Trooper Down! (25 page)

And when you are young and confident that life has only good things to offer, the odds against tragedy striking home seem even greater.

Then something happens that proves you wrong.

III

Bobby Lee Coggins was one of those self-driven people who always accomplish what they set out to do.

And what he wanted to do most in 1984, at the age of twenty-six, was to join the highway patrol. Actually, he wanted to join the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI), but he saw the patrol as the best place to start, a sort of stepping-stone to his future goal.

Even as a kid he knew what he did and didn't want.

He once walked home from a camping trip at three in the morning because the crowd he was with had been smoking marijuana.

“When he came in the house,” recalled his father, “he woke us up and told us what had happened. ‘That's their business,' he said. ‘But I don't want any part of it.'”

An honor student through high school and college, he was academic by nature, yet athletic too, winning awards for many of his sports achievements. Other interests were fast cars, motorcycles, photography, and weight lifting.

“Dad wanted us to lift weights from the time we were little,” said Barry, four years younger than Bobby. “It seems like we started right
after we were born because I can't remember not doing it. Bobby didn't mind at all—he'd lift for an hour or more every day until he was sweating like crazy.

“But I hated it. When it was my turn, I'd go in the room, close the door, and watch TV. Then I'd splash a little water on my face to make it appear that I'd been sweating too.”

Bobby was on to him from the start.

“Yeah, Barry,” he'd say, grinning, “you had a real good workout, didn't you?”

The boys grew up in a contemporary, rock-front house on a corner lot in Bryson City, North Carolina. A middle-class neighborhood, it was quiet and safe, a good place to live and rear children.

The Cogginses were a close-knit, traditional family. James Coggins, a sales representative for Kraft Company and chairman of the Swain County Board of Commissioners, had firm ideas about how to raise boys, but he was a loving father who genuinely enjoyed his sons. Whenever Bobby took jobs that kept him out driving at night, James would often accompany him so the two could ride around together and talk.

Frances, a small woman with a soft, gentle manner, was the nurturing force, the kind of mother who placed her home and family far above a career.

Growing up, the boys seldom disagreed, despite some real differences in temperament. Bobby was quiet and deliberate, much like Frances. Barry was loud, impulsive, rambunctious. Bobby had straightforward goals and went after them, while Barry tended to drift from one get-rich-quick scheme to another. Both were bright, but Bobby was seen as “the brain,” Barry the gutsier, more street-smart of the two.

Throughout his life, Bobby trusted his younger brother's instincts and relied heavily on his judgment in making decisions—even when it wasn't in Bobby's best interests.

One day Bobby was watching television when eight-year-old Barry came to the door, motioning him to come outside. What had started as an argument with some neighborhood boys was about to escalate into a knock-down drag-out fight.

“I want you to choke this boy till his tongue hangs out,” Barry instructed his big brother, “while I stomp those two over there.”

“Okay,” said Bobby, walking calmly into the fray.

Fully grown, he stood only five feet eight, but was muscular and well-formed, with deep brown eyes and a shock of thick, black hair.

Though he neither smoked nor drank, he was a junk-food addict who had to work hard to stay in shape. He'd run five to ten miles a day, come home and down half a gallon of milk at one sitting, then indulge himself in pizzas and Cokes. Sometimes Barry followed him on his workouts, cruising comfortably in his car while Bobby ran alongside, calling him names.

After graduating from college, where he majored in biology and chemistry, Bobby took a job with the U.S. Forest Service as a park ranger. It was his first taste of law enforcement and he loved it.

So he applied to the highway patrol. And waited. Got up at four every morning to run. And waited. Lifted weights every day. And waited. Toured New York City as a student photographer. And waited to hear from the North Carolina Highway Patrol.

One morning he lay sprawled on the living room floor with his head on a cushion, deep in thought.

“You know,” he finally said, “I've got all this education, all these degrees, and I can do just about anything physically. Why can't I get in?”

He was nearly in tears.

A few weeks later, he was notified that he had been accepted into the highway patrol.

