Wrecked

One year ago, a teenage boy plowed his pickup into an SUV just outside of Tatum, killing four of the East Texas town's most popular teenage girls. The grieving community is demanding justice, but the parents of one of the victims can't bring themselves to condemn their daughter's killer. He is also their son.

by Skip Hollandsworth

September 2004

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But others claim that the boy is not criminally at fault. They say that if Jaicey had simply looked down the very long and straight highway before pulling her Blazer out onto the road, she would have seen David's pickup truck coming her way. "Almost everyone in Tatum wants to blame David for this accident because he looks like the town's 'bad boy,'" says the Reids' attorney, Daryll Bennett, of Longview, a man who himself has spent more than a decade haunted by the death of his own son, killed at the age of eleven in a four-wheeler accident. "They want you to believe this is a simple matter of the town's 'bad boy' killing the town's 'good girls.' Well, it isn't that easy. None of this is."

The debate surrounding the crash has been inflamed by a recent lawsuit filed, ironically enough, by David's parents against the estate of Jaicey Robberson, blaming her for what happened and demanding monetary damages. Many Tatum townspeople are outraged at the Reids, who before the accident were considered quiet, likable working-class people, trying to make ends meet on Randy's welding income and the little money that Julie made building and selling birdhouses shaped like churches. Some even say that the Reids are acting irrationally because they are unable to deal with the horrific reality that their son took the life of their beloved, bubbly Rachel. "They know the truth about what happened that night," says Kasey Jo's stepfather, Allen Russom, a former shift worker at a chemical-processing plant who was laid off right after Kasey Jo's death. "They know that they should have slowed David down long ago."

Julie Reid, however, insists that it's the other families who have been driven crazy by grief. "They don't care that we've already lost one child," she tells me, sitting in the living room of her trailer home, which she rarely leaves these days. "Now they're out there meeting with the district attorney, pushing him to get the trial scheduled so David can be sent away to the state penitentiary. Well, they'd better think of another way to make themselves feel better, because we're not going to lose another child."

PARENTS OF DEAD CHILDREN WILL tell you that they have two lives: the one before their child died and the one afterward. Almost always, the second life is a kind of purgatory. "All you do is wait for a day to come when you can feel normal again," says Jaicey's mother, Daphne Allen, a nurse who is divorced from Jaicey's father and who identified her charred body on the night of the wreck from the retainer she wore. "You wait for a day in which you can go for an hour—one hour—without thinking about what happened to your child."

In a city, a parent of a child killed in a car wreck can always figure out a route to drive so that he or she never again has to look at the accident site. But in Tatum, which is so small its only traffic signal is a four-way stop, the parents and stepparents of Jaicey, Kasey Jo, Mackinsey, and Rachel must drive up and down Highway 149 several times a day either to get to work or to run errands. Although Kasey Jo's mother and stepfather have moved across town since the accident—"There was no way we could keep looking out our front window right at the four crosses," says Janet—they still find themselves on the highway constantly. As soon as she sees the road, Janet tries not to cry. "For the rest of my life, I will ask myself why I didn't hold my daughter for five more seconds when she came back across the room to hug me," she says. "Just five more seconds. That's all the time we would have needed for David to have passed by."

To try to forget what she saw that night on the highway, Mackinsey's mother, Debra Blalock, who's also divorced, took a job on the assembly line of a truck plant, where she works twelve-hour days—"Longer if they'd let me, so I could come home tired enough to sleep partway through the night," she says. Randy Reid would come home from his welding job and immediately begin working in his garage or in his vegetable garden, hoeing himself into a dizzy sweat. Randy doesn't talk much about Rachel. He says it takes him "a couple of days" to get over any conversation about her. Usually, when he hears Julie mentioning something Rachel used to like to do, he slips out a back door.

The four girls were indeed the good girls of the town, bright and attractive—"Our future," wrote Mary Craig, the 81-year-old columnist for Tatum's weekly newspaper. Kasey Jo had been working at a day care center in the mornings and was attending junior college in the afternoons, preparing for a career in medical radiology. Jaicey, a member of the National Honor Society, was studying for the ACT test to gain early admission to the University of Texas. Her dream was to become a doctor. Rachel, a nearly straight-A student, was a member of the school's UIL math team. Mackinsey spent her free time writing poetry. After the September 11 attacks, she wrote a poem that included the line "Many think I'm just a child that wouldn't know, how the people weep for the ones lost they loved so."

