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 when the other parents heard what he had done, they were furious. "It's like the boy cared more about his truck than he did about those girls he killed in that truck," says Jim Robberson. They became even angrier when they kept hearing stories of him returning to high school football games and attending a high school dance. When the Fellowship of Christian Athletes unveiled a three-foot-high monument in honor of the dead girls, David stood with his buddies at the edge of the crowd. Allen Russom was so disturbed at the sight of David that he told a preacher who was also there that David should be asked to leave. "The preacher said to me, 'But David has a right to be here. His sister was one of those killed.' And I said, 'But he was the one who killed her. And he was our children's killer too!'"

THREE MONTHS AFTER THE WRECK, the Department of Public Safety's accident reconstruction team released a report declaring what it believed happened on the highway. After interviewing witnesses, examining the pickup and the Blazer, and studying the 97-foot skid marks made on the highway by the tires of David's truck, the report concluded that David was going about 99 miles per hour when he hit the Blazer. The report was sent to a Rusk County grand jury, which this past January indicted both David and Karl on manslaughter and street-racing charges. David was arrested one evening at a nearby lake where he and a friend had been fishing for catfish in a rusty boat. The Reids used their life savings, loans, and the money they'd received from Rachel's life insurance policy to post a $50,000 bond and hire a lawyer.

For days people drove past the Reids' property, staring at Julie's paintings on the shed, wondering what was going on inside their home. When I ask Julie the question on everybody's mind—if she ever felt anger toward her own son during those days—she says, her voice wobbly, "How is anger going to help? It was an accident. The worst of accidents. But an accident."

She also tells me that David is not unlike any other boy in any other rural town tempted by back highways and farm-to-market roads. "Yes, David had a lead foot," she says. "But he wasn't worse than anyone else. Everyone knows that. He was a responsible driver. I let him drive Rachel to school every day. And everyone also knows the way girls are when they get in a car together. They laugh and giggle and don't pay attention. I did the same thing when I was a kid."

Karl Cullen admitted to DPS officers that he and David had begun to race just as they were leaving town. But he said that the racing was long over by the time they got to Kasey Jo's house, three miles away, and that he could not possibly be at fault because he was so far behind David when the accident took place. David told officers that if he was speeding when he reached Kasey Jo's house, he wasn't going much above the posted 65-mile-per-hour speed limit. He said that when he did see a vehicle come suddenly out of the driveway, he hit the brakes and wrenched the steering wheel to his left—and after that, everything was a blank.

The DPS report did acknowledge that the accident could have been due, in part, to Jaicey's not having yielded the right-of-way. What's more, says the Reids' attorney, Daryll Bennett, the DPS didn't talk to other kids who were at the scene of the wreck, some of whom reportedly heard Janet Russom crying out that Jaicey had forgotten to turn on her headlights. "But everyone, including the grand jury, has made the rush to judgment that pretty little Jaicey, on her way to the popular kids' party, can't be blamed and thus David must be at fault," snaps Bennett.

Janet says she never said anything that night about Jaicey's headlights. ("I'm a million percent certain that her headlights were on, because we could see them shining right through our open front door.") There is also the matter of Ozella Tunstle's statement to the police about what she saw after David and Karl raced by her. She says David's headlights were flicking on and off. For years Tatum boys had been playing a game at night on lonely stretches of highway, trying to see who could go the longest with his headlights extinguished. Was that what David was doing? Is that why Jaicey never saw him coming?

The Russoms and other parents did indeed begin visiting the district attorney, pushing him to schedule a trial. A couple of parents appeared on Longview television stations, talking about the need to bring David to justice. After Bennett watched one of the reports, he told Julie that they needed to fight back, and the way to do it was to file a lawsuit against Jaicey Robberson's estate. "David was the one who didn't want us to file the lawsuit [in which he is listed as the plaintiff]," Julie says. "He told me, 'Mom, that family doesn't have anything. They lost everything too.' I said, 'David, we're not filing this to get any money. We're filing it to get the truth out. Everyone in town is trying to make you guilty, and we have to do something to keep you out of prison.'"

