Surviving Life’s Toughest Test : Values Instilled by Her Parents Help Adams Cope With Tragedy

Father’s Day--graduation day at UC San Diego--and although brutal in its irony, Christina Adams knows her dad would be proud.

Christina Adams, a record-setting basketball player bound for UC Irvine four years ago, waylaid by family destruction.

Christina Adams, the young girl modeling a bathing suit for her mother, a witness a second later to her father killing her mother and then turning the gun on himself.

Christina Adams, the survivor.

“It’s not the best day for graduation to fall on,” she says. “I mean, sure, I hold things against him. I hold against him what he did to my mother . . . to our family . . . but my whole life with him was not that one day.”

One April day four years ago, a disturbed Hank Adams, an ex-cop who had been battling depression and separation from wife, Terry, arrived at the family home with gun in hand. There was nothing said. No way to know now if he saw his 4-year-old twin daughters playing outside just a few feet away. No way to know what he thought when he saw his oldest daughter sitting on the living room floor next to her mother.

Hank Adams shot and killed his wife, and then himself, leaving five daughters behind.

“My dad did a lot of great things for me,” she says. “I will never forgive him for what he did, no, I won’t, but I thank him and love him for 17 wonderful years--17 years in which he raised me to be tough enough to live on.”

Tough is the way opponents described Adams, a three-point specialist who averaged a state-record 38.3 points as a junior at San Diego Grossmont High. Many times they tried to stop her: Double-teams; box-and-ones; rough-her-up defenses. She responded by driving forward with a plan, bowling over a defender in the first quarter, absorbing the charging foul, but delivering a back-off message that would spring her free later.

“I would have hated playing against myself,” she says. Rock solid on the basketball court--as if bracing herself for some unseen ultimate blow.

“I remember my coach telling me to be prepared for anything, but not to worry about things I couldn’t control. He made me leave my problems at the door; if I didn’t, he kicked me out of the gym. I became focused on the court. I could always separate things. I used that the first couple of months at college when I was thinking, how can I be here, how can I function. So I studied in class and waited to cry when I got home. I did it; I’m still doing it.”

An athlete’s discipline put to the test. She saw a psychiatrist, as friends and family suggested immediately after her parent’s death, but stopped after one visit. She quit playing basketball, left UC Irvine shortly after the start of her second year, and she admits, “I went wild for a while; I wanted to get away and get my mind off of things.”

But there was a foundation in place. Move ahead, keep pushing, don’t stop: her parents’ direction still there.

“What a success story,” says John Adams, her grandfather. “I’ve watched her take 22-23 units, double up on a major, work as an intern for a TV station. I’ve heard her fight with the university registrar over credits and generally come out on top. She has to do it all because she doesn’t have a parent to fight for her.

“This is a girl who had to grow up in a hurry. With all the grief she’s seen, she could have gone to the dogs. She seems to have done just fine, but no, I’ve never talked to Chrissy about that day . . . They were as close as any father and daughter could be, and what a terrible thing to witness.”

That’s what everybody says--everybody but Christina Adams.

“I was glad I was there,” she says without hesitation. “I know it’s a weird thing, but that first year after it happened, my sister, Katie, was really upset. She wondered what happened--how horrible it was. But I was there, and I could tell it wasn’t as bad as people would imagine, and that was comforting.

“I know my mom didn’t suffer. She wasn’t scared. . . . I know a few things a daughter would like to know about her mom when something like that happens. It’s still hard and stuff, but to see it, it could have been worse. I still feel bad that my sister wonders about it. . . . I would hate to think what I would have imagined it to be like.”

Hanks Adams had been the one to put a basketball in Christina Adams’ hands, and he had been there for all the practices, all the games. But there were things happening with Hank Adams, things a daughter would not know.

“You think of your dad, and especially my dad, a police officer, a tough guy, and you think he can handle anything,” she says. “He seemed like he had everything under control, but obviously he didn’t.”

During her senior basketball season, her parents began living apart. It was tough--there were five children: Christina, 18; Katie, 12; Kelly, 5, and twins Erin and Ashley, 4.

“I remember being mad at my dad for coming to the gym when he said he wouldn’t, and being mad at mom for being mad at my dad,” she says. “That’s not the way it had been for our family; it just wasn’t like that. But it was tough that last year.”

At a high school all-star basketball game marking the end of their daughter’s high school career, mother and father sat on opposite sides of the gym.

A month later, the three came together for one last time.

“He called before he came over that day and said some things, but I didn’t think . . . people have talked about the fact he was taking Prozac, but I won’t cop out and blame it on that. It came down to my dad losing it over my mom; he didn’t want to lose his family. . . .

“He just came in and did it, and I was screaming, and I came running out and saw the kids and told myself to just act normal. I said, ‘Come on, kids, let’s go next door,’ and when I got to the other house I freaked out again. The next thing I remember is sitting on the sidewalk in my bathing suit and sobbing. Then this fireman comes up to me, and oh my God, I remember I started screaming again: ‘Why are you talking to me? Go help my mom.’ At that point I never thought my mother was going to die.

“I have never felt any guilt or anything like that. I’ve replayed the incident to see if there was anything I could have physically done. I tried, but there was nothing I could have done. Was there anything I could have said on the phone? No, nothing could be done by anyone. If it had not happened that day, it might have happened another day. Anyone capable of doing that . . . I don’t think anyone has control over that.”

