08/26/2013

   This second Saturday of our life without our son seemed to be something of a transition day. It was one of the first days since Curtis's death where we had no business to attend to. More of our house guests would be leaving. I had certainly appreciated all the love and support we had received in the last several days, the memories of which would help sustain me in the long, bleak days ahead, but by this day, I was definitely feeling in need of some space to begin dealing with all we had endured. At the same time, I was also fearful of what I might feel when I slowed down long enough to really think about what the future now held for us. One of our neighbors who was a police officer (not with our local police department) apparently felt it was important to meet with us all. He wanted to try to tell us from his experiences as a police officer what we might be facing when it came time to try to get justice for our children regarding the man who had caused the accident. We believed (naively, as we discovered) that when a man kills three children, intentionally or not, that there would be some kind of suitable penalty involved. Our neighbor tried to explain to us that this might not be the case. I had to give our neighbor credit. He knew that what he was saying would not sit well with any of us, but out of concern for all we'd already gone through, he wanted us to be prepared as we began our journey through the legal system. After all, he had years more experience in this area than any of the rest of us. Up to this point, I hadn't had much time or energy to even think about the man who had caused the accident. The only thing I'd done at one point during that terrible first week was get in my car, drive to his house, park in front and wait for him to appear. To this day, I don't really know what I was thinking except to say that I just wanted to see what someone who killed three children looked like. After a few minutes of waiting,  a car pulled into the driveway, and the man I assumed was responsible for Curtis's death got out of the passenger side of the car. In spite of my fragile emotional state, or perhaps even because of it, I just sat frozen in my seat. I didn't even have the energy to confront him. I would get a chance to do that many months later in the courtroom. Common sense prevailed even at this emotionally precarious moment in my life. I really didn't want to do anything that would add further trauma to my wife and children. (I would not even tell my wife about this incident until much later.) Besides, at that time I had yet to hear the my neighbor's discouraging words. I still thought then that
surely the legal system would provide us with justice. Wrong again.