Death on the Highway

Call it suicide or call it homicide, he was just a nice kid.

One of the last things that he did on Earth was call 911 and ask for help.

People in Chapel Hill are talking about the unexpected death of Courtland Smith, a premed biology major and fraternity president at UNC.

I would start with the story but since we still don’t know the rest of the story, I will stick with the facts as I know them from police reports that aren’t sealed and from the rivoting 15-minute 911 call Courtland made the morning of his death.

• Courtland was the DKE president at UNC.
• There was a party at his fraternity house Saturday night.
• His best friend saw him at 2:00 a.m. after the party. He reports that Courtland was “fine” at that time.
• About two hours later, Courtland placed the now famous 911 call.
• A female operator handled his call.
• Approximately 15 minutes later, Courtland was shot to death by a police officer on 1-85 southbound in Randolph County.

The questions outnumber the facts at this time. A video remains with sealed evidence. The medical examiner’s report has not been made public, nor has an e-mail Courtland wrote to his parents “that explains everything anyone would need to know” as Courtland told the 911 operator.

Because so much is unknown, the 911 call seems all the more important to our initial attempt to grieve this loss. The audio for the call can be accessed in the box with the story in the newspaper article.

Would I have listened to this call if I hadn’t watched Phone Booth last week? Maybe not. But Courtland's death would still have weighed on my mind as I worked with my premeds this week, talking with those students who are disappointed and feeling dejected about their low MCAT scores.

So many of my friends have sent their children to college for the first time this month. It’s every parent’s fear that their child will encounter danger or become severely ill while away at school.

The UNC campus has seen it’s share of tragedy recently. A few years ago, the student body president, Eve Carson, was shot to death at close range after being kidnapped and driven to an ATM machine to make her last withdrawal.

When Eve’s death was initially reported, there were holes of information big enough to drive a truck through. With Courtland’s death, the holes are even larger.

But what strikes me is the human interest. Sure, this is a human interest story, but that’s not what I mean. Somewhere in those last 15 minutes of his life, Courtland developed an interest in the female operator. He even asks her where she is from. And whether, as in Phone Booth, there was someone with a gun on Courtland’s “back pocket” or whether Courtland intended to fatally harm himself, he still cared about the operator and took an interest in her.

Call it homicide or call it suicide, he was just a nice kid.

One of the last things he did on Earth was call 911 . Our acoustic memory of Courtland is that of a young man who grew increasingly frustrated during his last cry for help.

Zombie Highways

Time was we worried about Chief Falling Rock when we took to the highways in my dad’s sedan. It was politically incorrect family slang for falling rock. On our family excursions along highways en route to the Smoky Mountains, the roadside signage warned of falling rock in the area. Chain link fence along the interstate heightened the sensation that a boulder could come sailing into the passenger window at any moment.

"Chief Falling Rock is after us," my dad would warn. A few years ago I took this acoustic memory and used it as the opener for a short story about a family portrait.

Times have changed a bit. Today there’s new terror on the roads. The News Hour with Jim Lehrer warned tonight of Zombie Highways. The story was about the Appalachian Development System gone too far in building a road to nowhere in north Birmingham. I saw some zombies on the interstate this summer, but the kind of zombies I saw were a little different than Jim’s.

If I had a quarter for every person talking on a cell phone while driving on the interstate, I could have made it to Austin and back without using my credit card once. Throw in a dollar for every mom (with kids in car seats) merging onto the highway while texting and I’ll make a contribution to your favorite charity.

We need laws to get people to quit taking undue risk.

How does that legislation get enacted? It seems soon after airbags began showing up in automobiles, I was witness to an autopsy at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Kentucky where a woman, under the height of 5’4’’, did not walk away from her accident because she suffered injuries when her airbag deployed on I-64. I don’t remember the exact role the ME’s office took in bringing about legislation to warn consumers that people under a certain height were at risk of airbag deployment injury, but I know there was some communication between Louisville and Frankfort on the issue.

There are plenty of people who argue government is too big, government does not need to take our freedoms away. If people made judicious use of capitalistic pleasures like phones with keyboards, maybe we wouldn’t need so many laws. Trouble is most people never want to think of safety until someone has hurt them.

While we’re in Mexico at the summit, we need to remember that we don’t want eighteen wheelers from Mexico on the interstate with the yellow HISD buses. Yes, let’s quit sending guns into Mexico for the drug cartels but no, we are not ready to allow Mexican trucks without brake inspections on US highways while my family is on the road.

Too much free trade and texting is bad for our safety on the roads. Darwin awards are for suicide, not homicide.

(This post was written last week and deemed too negative for the blog. Nonetheless, so many people have talked about dangerous road texting in the past four days that I felt compelled to post today.)

Taking the Time to Lay Down Some Tracks

I had a very pleasant morning with my son. I made chocolate chip pancakes. We watched a British show about training dogs. We walked our Lab and listened to the sounds of birds and cicadas along the way. We talked about mockingbirds. We paused to admire our favorite tree alongside the stream that flows into the one where James Taylor played as a boy.

Walking with a dog along a path takes me back to my grandfather’s retirement haven in Meade County on the Ohio River. He and I would start the day around five-thirty, sitting on stumps and drinking coffee under a large oak. Then we’d take his dog, a big ole slobbery shepherd mix, for a walk along trails with enough rabbits to keep Cesar showing off for hours. My grandfather pointed out the finer nuances of berry and tree identification along the way. By eight o’clock we’d be back at the house where my grandfather would scramble eggs and fry bacon. My Italian grandmother would still be sleeping when we spread her elderberry jam on our biscuits.

Now I can’t walk in the woods without remembering that mystical place where decades of river travel floated up from the steep banks to the house, on the notes from the Belle’s calliope.