Tragic Turn

Behind a fence that keeps his German shepherd at bay, Pat Harnden has a clear view of one of the deadliest roads around.

The 74-year-old man with a face as weathered as the landscape sometimes stands in this wind-swept spot for hours, watching from under his cowboy hat as cars whiz by and wondering just what it is about this stretch of U.S. 287.

On a good day, the highway can cut 15 minutes off the trip between Fort Collins, Colo., and Laramie, Wyo. In a few seconds on one horrific night last week, it cut short the lives of eight young University of Wyoming athletes.

From his roadside perch in the rugged high plains 17 miles south of Laramie, Harnden can almost make out the crosses across the road where others died in past wrecks. They’re joined now by a bouquet of yellow flowers taped to a cattle fence with a card that says, “You’re in our hearts forever.”

Along with some piles of glass swept off the roadway and a few twisted pieces of metal, the card is a sad reminder of the wreck that killed sons, classmates, running partners and fraternity brothers.

Members of the cross country team, they had run together the day before in the hills outside Laramie. Crammed into a sport utility vehicle, they died together in a collision with a pickup truck that peeled the SUV apart and sent bodies flying into the darkness.

“The car basically exploded,” Wyoming athletic director Lee Moon said.

The crash didn’t wake Harnden. Hard of hearing, he slept through it in his tiny trailer just a few hundred yards away.

He’d seen it before. But never were there so many, so young, their lives snuffed out in their prime.

“There’s just something wrong with that spot,” Harnden said. “I’ve tried to figure it out, but I can’t. I just know there’s been a lot of people killed there.”

*

Tragedy seems to haunt the athletic department of the university that dominates the roughhewn town of Laramie, which straddles Interstate 80 just above the Colorado border into Wyoming. The town is the kind of place where strangers say “howdy,” almost everyone drives pickup trucks and the liquor stores have drive-through windows.

A former cross country star disappeared in 1997 while out running and still has not been found. The same year, a Wyoming football player died after passing out on the practice field and an assistant football coach died of brain cancer.

But it’s on U.S. 287 where much of the grief has occurred.

The Wyoming Cowboys’ volleyball coach, Mike English, died in November from brain injuries suffered seven years earlier in a crash on the road. Former Cowboys golfer Mike Phillips died there in 1998.

There is more. Football player Greg Wilson was killed in 1984 while hurrying back for a spring practice session, and women’s basketball player Nichole Rider walks with a cane now because of severe injuries from a 1985 accident. The wife and daughter of an assistant football coach were seriously injured in 1992.

“It’s amazing how many have been lost on that road,” university president Philip Dubois said. “The road is notoriously dangerous, especially in the winter and especially at night. It’s just a crap shoot if you drive in the winter, and many of us won’t drive it at all.”

The Wyoming Department of Transportation wants to widen the road to four lanes, but has yet to fund it. They also plan to post signs telling people to pay attention to their driving.

Department statistics show 19 people died in the 21 miles between Laramie and the Colorado border between 1990 and May 2001.

Still, in the early morning of Sept. 16 the 65-mile stretch of highway seemed the easiest way for eight cross country runners to get home. They had gone to the bigger town of Fort Collins to look for running shoes and visit some clubs.

Heading the other way on the highway was another student, 21-year-old Clinton Haskins, a steer wrestler on the rodeo team. Haskins was driving a 1-ton pickup, on his way to see a girlfriend in Fort Collins.

There was light fog in the area when Haskins came around the slight bend in the road at Tie Sidings, a former railroad stop that now is nothing more than a post office and a rickety fireworks stand.

A hundred yards or so past Harnden’s trailer, Haskins drifted over into the oncoming lane, the passenger side of his truck slamming head on into the other vehicle. The collision was so violent it ripped the top off the SUV, sending young bodies flying.

The driver, 20-year-old Nicholas J. Schabron, was wearing a seat belt, as was the front seat passenger. The others weren’t, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered.

Schabron was killed instantly, as were Shane Shatto, 19; Justin Lambert-Belanger, 20; Kyle N. Johnson, 20; Kevin L. Salverson, 19; Joshua D. Jones, 22; Morgan McLeland, 21; and Cody B. Brown, 21.

Two days earlier, 3,000 students had gathered in the campus mall to grieve for the victims of the terrorist attacks. Now the grief had come much closer to home, and in shocking numbers.

“We’ve been through tragedies here before and the campus was already pretty raw from the terrorist attacks,” Dubois said. “Obviously, though, something of this magnitude is beyond pain.”

That pain was only magnified a few days later when Haskins, who survived the crash with non life-threatening injuries, was charged with driving drunk and causing the deaths.

He faces a prison sentence of up to 160 years if convicted. Prosecutors say Haskins went to a “rodeo party” before getting in his truck and had a blood alcohol content of 0.16. But his family came to Haskins defense.

They point the blame at U.S. 287, and its deadly past.

“If you can see the glow from the other vehicle and you can’t see the ground, you don’t know where you’re at. You just cannot discern where you are,” said Sally Haskins, his grandmother. “We know in our hearts he’s not at fault. He has a Christian background and he has never been in trouble. His parents and whole family are behind him.”

The mid-September rain is icy in Laramie, 7,200 feet up in a desolate valley between the Snowy and Laramie mountain ranges. It fell steadily Monday night, but that didn’t stop hundreds from gathering at a makeshift campus memorial under the statue of a cowboy on a bucking horse.

Just before a candlelight ceremony began, though, it cleared. Students and family members carefully held the lighted candles to protect them from the wind, and gazed up at a stand covered in black with the pictures of the eight dead students in a row.

Men in cowboy hats hugged each other. Relatives cried. From the back of the crowd, people began singing “Amazing Grace.”

Over at the Sigma Phi Epsilon house on fraternity row, they held a memorial of their own for Shatto. His fraternity brothers held candles outside, under a big poster on the building that said, “We love you Shane.”

They remembered the funny things about him, such as when classes ended last semester and he went streaking up fraternity row while carrying a torch.

With candles melting in front of the frat house, his fraternity brothers decided one more memorial would be fitting. They stripped and ran naked up fraternity row, past the sorority houses.

“We had to do it for him,” Randy Blauer said.

The next morning, the sun shone on the makeshift altar set up under the bucking horse. Mixed in with the flowers on the ground were three pairs of running shoes and some homemade signs.

“Big Brothers. My Best Friends,” one said. “You are running with the angels now.”

There were funerals across the state; five of the eight youths were from Wyoming.

A procession of fire trucks draped in black bunting carried Shatto’s coffin to the cemetery in Douglas. The high school cross country team ran beside the trucks, wearing T-shirts saying, “This run’s for you. In memory of Shane Shatto.”

Wyoming cross country coach Jim Sanchez, who lost eight of his 12 runners, was there and at a funeral in Gillette for Morgan McLeland.

“Like everyone else, my heart is broken,” Sanchez said. “As time heals, eight strong vessels will replace eight empty places.”

*

Back on the highway, Harnden watched cars go by and talked about the time he saw a woman try to pass a truck only to crash into an oncoming truck and die.

“I don’t have much to do other than sit in my trailer and watch traffic,” Harnden said. “It’s bad; it makes you afraid to be there.”

The human toll can be seen across the road, where there were already three crosses before Haskins’ truck slammed into the runners.

“Mom and Dad. 7-12-99,” is written on one cross adorned with plastic flowers fading in the sun. “RIP, Mary. 1997,” is on another.

“There’s been a lot of people killed there,” Harnden said. “You get used to it, but there’s still something wrong with it. Something real wrong.”