Before He Wakes (3 page)

“I’m sorry. The damage has been done. It’s just a matter of time.”

Doris would not allow herself to collapse. Things had to be done. People had to be notified. The telephone numbers of people she needed to call were all at home, and she told Al to stay at the hospital while she drove there to make calls. She was concerned foremost about her daughter, Cindy, who lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Although she was much younger than Russ, Cindy was very close to her brother. A speech pathologist in the public schools, Cindy moved from school to school and would be difficult to find. Doris called Cindy’s husband, David, at work, to have him take care of Cindy and arrange an immediate flight to Durham. She called her preacher, Malbert Smith, who had known Russ since he was a child. Al, she knew, would need him. She called a sister in Durham and asked her to pick up Cindy and David when they arrived at the airport.

After Doris had left for home, Marva had suggested that Barbara take a break from the ordeal of waiting and go home for a rest, but Barbara protested that she didn’t want to leave Russ. The doctors had not yet granted permission for family to see him, though, and a short time later, Barbara decided that she should go home to shower and change clothes before going to him. Seeing that she was in no condition to drive, Larry Harper offered to take her. As they were leaving, Marva suggested that Barbara ought to clean up the bedroom while she was there.

Doris hurried back to the hospital but couldn’t find a parking place. Her son was dying, and she couldn’t get to him because she couldn’t park her car. She was becoming frantic with frustration when a car stopped alongside hers. Barbara was inside with her minister. She said there’d been no change in Russ’s condition, and she was going home to shower.

“I can’t find a parking place,” Doris said in an exasperated plea.

“Park across the street,” Barbara told her, “because if you stay over here, your car will be towed.”

Doris parked there, ran back to the emergency room and found Al waiting alone. Russ had been taken to a room, he told her.

“Malbert is coming,” he said. “He’ll be here in a minute.”

“Al, Russ is up in that room by himself, and I am not waiting for anybody,” Doris said, heading for the elevator, her husband following.

As they stepped off the elevator at the intensive care ward, Malbert Smith appeared with Wally Fowler, a church member. Together they went to Russ’s room. Wally went inside with Doris while Al remained outside. Wally stood back quietly as Doris went to her son’s side. She gently took his hand and began rubbing his arm, crying softly and telling him over and over that she loved him. She knew that he knew that, because they told each other regularly. Still, she couldn’t tell him enough.

“Can he hear me?” she asked a nurse.

“I don’t know.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed, and she thought it meant that he must be hearing her, that that was his way of letting her know, and she kept telling him over and over, rubbing his arm all the while.

She didn’t know how long she stayed at his side, but when she went to check on Al, she found that Malbert had him stretched out in a recliner, putting cold compresses on his forehead. Al wanted to go to Russ, and she waited while Malbert took him inside.

Later, they traded places at their son’s side, one of them always there, until nurses asked them to leave briefly. They walked around a comer of the corridor and saw Barbara and her family. Coworkers from the medical center were stopping by to express condolences to Barbara. Her parents were preparing to go back to work.

Doris and Al had been told several times that if Al didn’t move his car from the emergency room parking lot where he had left it, it would be towed. Doris knew that if Russ died on this day, she and Al would want to ride home together. They wouldn’t need both cars. Doris asked Barbara’s brother, Steve, if he would follow her home in Al’s car so that she could leave hers.

When they returned, everybody was gathered in a conference room in the intensive care ward. A nurse had asked them to leave Russ’s room. Soon a doctor appeared, looking grim.

“I don’t know any other way to tell you,” he said. “He has expired.”

Doris was looking at the clock behind his head as he spoke. It was a little after twelve-thirty. She exploded from her chair. She had to get to her son, but a nurse stopped her.

“Sit down,” she said firmly. “You can’t go now.”

When Doris finally was allowed to go to him, she took his limp hand, surprisingly still warm, and rubbed his arm as if she were trying to rub life back into him, crying and telling him how much she loved him. Several times she left, but each time she was compelled back to his side. Nurses finally told her that she shouldn’t go back, but when she pleaded to return just one more time for a final goodbye, they relented.

Afterward, while Barbara went in to see Russ with her minister, Doris and Al walked the hallway outside intensive care, back and forth, crying and asking why.

Bryan, their grandson adopted by Russ, came in. He was nineteen, a student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, a three-and-a-half-hour drive to the southeast.

“Will somebody please tell me what is going on?” he said.

Family members told him.

“Oh, no!” he cried, throwing up his arms and sinking to the floor against the hallway wall, where he sat sobbing, his Uncle Steve trying to console him.

Barbara stopped Doris and Al and said, “I want to have the coaches as pallbearers and the baseball team as honorary pallbearers.”

“Fine,” Doris said, and then she was riding home with Al, both of them stunned and unable to accept the harsh reality of the morning’s events.

3

Sergeant Rick Buchanan was at his desk in the detective division of the Durham County Sheriff’s Department, starting a new work week, when the telephone rang. Frank Honkanen, a young pathologist at Duke University Medical Center who served as the county’s medical examiner, was on the line. Buchanan jotted down the time of the call: 10:35.

A previously healthy forty-year-old male was at the hospital, shot in the head, supposedly accidentally, Honkanen said. The man was brain-dead. Death was certain. The family wanted no extreme measures taken to keep him alive. He was an organ donor. Would organ removal interfere in any investigation? Would an autopsy be required?

Buchanan couldn’t give an answer. He hadn’t heard of the case. That was unusual, because as lead homicide investigator for the Durham County Sheriff’s Department, he normally was alerted to any shooting in the county.

What was the name? Buchanan asked.

“Stager,” Honkanen said. “A. Russell.”

He’d have to look into it and get back to him, Buchanan told him.