James and Frances were supportive—whatever Bobby wanted was fine with them. But Barry was opposed to the idea right from the start. He thought the work dangerous and ill-advised for someone with Bobby's educational background.

“You don't need to do that,” he told Bobby. “Be a chemist or a biologist.”

But Bobby, who could dig in his heels when the occasion warranted, had made up his mind. Not even Barry could dissuade him.

Once enrolled in patrol school, Bobby found it “no big deal,” mostly because of his prior academic achievements and his excellent physical conditioning.

From the beginning, he was not the “gung ho” type. Neither the flashy patrol car nor the uniform especially impressed him. Nor was his every waking hour focused on the highway patrol. He seldom
talked about his work, preferring not to involve anyone outside the patrol in day-to-day incidents on the job.

When he received his first assignment, he looked it up on the map, and was relieved to learn it was in western North Carolina. Then he went to check it out.

“Oh god,” he told Barry, “wait till you see this place.”

Buried in the mountains more than sixty miles northeast of Bobby's home, Hot Springs, in Madison County, still has no stoplights, fast-food joints, shopping malls, or theaters. Little more than a village, its largest industry—Whitewater rafting—is seasonal, dependent on the mood of the French Broad River that flows through town.

Once a tourist mecca, it flourished during the 1800s by attracting invalids who came seeking cures at the warm natural springs boiling up from the mountains.

By the turn of the century, when doctors were no longer convinced such “cures” were valid, Hot Springs had lost its appeal and because of its isolation had rapidly declined.

The few businesses still remaining have a sad, deserted look, as though time had peeked in, shook its head, and left. A small bank stands on Main Street along with a hardware store, a park ranger station, a few general shops, and an old-fashioned cafe with a handwritten sign stating plainly,
NO CREDIT. PLEASE DON'T ASK NO ONE.

Surrounding Hot Springs is country that is pure “back-of-beyond,” with ridges so steep and valleys so remote “that even God gets lost without a map,” said one native.

Understandably, Bobby Coggins's presence in town—as the first trooper stationed in Hot Springs in more than a decade—was a major event.

What initiated the assignment was a citizen's complaint that troopers in Madison County, whose job it was to patrol the entire region, were spending too much time in one area, leaving large parts of the county unattended. Captain Charles Long, now retired from the patrol, met with local residents to hear them out and at the end of the meeting agreed to do something about it.

“I discussed the situation with the patrol commander,” said Long, “and he agreed we should pick the best cadets we could find and send them to places that didn't have a trooper.”

“Bobby was the first officer we chose. We thought he was sharp, neat, well-educated, a good person to represent us in the area. And it turned out we were right. He did an excellent job.”

His first two weeks in town, he caught the eye of a teenage girl who had never seen a patrol car, much less met a trooper.

Her name was Linda Jo Justice and her parents ran the Carolina Grocery and Video store on Main Street.

She remembers the first time she saw Bobby and the immediate crush that followed.

“I was working behind the counter one day and he came in dressed in his uniform. I thought he was the best thing that ever happened to Hot Springs.”

Two days later he stopped by again, struck up a conversation with Virginia Justice, Linda's mother, but could not remember Linda's name.

Undaunted, she whispered to her mother, “Ask him to come for supper.”

“You ask him yourself,” she replied.

Bobby accepted the invitation, and before long he and Linda were a twosome.

No doubt he was smitten by her beauty. Considered one of the best-looking girls in Hot Springs—if not the prettiest—Linda Jo had a mass of honey-blonde hair, big blue eyes, and the kind of figure that could turn a man's head. Dressed up, she easily passed for twenty-one, instead of sixteen.

“Mom didn't really approve of us dating because of our age difference,” said Linda. “But she didn't say much. She knew I wasn't going to let her talk me out of it.”

Bobby—who in the past had tended to date older, more sophisticated women—took some ribbing from fellow officers.

“Need a baby-sitter for your girlfriend?”

But Bobby would laugh, not really caring what they thought.

He told her about his desire to go into the SBI and that he thought it was a safer job with more conventional hours than the highway patrol.