The younger children, while shielded by supporting relatives from the horror, wanted to know where their mother was, where their father had gone. Rushed to neighbors, they knew something was wrong, and a day later they waited for an explanation.

“I felt it was up to Katie and I to tell them,” she says. “We had to talk to the little ones; it got to the point where we were saying Mommy and Daddy were gone and we’ll talk about it later. We sat them down and we told them Mommy and Daddy were in heaven, and they are not going to come back. They cried, they missed Mommy. Trust me, that kills you.”

Christina Adams, a young girl quickly becoming a young adult, listened to suggestions from friends and family that she pass on UC Irvine, stay with the girls and attend college near home. But with scholarship in hand--four months removed from the locally highly publicized incident--she went on to Irvine.

“My sisters were taken care of, and that was the most important thing,” she says.

Steve and Helen Adams, her aunt and uncle and recently married, took on Hank and Terry’s four other children and all the trials, questions and adjustments expected of a seasoned mother and father.

“I tell friends the Lord has an odd sense of humor,” Steve says. “A year after the kids came, Helen had cancer, had to have a hysterectomy and could no longer have children. But then we had our kids.”

Christina Adams, no longer a kid, went to live with her grandparents when not at school. There was conflict, the kind that comes with forced change and the comparisons of a mother lost.

“It was hard for me to deal with Helen being a mom her way when my mom was a mom in her way,” she says. “I struggled, but then I learned it was a big thing happening to her, too, and now I respect her more than anyone in this world.”

The passage of time and the success now enjoyed has taken the edge off the struggle. Christina Adams lost her parents, lost her sisters, lost her way. She quit playing basketball, and in a combination of a bad back and a lack of interest, surrendered her scholarship. The trauma had taken its toll.

“That’s just not true,” she says with defiance. “That’s what people might have thought when I stopped playing basketball. I know people thought I couldn’t handle it, but it never happened that way.

“I could have become a wreck, I suppose. I remember going to sleep at night, and you’re alone, and it wasn’t nightmares so much as dreams I would have. I remember telling myself, look at what you saw, and then I’d start crying and I’d get scared.

“But it just goes away if you stay directed and tough. When I think about my parents now I don’t think about that day.”

Friends at school, however, would eventually trip across that day. “And what do your parents do?” “What do your parents think about this?” “Will you be spending the holidays with your folks?”

“It got to the point where I was feeling sorry for my friends because they would get sad when I told them the story. I don’t know how to be a victim; that would be a difficult role for me. I like people to look at me in a positive way; I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me.

“Some people might have thought I ran away to hide my problems, but you can’t escape something like this. I have four little sisters who wouldn’t let me escape.”

But she quit playing basketball, tossing away her identity.

“Not playing basketball to other people might have meant I was in trouble, but I didn’t see myself as Christina Adams, the basketball player, like everyone else did. I’m sure the fact my dad wasn’t there allowed me to quit playing basketball. I would have thought, no way I can’t play--what’s my dad going to do on the weekends? He would have said, you’re not quitting; your back hurts, but don’t be a baby.

“But I had a bad back. It was easier to quit because I no longer had to play for my dad, but I definitely didn’t do it because I wanted to spite him or because I missed him or because he wasn’t there to support me.”

Her father had orchestrated the recruitment of his daughter, and although she was accomplished enough to graduate a semester early and accept scholarships from either Cal or the University of San Diego, she waited and selected an offer from Irvine over Dartmouth.

“I wanted to be with my family for Christmas, and Dartmouth played in a Christmas tournament, and besides, I really liked the coach at Irvine.”

But Irvine fired Coach Dean Andrea and hired Colleen Matsuhara shortly before Adams’ arrival. Nothing against Matsuhara, but this was one more setback for a young woman already overloaded.

“I didn’t really know her that well, but you could tell she was a real tough cookie,” Matsuhara said. “She didn’t mention her family situation once.

“She came in here with a bad back, so I don’t think we were ever able to see her full capabilities. Where is she now, do you know? I didn’t realize she had re-enrolled in school . . . I heard she was working.”

She was waiting tables. She played in two games for Irvine, hit a couple three-pointers, but doctors suggested she take a redshirt season and have back surgery. “Basketball was not important enough to me any longer to undergo surgery,” she says.

No regrets. “How did Irvine do?” she asked. No looking back.

“You mean she doesn’t play at all?” said Jinelle Williams, an Irvine senior who took her recruiting trip to the school four years earlier with Adams. “I remember we sat together in the Bren Events Center and that day we decided to come here; we were both going to turn the program around.”

Williams, a key contributor in Irvine’s successful drive to make the NCAA tournament for the first time this year, said she still remembers the hard passes. “You didn’t take your eye off the girl when she had the ball,” Williams said. “No question, she was a good player . . . I’m just thinking, if we did have that girl now, wow.

“Shoot, whatever happened to her?”

She kept driving, transferred to UCSD, took on majors in communications and political science, put in stints as an intern at KSDO radio and KUSI television in San Diego and now visualizes sitting behind an anchor desk reporting the news.

Still, there’s no more basketball. No more hoop to shoot at. But still driving.

“It’s the legacy her father left her,” Helen Adams says. “She’s not playing basketball, and not pursuing the road her father would have plotted, but Hank and Terry instilled in her the ability to go her own way . . . “

And so Father’s Day it will be, ironically if it must, and it will be a fine day to graduate.

“I think I can pretty much survive anything now,” she says. “But let’s not keep testing me, OK?”