ALTHOUGH HE WON'T ADMIT IT, Rusk County district attorney Cal Freeman has been in no hurry to put David on trial. (It is not clear if Karl will be tried at the same time, if at all.) "He knows there won't be any winner in this trial," says a private investigator involved in the case. "He knows this is going to be the kind of trial that can bring the whole town down."

Although the other families are resolute in their determination that David be held accountable, they do admit that his indictment has, so far, not made their lives any better. "What's so surprising is that the pain gets worse every day," says Jaicey's mother, Daphne. "No matter what people say to you, you have trouble feeling any comfort, any closure. I find myself in stores, pulling clothes off a rack because I think they will look good on Jaicey, and I carry them to the checkout stand before I think, 'What am I doing?'" Janet and Allen Russom tell me that they actually drove to a mall in Longview just so they could walk past a certain store to look at a teenage clerk there who resembled Kasey Jo. In their new house, Janet has gone so far as to recreate Kasey Jo's bedroom, because she can't ever imagine walking down the hallway and not seeing Kasey Jo's bed, filled with her favorite stuffed animals. Debra Blalock often drives by the fields where Mackinsey used to run cross-country. Sometimes she sees another blond-haired girl running in the distance, and she has to say to herself, "It's not my daughter. It's not my daughter."

As for Julie Reid, she still has not been able to stop her car and stand by the crosses just down the highway. "It's full of ghosts," she says. "This whole town is full of ghosts." But when I ask why the family doesn't move someplace else—a suggestion that has been made more than once by Tatum residents who despise them—she says she never wants to be far from Rachel's grave at the Tatum cemetery. She visits the grave at least once a week, although she always makes sure before visiting that Janet and Allen Russom are not at Kasey Jo's grave, a mere twenty feet away.

Like his parents, David, now nineteen years old, rarely appears in Tatum anymore. Because he got tired of people coming to Sonic just to look at him, he quit his job and started working for a construction company. He says he has heard about threats made a couple of times by guys who were friends with the other dead girls, but no fight ever took place. For a brief period, one of the cheerleaders who had been a close friend of Rachel's dated David. She was another one of the town's good girls, no doubt drawn to David because he was complicated and controversial, unlike any other boy in town. She said she felt sorry for him. He, in turn, went out with her, he says, "just to see what it was like being with someone like that. I don't know. It didn't last long. I didn't have much to say."

What truly surprised Tatum residents was the news that David had appeared several months after his indictment at Tatum's First Baptist Church. He stood in a white robe at the baptismal pool, and when the minister said his name, there were people in the sanctuary who gasped. He slowly slid under the water to be baptized, and when the minister told him to rise to new life in the name of Jesus Christ, he came up out of the water with a grim look on his face. "I thought it would help, you know," he tells me. "Maybe get rid of the dreams."

"The dreams?" I ask.

"Rachel coming to me, saying things." He stops suddenly and looks around at his friends, realizing he is saying too much. "I only went to church a couple of times. I knew everyone was talking about me behind my back."

I ask him if he's afraid of going to prison. "Yeah, maybe," he says. "I guess that will make people around here happy, me behind bars, like I'm not going to have to pay for this accident every minute of every day of my damn life. Like I'm not thinking about it every minute."

When I pause and leaf through my notebook, searching for another question to ask, he sees his opening and tells me he needs to leave. He and his buddies have to go someplace, he says. He heads for the passenger seat of a friend's pickup truck. Although David has driven since the wreck—a couple of times with his father and a couple of times with his girlfriend—he still prefers to be a passenger. He does tell me that he's been thinking lately about buying another truck. "Nothing fast," he said. "Just something that would take me somewhere far away, like Florida. Just get on the highway and go."

The truck slowly pulls away, turns right on Highway 149 and heads toward the site of the accident, toward the crosses. "He never looks at the crosses when he drives past them," says Julie. "That's one thing, at least, that he's told me. He says he'll never be able to look at those crosses."

Before I get in my own car, I ask Julie if I can look at the photo of Rachel in David's room. The photo is of the two of them, taken just before they left home to attend the Tatum High School 2003 spring prom. Rachel is in a shimmery gold dress that Julie still has in a closet, and David is in a starched white rented tuxedo, as stiff as a board. Rachel is smiling like a beauty queen, her light brown hair curled in ringlets, and David has a cocky smile on his face.

"My sweet children," says Julie. "My sweet children."

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