take, and I've had a tough time keeping control, but I just keep going on," Clark said, his jaw trembling, his eyes clouded with tears.
Their classmates attended only half a day of school Thursday, meeting with 30 psychologists called in to counsel the students. The second of three days of final semester exams was postponed. On the lawn and in the parking lot, students huddled in tight, grief-stricken clusters, holding one another and crying. Others sat and stared in stunned silence.
"When I moved here 6 1/2 years ago, Joey was one of the first ones to speak to me and make me smile. His sense of humor always made him so special," said Rebecca Peck, with whom Rogers would have graduated in May.
"I just kept waiting for his truck to pull into the parking lot this morning, and it never did," she said.
On Main Street in this town of about 2,000 residents, rows of antiques shops that normally do a bustling holiday trade stood nearly empty.
"In a town like this, everybody knows everybody, and a lot of them are related," Frieda Summer said as she gazed out the window of her shop onto the empty street. "Four of them boys were my distant relatives. We all came from the families of ancestors who settled this county."
Churches rushed messages of mourning onto their outdoor signs. Flags were pulled down to half-staff. The families gathered to make arrangements for a joint funeral Saturday afternoon.
Christmas was all but forgotten.
"You have to remember that for these families, Christmas this year is ruined and for many of them, Christmas will be ruined for the rest of their lives," said Carolyn Self, a counselor from the Pennyrile Mental Health Center.
"Some of them were only children. For their parents, there goes their hopes for the future."
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB