Eventually, Keith opened his window and hung his head out like a dog, trying to get air.įinally, Michelle broke the silence, looking at Pil in the rear-view mirror. They sat silently for a long time, just listening to the engine tick as it cooled. They all let out a breath of relief when she put Big Bird in park and turned off the engine. They drove in silence for several blocks, until Michelle turned slowly onto 7th East, and then parked the SUV in the lot of Trolley Square, right under the old water tower. She ripped down Main, and then took a left through a yellow light onto 6th South, where she finally took the pressure off of the accelerator. None of them spoke a word as they ran.įumbling for her keys and still shaking, Michelle started the SUV and tore out of the Matheson Courthouse parking lot. Within thirty seconds of Pil landing that blow on Howard Gunderson’s chest, the trio had burst into the sunlight and were circling the building, heading toward Big Bird in the parking lot behind the building. But he found himself supported between Michelle and Pil, sprinting out of the hearing room and heading toward the front exits of the Matheson Courthouse. He didn’t remember getting his feet under him, and he didn’t remember telling his body to run. The blow severed their eye contact, and Keith was able to shake his head and remember where he was…Īnd then he was being picked up and hustled out of the courtroom, amid a lot of other screaming and flailing bodies.
But he saw Gunderson knocked back with such force that he wondered if he would have broken ribs. He hadn’t seen Pil strike the blow in the center of the boy’s chest. So he wanted us both, he thought, and wondered if it would be his last. Keith was frozen, and for a fraction of a second, he thought for sure he was about to die. And then their eyes had locked, and the man was coming at him like a freight train. He had been in the midst of those thoughts when the hearing room exploded all around him.Īll he could recall clearly now was Howard Gunderson leaping over the red railing and landing in the aisle in a crouch, his left hand on the floor, and his right holding a blue ballpoint pen that he gripped like a knife. Why? Why would this shy-looking boy do something so horrible? That’s the man that stood on our porch, looked in the window at the two of us, and then fired a bullet through Richard’s skull.
In those final, chaotic seconds, he had been struggling to keep his mind focused on what the judge was saying, even though all he really wanted to do was to stare at the man who had killed Richard. Keith wondered, as they pulled into the parking lot at Trolley Square, if his mind had blocked out much of what happened at the hearing, or whether it had simply been too confusing for his brain to take it in.
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