ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 31, 1997 TAG: 9703310096
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ABINGDON
SOURCE: MICHAEL D. SHEAR THE WASHINGTON POST
The beginning and the end of Michael Sandoe's life are clear. It's what happened to the young man in between that remains a mystery to his former friends and neighbors in this rural Southwest Virginia community where he grew up.
For the first 18 years of his life, Michael Barr Sandoe had what former teachers and friends recall as a typical, if sometimes boisterous, childhood and adolescence. The end, though, came quietly. Officials say the 26-year-old Sandoe and 38 other people committed suicide by swallowing mixtures of crushed sleeping pills and vodka at a house in a wealthy suburb of San Diego.
Several who knew Sandoe before he graduated from high school in 1989 to join the military say they'd lost contact with him. Now they are trying to square the Michael they knew - a cheerful senior class president - with the one who joined a cult that mixed Christian religion and science fiction.
``I don't know what might have happened to him in the military or something else to change him,'' said Michael Lethcoe, 49, a teacher at Abingdon High School and faculty sponsor for the Key Club, a service group of which Sandoe was a member.
``It's such an abnormal occurrence, and he was more of a stable individual,'' Lethcoe said. ``I enjoyed being around him. I'm just really surprised.''
For most of his life, Sandoe lived in Abingdon. In high school, the tall young man was known as a prankster, friends say, always joking with people in a good-natured way. He was in the French Club in his junior year and was elected class president the next.
Shannon Markham, 25, one of Sandoe's friends in high school, called him a ``regular guy'' who loved his Ford Mustang and had a steady girlfriend.
``Mike had a lot of friends. He was a well-liked person,'' Markham said. ``I think Mike was pretty happy with the way things were with himself. He was like any of the rest of us: a little crazy, a fairly daring guy. Sometimes we would run around the neighborhood, pulling practical jokes on people.''
Jackie Craft, another high school friend, said running for class president started off as a joke for Sandoe, but he took it seriously once he won. ``His senior year was really a different year for him,'' she said. ``He gained a lot of respect from people.''
After high school, Sandoe enlisted in the Army. His mother, JoAnne Sandoe, said her son became a paratrooper and Ranger.
After serving in the Persian Gulf War, his mother said, he came back and ``worked and traveled.'' She said she had no indication her son was involved with the Heaven's Gate group.
Texas driving records show that in the early 1990s, Sandoe lived in Dallas, where some of the other cult members also stayed at one time or another. Newspaper articles in 1993 reported that a Michael Sandoe was among about 35 activists who picketed homes of abortion doctors in Dallas. The paper said Sandoe and several others were arrested during the protests.
When coroner's officials in San Diego released his name last week, they listed his most recent address as Boulder, Colo.
At Sandoe's grandmother's house in Abingdon, friends and neighbors brought food and offered condolences to the family Saturday. Leona Sandoe, the grandmother, said she and other family members were too upset to talk about Michael's life.
Lola Bumgarner, who lives across the street, said family members were ``taking it very hard.''
``I watched the pictures of the bodies on the cots for two days,'' she said. ``Then I heard that Michael was one of them. It's totally different then. ... I can't believe it.''
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines KEYWORDS: FATALITYby CNB