Chasing Gideon Read Free

He wouldn’t answer. Couldn’t answer.”
    Then Sean saw the woman in the backseat with her head through the glass. “I thought she was dead.”
    Someone called an ambulance—no one recalls who it was. EMTs arrived within minutes. They moved the elderly driver of the Toyota, Lowell Stack, from the car. Stack, according to witnesses, was bleeding from the head and excoriated himself, repeating “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. What have I done?” 4 Asked if he was okay, he nodded. “I think I’m alright.” But he was worried about his daughter in the backseat: “How’s Judy?”
    Officer Erin Raleigh, one of the first cops on the scene, spoke to Sean. “Sean appeared to have been crying and was currently teary eyed and very upset at the time,” Raleigh wrote in a contemporaneous report. 5 “Sean told me he was driving his Mustang when the collision occurred. Sean explained to me he was driving westbound on Garland and was travelling ‘a little fast,’ but stated he never made it out of second gear. . . . Sean told me he was just worried about the other people involved in the collision, to make sure they were ok.” Another officer on the scene, Bryan Grenon, put it differently in his report: “Replogle appeared to be distraught and somewhat distant.” 6 Another witness, Yvonne Belcourt, who’d been driving the car behind him and was furious at “the speed of this child,” ascribed different motives: “After the wreck, the only thing I remember is jumping out of the car, screaming at the kid. . . . And then I remember him jumping up and down screaming, ‘Oh, God, oh, God,’ and I swore at him. I said, ‘What the f—do you think you’re doing?’ Only I didn’t say ‘F,’ I said the bad word. I’m not normally a swearer. . . . I don’t remember what else he said. I wasn’t concerned about him. I was concerned about the old people in the car.” (With echoes of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger , in which the protagonist’sbehavior after his mother’s death was studied and recast as indicative of his guilty conscience, Sean’s affect at the scene would later be dissected, analyzed, characterized, and re-characterized as lawyers and witnesses searched for telltale signs of guilt or innocence.)
    Officer Raleigh asked about insurance and Sean admitted he had none. Raleigh went to speak with Officer Grenon about the folks in the other car. “Officer Grenon stated that all three motorists were going to be transported to Providence Holy Family Hospital Emergency to be treated for their injuries. Grenon stated none of the parties in the vehicle had sustained life-threatening injuries, but did need to be viewed by the medical staff at the hospital to be treated.” Another cop measured skid marks from both vehicles and took photographs of the scene.
    Sean was “pretty freaked out” but remembers a cop comforting him, assuring him that the family in the Toyota was okay. He went home thinking the others would be all right, that he himself was “stupid for speeding,” and that cops would be ticketing the Toyota’s driver “for blowing a stop sign.” Sean found out the Stack family’s address and sent a Hallmark card, telling them how sorry he was.
    Later that evening, at 9:30 P.M. , Officer Raleigh noted in his written report that the cop measuring skid marks had done his calculations and determined the speed; Sean had been going 45 mph prior to impact, he said. The speed limit was 30 mph.
    The next day, Officer Raleigh went by the Replogles’ house and gave Sean a ticket for reckless driving and issued a Notice of Infraction for Liability Insurance Required. “I released Sean on his signature promising to contact the court within 15 days,” Officer Raleigh noted.
    On Monday, Sean went to school but felt terrible. Judy Rodeen, the woman