Chasing Gideon Read Free Page A

in the backseat of the car, turned out to be the office manager at his high school. “She was the main office lady, so the office people all hated me after that,” Sean said. Everyone at school knew what had happened. He walked down the halls. People stared. Pointed. He was a monster.
    Doctors put fifteen staples in Judy Rodeen’s left ear and head, five stitches near her left eye, and treated her for pain in the left side of her body. 7 Judy’s mother, Frances Stack, suffered cervical injuries,contusions, and lacerations. After examining Lowell Stack and running some tests and x-rays, an emergency room doctor decided he needed surgery to treat his wounds. He hospitalized the elderly man and operated immediately.
    Then, seven days after the accident, Lowell Stack took a turn for the worse. He rapidly deteriorated. At 6 P.M. on October 28, eight days after the accident, Lowell Stack died in the hospital. The preliminary cause of death was “from complications arising out of the injuries sustained in the crash,” a police report noted. 8
    Sean would learn about the death in a roundabout way. A friend of his who worked as a student assistant in the high school office overheard a conversation among staffers and slipped out to find Sean. Sean was sitting in class when his friend motioned him out into the hall. “The guy died, dude,” his friend said. “They’re all talking about it in the office.”
    Horrified, Sean turned, walked out of school, and went home. “Oh, my God!” he recalls thinking. “What the heck? Oh, my God!”
    Two days later, the police showed up at the door to the Replogles’ home. “I was in my bedroom playing video games with my friend,” Sean says. “Dad came in my room and said there are a couple police officers here that need to talk to you.”
    Corporal Tom Sahlberg broke the news. “I . . . advised him that the #2 driver had passed away, and now he was involved in much more serious charges that included Veh[icular] Homicide and Assault,” Sahlberg wrote in his official report. 9 “He was fully cooperative and asked how the Stack family was doing, and that he had sent them a card. In addition, he had set up a court date for the Reckless Driving citation, which I advised him had been dismissed because of the more serious charges now pending. . . . I told him to be careful answering any official questions until he had an attorney, but that he was free to contact me with any questions he had.”
    Sean didn’t know what to say. “I’m so sad that this person had to die,” he thought. “But this was an accident.” It was hard for Sean to comprehend that he was being charged with murder. As his father stood beside him, Sean listened, trying to make sense of what the cops were saying. Sahlberg told Sean that he would be back to formally arrest and book him in a few days.
    Then, two days later, police arrived at the house with a minivan, put cuffs on Sean, and took him downtown to book him. He was released on his own recognizance—but he was terrified. How would he survive prison? he wondered. What would they do to him—a skinny kid who had no idea how to defend himself? Who played video games and cried when he was in a car accident? What would happen to him? How could he mentally or physically prepare for life behind bars?
    Like many Americans, neither Sean nor his family had given much thought to “public defenders” or “indigent defense” prior to his car accident. Likely the terms were entirely unfamiliar to them. Legal services for the poor and the working class was not an issue for them. Why would it be? They had never been in trouble with the law.
    But they were about to get a lesson, via immersion in the criminal justice system. Sean was assigned an attorney, Carol Dee Huneke. This was a small stroke of luck in a slew of bad news.
    When Huneke first met Sean Replogle