‘Someone Murdered My Husband’ : Hit-Run Death Haunts Grieving Family

Sam Mills was the reliable family handyman until minutes before his death.

The 39-year-old Tulare man was bicycling home in the dark with his wife and daughter Aug. 4 but fell behind after pumping up a tire on his wife’s bicycle.

Mills then was struck by a hit-run driver and died instantly. One of his feet was torn off, and his face was unrecognizable when his body was found.

At home, a closet door has come off its hinges, checkbooks need to be balanced and the family’s pickup needs some work.

Bonnie Mills says the projects would have been done by her husband but have just accumulated since his unsolved death.

The investigation “is still open, but we’ve just about exhausted all our leads,” said Dick Gilbert, California Highway Patrol spokesman. “We’re not really much further along than we were the first day.”

“It was like a diesel truck whooshing by me,” Bonnie Mills said. “And there was this sound--it still haunts me--kind of like a moaning.”

Mills, her two children and friends made 20 posters in the family garage to hang on utility poles at the accident scene to draw attention to her husband’s death and possibly elicit new information.

“Someone murdered my husband, Sam,” one poster read. Another warned, “Bike riders: Watch behind you.”

Mills has been unable to accept her husband’s death and blames herself for it.

“It should have been me,” she said. “That was my place, not his. I blame myself.”

Mills was the one who persuaded her husband to take up bicycling after he was laid off from his 17-year job in May. He did the housework, yard work, grocery shopping, banking and driving.

Mills rarely walks in the garden her husband once tended.

“I don’t like it out there anymore,” she said. “Because I see him everywhere. It’s almost as if I can reach out and touch him.”

Richard Mills, 16, was the first family member to see the body. He had been called to drive toward Visalia and meet the bicyclists halfway on their ride from the home of Mills’ parents.

The teen-ager has difficulty walking down a hallway decorated with family portraits, including a picture of his smiling father.

“When I walk through the hallway, I try not to look at that picture anymore,” he said.

He and his 13-year-old sister, Debbie, now help their mother with household chores, and the family is receiving counseling.

“The kids keep asking me what we are going to do about Thanksgiving and Christmas,” Bonnie Mills said. “Who’s going to hang up the lights, or buy the presents?

“He always did that. Now what are we to do?”