By now, he'd gotten over his initial unhappiness with Hot Springs and began to relax and enjoy his new assignment. He found most of the locals pleasant and receptive to the idea of having a patrolman in town.

“A few of the rednecks were scared of him,” said Linda. “They
had gotten out of hand over the years because the law never came down here. But they learned to respect him,”

He spent his first six weeks on the job with training officer Jerry Tapp.

“He fit right into the community,” said Tapp, “because he could talk with anybody. And he was easy to train, open-minded, good about listening to what I told him. The only problem we had was that he was
too 
talkative. I finally said to him, ‘Give me a break. I'd like to ride around in silence once in a while.'”

The one question Bobby asked that Tapp had never been asked before was, “How long do I fight before I have to shoot someone?”

What Tapp didn't know was that before joining the highway patrol, Bobby had never handled, much less fired, a gun. Guns were not allowed in the Coggins home and Bobby had never expressed a desire to have one. Even after joining the patrol, he felt uncomfortable with a sidearm (though he scored high in marksmanship at cadet school), and would remove it as soon as he got home.

Bobby's superiors saw him as an able, conscientious trooper, but somewhat naive about potential danger from the public.

“I noticed that sometimes he engaged in too much conversation when he stopped people,” said a line sergeant. “I also warned him about keeping his hands free. He'd hold his flashlight in one hand and his ticket book in the other. If he needed to get to his weapon, he'd have to drop something. Young troopers are taught those things in school but they have a tendency to forget.”

James and Frances came to visit often, as did Barry, and were impressed by how quickly Bobby had endeared himself to the community.

“One day he wanted me to ride with him to the post office before he went on patrol,” said James. “When we got there, we saw a group of boys sitting on a big wooden spool, drinking beer. Bobby ran around the patrol car, cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, ‘Hey, boys! You better hide that beer! The law is right up the road!' They just laughed and waved at him.”

At night, after getting off duty, he'd drive to the center of town and park on the bridge so he could shoot the breeze with the locals. One was a mentally handicapped man who took a shine to Bobby's hat. A few days later, Bobby brought him a U.S. Forest Service hat and told him that now he could help him “patrol.”

Mid-September in the Appalachian mountains marks the beginning of a natural wonder that peaks when all the leaves have turned to shades of yellows, reds, and golds. It is a season of change, a last full burst of living color before the bitter gray bleakness of winter settles in.

Along the stark, high ridges surrounding Hot Springs, Bobby often cruised the very places where tourists stopped to catch a bird's-eye view of the fall foliage.

Saturday, September 14, 1985, was one of those days.

Shortly before 4:00
P.M., 
Linda Jo decided to leave work early. There was little activity at the grocery store in Hot Springs and she wanted to go shopping with her mother in Newport, Tennessee. But she had to go home first to change. On the way, she expected to see Bobby. The couple had become engaged in May, and Bobby was renting a room at her parents' home in Spring Creek.

She spotted him at an overlook, the cruiser parked behind a truck, its blue light spinning. Standing outside the patrol car, he turned to wave as she passed.

Bobby had checked on duty at 4:00
P.M. 
and was heading up the winding, narrow Highway N.C. 209, which runs through Pisgah National Forest into Hot Springs, when he noticed a '76 orange and white Chevrolet truck with a South Carolina license plate. Watching it closely, he looked for signs of the weaving, irregular pattern drunk drivers exhibit. Suspicious, he turned on the blue light, signaling the driver to stop.

Jimmy Dean Rios, twenty-four, was driving. Seated beside him was William Bray, twenty-three.

The pair had stolen the truck after escaping with three other inmates from the Franklin County jail in Arkansas. Rios had been arrested for theft of property and forgery. Bray had been charged with reckless driving, fleeing from a police officer, having a concealed weapon, and possessing a controlled substance. Classified by one doctor as borderline mentally retarded, Bray carried a .25-caIiber pistol Rios had pitched to him as soon as he saw the patrol car. Bray later testified that an hour or so earlier he had smoked marijuana, swallowed four codeine tablets, and consumed six or eight beers.