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Some of them are famous, like Laura Bush, who writes movingly in her memoir of how she lost her faith in God the night she accidentally killed a fellow high school student in a car accident. With 40,000 automobile fatalities in the United States every year, in addition to innumerable fatal firearm accidents, mechanical accidents, and friendly fire and civilian killings in our nation’s wars, there are thousands and thousands of accidental killers out there. There certainly wasn’t a City of Refuge where I could live out my days until Billy Graham or the pope died. There was nowhere I could go to get away from the feeling that I was no longer good. I knew there was nothing I could do to undo it. It may have been because I hadn’t been drinking or speeding at the time of the accident.īut I knew what I did was wrong – evil, on some level. I gave a deposition about what happened, and because I was a poor college student, because my father was a poor pastor with six kids, and for other reasons I do not know, the suit was dropped. Several months later I was sued for $2.5m. The first time I drove I experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress – reliving the helpless, locked-in feeling of the crash as I drove through a construction zone. I hobbled around on crutches for a couple of weeks, and by the next month I was driving again. If I took a nap, I would jerk awake from the sensation of hurtling uncontrollably toward the motorcycle. I remember staring at a white wall and feeling like I was rushing toward it. I felt guilty for surviving when a woman had been killed, and I knew I would carry that weight with me forever. I didn’t talk about what had happened with anyone.
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I didn’t go to any counseling and none was offered. I only remember being confused why he read that particular passage to me. When the high priest died, accidental killers could go back to their homes, no longer at risk of revenge murder.Īfter reading this scripture, the dean said, “God made provision for what happened to you.” I don’t remember my response. The perpetrator would flee the avenging family of the deceased, escape to a City of Refuge, and live there until the Jewish high priest died. He read a passage from the Hebrew Bible about the mysterious Cities of Refuge, ancient safe havens for people who had accidentally killed someone. He pulled a chair up and opened his giant King James Bible. I slept, and the next morning the dean of men came to see me. My roommate was there, shaken but not badly injured. I wanted to feel something other than the feeling that I should be dead instead of that woman. Later, at the hospital, nurses got the windshield glass out of my hand and put my knee in a stabilizer. I took off my red necktie and attempted to stop his bleeding. I probably said it a thousand times in those few moments when our eyes met. He looked up and said, “Fuck you, man.” I said I was sorry.
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He was on his stomach, and I could see blood flowing from between his legs on to the asphalt. I saw a man lying on the ground, and I went to him. Her neck was bent at a strange angle and somehow I knew she was dead. Then I saw a motorcycle, lying on its side.Ī woman wearing a helmet was a few feet away. There was another car smashed up on the side of the road. The next thing I remember is sitting in my stopped car, checking to see if my roommate in the passenger seat was alive. The plate instantly crushed the front of our car, locking the tires in place and fracturing my kneecap, and we were thrown into the oncoming lane. The driver’s side of my car slammed into a steel plate in the concrete median. I swerved back into my lane, but I swerved too far. As I moved right I saw a red Jeep already in that lane. I felt vulnerable in the passing lane, so I attempted to move into the right lane. I squinted and tried to shade my eyes with the car’s visor. Around 5.30, as we rounded a curve in the road, the glare of the setting sun hit my eyes. I was driving my recently fixed-up 1973 VW Super Beetle. We were two young men steeped in the fundamentalist-evangelical world of our youth, heading for what many evangelicals consider the holiest of services, Sunday night. It was Sunday evening, and my roommate and I were dressed for church according to college rules – jacket and tie. I was 19, just a few weeks out of Marine Corps boot camp, and had just begun my freshman year at a Bible college in West Virginia.