We recovered our senses enough to ask the officer to drop us off at our neighbors' house where our son and daughter were waiting. As we got out, they again expressed their condolences and the chaplain pressed a card into my hand saying, "Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you." I wasn't  even sure at this point I would be able to walk up to our neighbors' door. My wife and I grasped hands and began to woodenly walk toward the door. We stopped as we got to the door. I knew as soon as we rang the bell and stepped inside we would have to tell our children the terrible truth. I didn't think I'd be able to find the words. We were greeted by our neighbor who looked at us with hopeful eyes. I just shook my head. My wife fell into our neighbor's arms. Casey and Carly came anxiously to meet us with hopeful looks on their faces. I took my 16-year old son by the shoulders while my wife enveloped our 10-year old daughter in her arms. I looked Casey straight in the eye and said, "I'm so sorry, but your brother is gone." Behind me Carly screamed out her anguished questions, "Curtis died? He's dead?
Casey dropped his eyes, but never said a word. Our neighbors encircled us-the first moments of  the kind of comfort we were going to need for months-years-to come. We discussed what few facts we knew. We learned that our son's friends had also not survived the accident and that the parents who had been driving were both in the hospital. It seemed as if a massive dark cloud of shock and grief had descended over our neighborhood. How could something so horrible happen to us-to all of us? Our kids had all grown up together. Now three of them were gone in the blink of an eye, and the rest of us were left to somehow endure? Three families, an entire neighborhood and community rocked to the core?  Besides our family being forever changed by this night, our neighborhood as well would never be the same.  I remember thinking that maybe if I just stayed in my neighbors' house long enough that this would all turn out just to be someone's idea of a sick joke, but we knew there were things we needed to start doing even though it was 11:00 at night. Our neighbor and his son took our car keys and walked down to the corner to retrieve our vehicles for us and parked them in our driveway. As the four of us left our neighbors' home to walk the short distance back to our house it struck me that this would now have to become our new reality-just the four of us. There would never be five of us again.