After the accident, their funerals were standing room only. "Amazing Grace" and "I Can Only Imagine," a popular contemporary Christian song, were sung over and over. Photographs of the girls in their cheerleading uniforms or in Popsicle-colored prom dresses were propped up beside their caskets. At Jaicey's funeral, all the members of the high school football team were listed as honorary pallbearers. Rumors were already then flying that some of the football players were going to go looking for David to pay him back for what he had done.

DAVID REID WAS NOT BY any means the town's bad boy. He had never been arrested for a crime. But he was the kind of kid who came to school in a black T-shirt and sat in the back of the classroom, utterly uninterested in academics or any extracurricular activities (he graduated in the bottom half of his class in the spring of 2003). He was known for getting into fights over girls, and he was also known for his disregard of authority: He had once been suspended from high school for smoking in a hallway, and he had received a couple of tickets from the local police for speeding in his truck.

"I've done a few crazy things," he tells me when I first meet him earlier this summer in his parents' garage, where he is hanging out with some of his buddies from the Monster Garage Crew. He is, of course, wary of me. He is talking to me only because his mother wants him to, and still he is reticent, unwilling to reveal too much. Like so many young men his age, he tries to show no emotion whatsoever, as if that might be interpreted by his friends as some sort of weakness. When I ask him what he misses about Rachel, he says, his eyes cast downward, "You know, lots of things. All kinds of things." Occasionally, he looks over at his girlfriend, Stacia, a high school student from Lake Cherokee he met when he was working at Sonic. She smiles at him shyly, but he is apparently uncomfortable smiling back at her in front of a stranger. "I guess my mom wants you to see that I'm not a criminal," he says gruffly. "Hell, what good is it going to do? Everyone out here already calls me public enemy number one, the badass of Highway 149."

As everyone in town knew, the sociable Rachel had been, in the words of one Tatum parent, "the apple of Julie's eye." She was the child in the family who was no doubt going to graduate from college and make a mark in the world. But by all accounts, Julie was equally devoted to David. She had constantly encouraged him to do something with his love of cars—perhaps someday open a custom paint and body shop. Six months before the wreck, to show how proud she was of both her son and her daughter, Julie had painted two pictures on a shed next to their house, visible to anyone driving by. One painting depicted Rachel in her cheerleading uniform. The other depicted a low-riding blue pickup truck—the first one David had customized before he got his green Sonoma.

Julie says she did not tell David about Rachel until three days after the wreck. He was still in the hospital, recovering from broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a severely twisted leg, and cuts on his face and most of his body. When he was lucid enough to talk, he told his mother he couldn't remember anything about the accident. She told him, finally, that some girls had died in the Blazer. David asked for their names. His mother mentioned Jaicey, Kasey Jo, and Mackinsey.

"And Rachel," she said.

"Rachel?" David asked, uncomprehending. "Rachel who?"

For a moment, his mother couldn't answer him. Then he said, "Our Rachel?"

"He might never tell you what he thinks," Julie says about David, "but I know he was proud that his little sister was a star at the school, doing things he didn't do. If you go back in his room, you'll see a photo of her on the wall."

A couple of months after the accident, his injuries healing, David returned to his job at Sonic—"You know, just trying to move on with my life," he tells me, shrugging his shoulders, looking away. Inevitably, the parents of the other dead girls saw him around town. He kept his head down, refusing to speak. The parents concluded that he had little remorse for what he had done. "All we wanted was for him to just say, 'I'm sorry,'" says Janet Russom. "Why, we asked ourselves, couldn't he walk up to us and say, 'I'm sorry'?"

One day, David had someone drive him to the wrecker yard where his demolished truck sat. He stared at it for several minutes, silent. Eventually he noticed that the chrome covers on the back wheels were undamaged. "I don't know," he tells me. "I thought, 'Well, someone can use them.' So I took them off."

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