|
|
|
Tears Continue To Flow Across Wyoming Road
The Denver Post Feature Story
Sept. 19, 2001
By Mark Kiszla LARAMIE, Wyo. - U.S. Highway 287 slithers crookedly across the high plains toward the University of Wyoming. The long stretch of asphalt is a black snake, covered in blood and reeking of death. For the Cowboys who travel it, this is a road of tears. And the sorrow never ends. Mercilessly, the road of tears killed eight young Cowboys just this week, instantly destroying the school's cross country team in a gruesome, two-vehicle crash during the sad, early hours of Sunday morning. "These were my boys," declared coach Jim Sanchez, saying goodbye to eight athletes at a candlelight vigil on the Wyoming campus attended by 2,500 grieving students. "Rest in peace, guys." Death is most senseless when it preys on youth. At a makeshift shrine of flowers, running shoes and hand-penned poems constructed at the base of a huge bucking-horse statue that stands outside the Wyoming athletic offices, there are eight black-and-white photographs, each starkly framing a fresh face way too full of life to imagine burying. Cody Brown. Kyle Johnson. Joshua Jones. Justin Lambert-Belanger. Morgan McLeland. Kevin Salverson. Nicholas Schabron. Shane Shatto. All were strong. All were between 19 and 22 years old. All eight Wyoming runners were dead and gone the instant their overcrowded Jeep was horribly mangled by a pickup that crossed the center line of U.S. 287. "Remember when Marshall lost its football team in a plane crash years ago? This is the same level of catastrophe. Because, basically, you've wiped out the whole team," said Wyoming athletic director Lee Moon. He slumped in his office chair, rubbing weary palms into eyes left moist from a difficult phone conversation with a mother who will never hug her son again. The road of tears never has been so cruel to Wyoming as it is during these grim days, when a crying coed has desperately grabbed Moon around the waist and asked, "Is there a God?" But this was not the first time U.S. 287 has murdered or maimed young Cowboys. Far from it. Since 1984, the Mountain West Conference school's small, tight-knit athletic family repeatedly has had its heart ripped out by the deadliest stretch of road in college sports. If the list of victims wasn't so long and the suffering wasn't so protracted, nobody would believe this nightmare could possibly be real. Volleyball coach Mike English finally passed away in November, seven years after an auto accident on the dangerous, 65-mile journey between Laramie and Fort Collins left him with permanent brain injuries that ended a brilliant career. U.S. 287 stole the life of Wyoming golf alum Mike Phillips in 1998, just as it took football player Greg Wilson while he was rushing back to spring practice in '84. Former basketball player Nichole Rider must hobble with a cane, and ex-linebacker Ike Chima is paralyzed after crawling away from wreckage on a back road, which coaches regularly travel for recruiting purposes and where athletes go joy riding in search of a party in Colorado. At a desolate place called Tie Siding, a little Wyoming town that's really nothing more than a 19th-century post office, a weather-beaten general store and a big dog barking into the late-summer wind, eight cross country teammates were killed at 1:30 a.m. on a nearly moonless night, when they were spun into a violent death spiral by a southbound Chevy truck, whose lone occupant was a 21-year-old Wyoming rodeo club member named Clinton Haskins. "How many more lives have to be lost on that road?" Moon said. "Where I grew up, three-lane highways were called death traps." U.S. 287, a shortcut that enticingly slices miles off a corner of the interstate system that runs between Wyoming and Colorado, winds through landscape of the wild West so gorgeous it could be a Remington work of art. With its three serpentine lanes constantly changing the rules of the road, a traveler never knows what awaits around the next curve of red rocks. There could be a sunset blanketing the Rocky Mountains in awe-inspiring color. Or a ground blizzard blinding the air in an intimidating shroud of white. Or a speeding truck barreling down the wrong side of the road in the dark. "I've probably driven that road 200 times. But never again. No way," said Gordon Shaw, now an assistant football coach at Minnesota. "I don't know what it is about that stretch of highway. Bad weather can move in quickly. It's always windy. The road is filled with truckers trying to cut some time off a trip." On a snowy winter Sunday in 1992, Shaw was working for the Cowboys. He was heading back to Laramie on U.S. 287, upon completion of a business trip to Denver. His wife had driven down to Colorado so the whole family could share dinner. After the meal, she was behind the wheel of a minivan in a two-auto caravan trying to beat a storm home. Shortly after crossing the Wyoming state line, Shaw lost sight of his wife in the rearview mirror. About 5 miles from campus, he saw police cars, then ambulances, speeding in the opposite direction. Full of dread, the Cowboys assistant turned around. He quickly found his wife in a ditch, imprisoned by the twisted metal of her vehicle, which had been crushed by an out-of-control trucker. Their baby daughter was bleeding profusely from a 2-inch deep gash in her skull. "They all lived. But they weren't all right. The highway patrolmen said they never saw a car so badly damaged without a fatality," Shaw recalled. Nearly a decade after the accident, he loves a permanently scarred daughter who struggles with fourth-grade homework, walks with a limp and can't use her right hand. "I'd be willing to bet if you compared the number of accidents on that stretch of Highway 287 with the same stretch of Interstate 25, the ratio of trouble is 20 to 1," Shaw said. "And the question becomes: Is it worth it?"
Eight Cowboys. Eight funerals. There's your answer.
|
|
