Tragedy Links 2 Women in Anger, Grief, but Also Keeps Them Apart

Twenty-one months ago, Debbie Armantrout’s daughter was alive and Jackie Framstead’s son was a free man.

And then, in a flash of midnight gunpowder, all that changed.

Brian Framstead is in jail, accused of murder, and Tammy Davis, Armantrout’s 19-year-old daughter and the mother of Brian Framstead’s child, is dead.

And as surely as Brian Framstead and Tammy Davis were bound together in tragedy, the lives of their mothers have been forever linked in anger and grief, each woman’s sorrow springing from the other’s child.

Each has her convictions about what happened on Jan. 5, 1990, on a stranger’s doorstep in Huntington Beach, where Davis was found slumped in a pool of blood after pounding on the door for help. Each has her own personal reaction to the image of Brian Framstead, in a car hours away, dousing himself with gasoline and setting himself on fire.

And each mother is waiting for Nov. 4, when Brian Framstead goes on trial. For each, the courtroom holds a different version of justice: for Jackie Framstead, the chance to show the world her son is no monster, and for Armantrout, the opportunity to see Brian Framstead put in prison for a very long time.

In his cell in Orange County Jail, Brian Framstead, too, awaits the trial, albeit with some trepidation. Between surgeries to repair his fire-damaged body, he reads National Geographic, plays Ping-Pong and dreams of seeing Briana, his 3 1/2-year-old daughter, again.

Speaking in a soft, hoarse voice, Brian Framstead, 30, declined in a recent interview to discuss the events that prosecutors say led him to fire the fatal shotgun blast at Davis, who had obtained a court order to keep him away.

“I was just hoping to stay together and be a family,” he said. “That’s all I wanted.”

Some nights, Brian Framstead dreams of walking with Davis and Briana on Santa Monica beach, somewhere they had never been. On the mornings after those nights, he said, “you just wish you could go back to sleep and into the dream again.”

On other nights, he wakes up crying.

Tears filled much of the last year and a half for Jackie Framstead and Debbie Armantrout. These two women, near-strangers who regard each other with alternating waves of empathy and resentment, have been consumed by the same struggle: to keep their lives in order in the face of nearly suffocating tragedy.

And they have both won.

As if her son’s imprisonment were not enough of a blow, Jackie Framstead suffered the death of her mother as well. She moved in with friends, and is finally beginning to feel that her good days outnumber the bad.

“I’m hanging in there,” she said. “I have my bad days when I cry. I try not to talk about it.”

She said she is still furious about the “lies” told about her son by the news media after the shooting, especially reports based on police files indicating that he abused both Davis and Briana. As for the shooting itself, she said, it was “something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Nothing can justify it.” But only Brian Framstead can say what really happened, she said.

She longs to see Briana, who lives with Armantrout. She has never asked her if such a visit would be possible; she is convinced Armantrout would refuse.

To Armantrout, Briana is “a beautiful gift” left by Davis. But riding right behind the joy is sadness.

“I look at my granddaughter and I see everything that Tammy has missed and it rips my guts out,” Armantrout said. “It’s a shame her daughter will never know what a special girl her mommy was.”

Just as Davis will never watch Briana grow up, Armantrout still grapples with the pain of losing her own daughter. She envies Jackie Framstead the chance to see her child alive.

“I have a lot of anger,” Armantrout said. “I go to all these (court hearings) and his mom is there to blow him a kiss. All I get to go visit is a headstone.”

Even in the anger, there is understanding. But it seems that the very thing that they share--the experience of a profound tragedy striking their children--keeps them apart.

“I have empathy for Jackie,” Armantrout said. “I understand as a mother what she’s going through. But she won’t even look at me.”