style="font-size:15px;"> A lot of law enforcement officers would have shaken their heads no, however politely. The lead investigator didn’t.
“Sure, Alison, we’ve got you covered,” he said. He then instructed his men to fire up the flashing light bars on all the squad cars. He positioned his team in the background of the shot and armed them with clipboards, which they furiously scribbled on as the cameras rolled. It was a dramatic scene and made a great backdrop for Alison’s report. She nailed it.
Some readers will conclude, “Aha! Fake news!” But it wasn’t. Law enforcement busted a meth lab. The outcome was the same either way. It was a benign recreation, the kind of harmless small-town courtesy that could have happened in Mayberry, North Carolina, as easily as Jacksonville. Would officers in a major metropolitan market have done this for Alison? Given the trust she’d garnered, I’d like to think so. Those officers did it for her because she was held in high esteem and they knew her ethics to be beyond reproach.
What was it like being Alison’s dad? It was getting up each day with a heart bursting with pride. When I was running for Henry County’s Board of Supervisors just before she was killed, I only halfway joked that my campaign slogan was “I’m Alison’s dad.” It’s how I introduce myself still.
I worshipped my little Scooter. She will always be the best part of my life. I think she knew it, too.
2
The Day
I want to tell you what I was doing the day before the worst day of my life.
It was a good day, a great day even. Back when I served on the Henry County, Virginia, Board of Supervisors (I won by a single vote, so don’t let anyone tell you voting doesn’t matter), I worked to get weekend power generation at Philpott Dam, to allow kayakers to enjoy the Smith River on weekends.
I didn’t achieve that goal during my time on the board, but seven years later, during the summer of 2015, all of the gears I’d carefully put into place finally meshed. Philpott Dam, an unassuming hydroelectric dam built along the Smith River during the New Deal era, would now have weekend generation.
I’m a paddler. One of my greatest joys, even now, is to gather together some friends and family, drop a few kayaks in a river, and enjoy nature’s splendor. It’s peaceful, relaxing, and when the speed picks up on that silvery ribbon of water and you’re working to point the kayak’s nose in the right direction, operating off of your instincts and your experience, it’s exciting, too.
It’s also great for tourism, which was my main goal. Henry County is a beautiful place, ripe for tourism, and paddlers are willing to travel miles and miles to find a good river. A good river is a fast river with just enough depth to keep a kayak from scraping the bottom, and until recently, the Smith was only a good river on weekdays, since that was when Philpott Dam was generating power and pumping a few million gallons of Philpott Lake through its twin turbines. I figured that if we could get at least one day of generation on weekends, it would be a boon to our river tourism industry.
On August 25, 2015, my labors finally bore fruit and weekend generation at Philpott Dam was made official. I drove out to the dam, parked in the narrow lot along the river, and then got out to greet a few folks. I saw Craig “Rocky” Rockwell, the project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers; he’s a tall, good-natured older gentleman who always has a few sardonic quips at the ready should the need arise. We congratulated each other. He would end up retiring in a little more than a year, and I think he was glad to see at least one more positive mark on his record before he took his leave.
I saw Tola Adamson, a reporter from Channel 13, there to cover the big announcement. We said hello; she knew me because she knew Alison, a thread that continues to weave its way through my life.
I saw others, too, county officials, local politicians, American Electric Power employees, various local dignitaries of all stripes. It was a day of celebration, a day of speechifying, a day for people to line up at a podium and rattle off lists of all the folks who deserved a pat on the back for the good work that had been accomplished.
At this point, you might be thinking: that’s all well and good, but what the hell does it have to do with this book?
The answer, in a real sense, is absolutely nothing, and that’s exactly why I’m telling you about it.
When tragedy strikes—real tragedy, horrific tragedy—all the little things that you cared about prior to that moment are swept away as if by a blast from a neutron bomb, leaving only crumbling structures in its wake. Maybe you’ve got tickets to an upcoming concert you’ve been excited about, or you just bought a new designer handbag you had been scrimping and saving to afford, or you just got a promotion at work; whatever it is, when the black tidal wave of tragedy hits, everything else becomes meaningless, inert. You wonder why you cared at all.
August 25, 2015, was a day of celebration and personal victory. Less than twenty-four hours later, I would have barely been able to spell the words “weekend generation,” let alone explain why anyone should care. And a little more than twenty-four hours later, I would find myself back at the dam, my former site of triumph, attempting to shout God Himself down from the Kingdom of Heaven.
•
I’m going to tell you about the worst day of my life.
The list of disagreeable things I’d rather do would make for a book at least twice the length of this one. I realize, however, that it’s important for you to know what it was like. It’s important for you to have a taste of what I went through on the day my daughter was killed.
Make no mistake, it will be just a taste. I don’t know that a team of the finest living writers could record that day so that you would feel exactly what I felt. I can tell you about it; I can show you what happened; but I cannot truly put you in my shoes, and frankly, I wouldn’t wish that on you if I could. If I can make you feel at least a fraction of what I felt that day, even 1/100th, I’ll feel I’ve done my job.
Recalling the entire sequence of events precisely is as impossible as filling a jar with mist, but I will tell you what I remember, and I will tell you the most horrible parts I will never forget.
My wife, Barbara, woke me up a little before 7 a.m. on August 26, 2015, shortly after she received a phone call from Alison’s live-in boyfriend, WDBJ anchor Chris Hurst. Chris says he didn’t call until at least 7:15, but who can know? It was early, especially for me.
I was working from home in those days as a corporate headhunter, and I was accustomed to waking up about 8:00. I didn’t usually watch Alison’s early morning segments live; I would watch them on the internet over breakfast. I am eternally grateful that I’m not an early riser.
“There were shots fired at Alison’s location,” Barbara said, stirring me from sleep. “We don’t know what’s going on.”
I stared at the gently whirring fan blades overhead, the fog of sleep still clinging to my brain. The words made little sense, but the uncharacteristic tremor in my wife’s voice prodded me.
Shots fired? Alison was a morning news reporter an hour up the road. She wasn’t a war journalist. Why would shots be fired?
“Huh?” I said.
“Just get up,” Barbara said, leaving the room and padding down the hall toward the kitchen.
I