When Buchanan located the incident report filed by the deputies, he realized that the shooting had happened before the shift change. Both deputies would be home asleep after their all-night shifts. The reports contained only the barest details of Barbara’s version of events and gave no indication that the shooting was anything other than an accident, but Buchanan would have to talk with the deputies before determining whether any additional investigation would be required.

Before he was able to get in touch with the deputies, though, Buchanan received a call from the hospital saying that Russell Stager had died at 12:35. The possibility of an autopsy had kept doctors from taking his organs for transplant.

At midafternoon, Buchanan got into his unmarked silver-gray Plymouth cruiser and drove to Barbara’s parents’ house, a beige brick ranch-style house set deep in woods in the Willow Hill subdivision north of Durham. He was met in front of the house by Barbara’s father, James Terry, who showed him the bloodied sheets and pillowcases from his daughter’s bed and asked if he would need them. One of the investigating deputies had told him they wouldn’t be needed, he said, since the shooting was an accident.

“No, we won’t need them,” Buchanan said. He just wanted to speak briefly with Barbara.

He met her in the dining room, and he was surprised that she was not as distraught as he had expected.

She told him about hearing the alarm going off in her son’s room and reaching to remove the gun from beneath her husband’s pillow. It went off as she raised it, she said. She described how she and Russ were lying in the bed, and when Buchanan asked if she would mind going with him to the house so that he could see the room and bed, she quickly agreed.

That surprised Buchanan, too. Somebody who’d undergone such a traumatic experience presumably would be reluctant to return so soon to the scene.

Yet another surprise was in store. Buchanan assumed that Barbara would be overcome with emotion upon entering the bedroom. The guilt of having caused such a horrible event, even though accidentally, surely would be overwhelming. But she showed no signs of distress as they walked in. Instead, she began calmly pointing out Russ’s position on the bed and how she had been lying next to him.

The bed had been made. The room was immaculate, as if no tragedy had occurred there just hours earlier. Buchanan took note of a pump shotgun standing in one comer, and as he nosed about the room, setting the scene in his mind, Barbara picked up Russ’s wallet from a dresser top and thumbed through it.

After returning Barbara to her parents’ house, Buchanan wasn’t sure what to think. “Most cases, you get a feel of them,” he said later. “This one, I couldn’t get a feel of it. Somehow it just didn’t feel right.”

He returned to his office and called the medical examiner to find out more about the wound. It had been a close shot to the back of the head, said Honkanen, who had questioned Barbara before she left the hospital. The bullet was still in Russ’s brain.

Both men agreed that Barbara’s story had sounded plausible enough. No autopsy would be necessary. The body would be released to the funeral home.

When Buchanan wrote up his reports about the shooting before going home, he added, “Based on the current information as was provided, the death was being declared accidental.”

Still, something nagged him about it, and that night after he got home, he called Deputy Clark Green to question him about the position of the gun on the bed and the location of the cartridge. Nothing Green told him led him to think the shooting could have been anything other than an accident. Yet something about this incident still didn’t feel quite right.

Russ Stager’s first wife, Jo Lynn, had just arrived home from work Monday night when her parents appeared unexpectedly at the door of her house in north Raleigh. She could tell from their expressions that something was wrong.

“We have some bad news,” her mother said without preliminaries. “Russ is dead.”

Jo Lynn was shocked. “A car wreck?” she asked. Russ had narrowly escaped being killed in an accident just a year before.

“No, he was killed accidentally with a gun.”

“How?” Jo Lynn asked. “Who shot him?”

“Barbara.”

Jo Lynn was stunned. It had happened! When Russ had told her, it had seemed inconceivable, yet it actually had happened. She reacted instinctively. She went straight to the telephone and called the Durham police, only to learn that the department hadn’t investigated the shooting. Try the Sheriff’s Department, she was told. She called and asked to speak to the person investigating the Stager shooting, only to be told that he was gone for the day.

“You have to get a message to him,” she said. “I have to talk to this person.”

Twice more she called, but the return call never came. She was too agitated and upset to go to bed, and she sat up all night, her mind churning with memories and regrets. Early Tuesday morning she began calling again. After several tries, she finally reached Rick Buchanan. She identified herself as Russ Stager’s former wife and said that she had to talk to him immediately. Could she come over?

Buchanan agreed to meet her at his office in the courthouse in downtown Durham at ten.

To organize her thoughts and make certain that she didn’t forget anything that she intended to say, Jo Lynn sat down and wrote a letter of introduction before leaving.

As Jo Lynn drove into town, she was unaware that Durham’s morning newspaper had spread the story about Russ’s death across the top of the obituary page: “
DURHAM HIGH BASEBALL COACH ACCIDENTALLY SHOT TO DEATH
.” The article quoted Buchanan and recounted the version of events that Barbara had told the officers. “There was no evidence of a struggle or foul play,” it said.

Jo Lynn, though, was on her way to try to get somebody to think differently.

She got a bad impression of Buchanan when he remained seated at his desk as she introduced herself and offered the letter she had brought. He seemed utterly disinterested, she thought, and it irked her. Russ was dead and he didn’t seem to care.

She took the chair that Buchanan offered and waited impatiently as he opened the letter and began to read.

Dear Officer Buchanan,

Thank you very much for agreeing to meet with me today regarding the death of A. Russell Stager III. In order to establish some credibility for myself, I would like to tell you the following. I am a 1975 graduate of Meredith College in Raleigh. N.C. I taught school briefly. I am currently office manager for a very large, successful residential builder in Raleigh. My employer is currently president of the Home Builders Association. Russell and I were married for approximately five years and after the usual distance a divorce brings, we became very close friends and confidants. That is why I can share the following information with you.