Two Sons, Two Accidents, a Mother’s Endless Pain

LAS VEGAS —  Dust lingers on pictures of the two brown-haired boys. There are candles from the vigils, T-shirts that haven’t been washed.

The mother guides her hand over the memories--the night light her younger son left on when he was afraid, the Green Bay Packers pillow of her elder son.

The first accident was almost two years ago. A driver on drugs ran over and killed 14-year-old Scott Garner Jr. Then, little more than a year later, her first son, 19-year-old Joseph William Harvey, was killed by a drunken driver.

The pain creeps over their mother, as if her body is burning.

“I just stay confused,” Vicki Gould says. “When I have one of those really bad days, I think, why did it have to be both of them?”

There was nothing remarkable about that day, March 19, 2000, when Gould dropped off her son at the Family Court building for his community service.

Gould and her third husband, Doug, knew Scotty was hanging out with the wrong crowd. He was living with his father across town when he got arrested for waiting outside a house as an older boy went inside and stole money. It was the first time he had been in trouble, his mother said.

More trouble followed; Scotty was caught with marijuana at school. A juvenile judge ordered him to perform 40 hours of community service.

On Saturdays and Sundays, Gould would take the seventh-grader to the court building and watch him get into a van with other juvenile offenders. They were split into work crews assigned to pick up trash around Las Vegas.

Once, Scotty told his stepfather that in between picking up trash, the teens chased lizards.

It hardly seemed dangerous.

That Sunday was Scotty’s fourth day of community service--he only had one more day left.

He had recently moved in with his mother, and the next day he was to enroll in a new junior high, hoping to make a fresh start.

She took Scotty to McDonald’s, as she always did on those weekends. When they got to the court building, Scotty volunteered to ride with a different work crew. He was going to see his father--Gould’s second husband--when he was done.

Gould went about her day, repotting plants, buying groceries. She was at the store when her husband Doug got a call at home.

Scotty and five other teens on the work crew had been struck by a van driven by Jessica Williams, a 22-year-old former topless dancer who admitted smoking marijuana and using Ecstasy before plowing into the teens picking up trash along Interstate 15. All six were killed.

Gould’s legs felt like noodles; they buckled beneath her. She was there, but she wasn’t.

She wanted to see him, just to be sure. A funeral home worker said she shouldn’t; he didn’t look like Scotty.

“He said, ‘Does he have just that little patch of hair here?’ ” she says, pointing to her bangs.

Yes. He had just gotten a funny haircut.

Scotty was the daring one, the one who liked skateboarding and dirt bikes and wanted to be a Navy SEAL. But he also would bring his mother flowers for no reason and tea when she was sick. The day before his death, he had brought her five pink carnations.

After the accident, family and friends filled Vicki and Doug’s house. Her elder son, Joseph, who lived with his father in Bakersfield, arrived the next day.

One of Gould’s pink carnations was buried with Scotty; she kept the others. Scotty was buried in his BMX riding suit, a Christmas present from Vicki and Doug. His stepfather had made him a deal--save your money for a dirt bike and he would pay for half.

Scotty never got to try out his suit on a new bike.

Gould went into therapy and took medication for depression and anxiety.

She finally went to the highway to look at the crash site. A prosecutor gave her a picture of Scotty’s body on the side of the road, but she couldn’t look at it.

Television news reports show repeated footage from the crash scene, bodies covered with sheets.

“I want to know which one is him,” she says.

Gould wanted to sing a song, “One More Day,” for her son at the sentencing of the driver who killed him, but it wasn’t allowed. The woman was sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in prison.

Gould began spending more time with Joseph, visiting him in Bakersfield and buying him bus tickets to Las Vegas, where they went for drives and rode the rides together at an amusement park.

“I wanted to make sure he would be OK, to get him to talk about it,” she says.

Joseph lived with his father--Gould’s first husband and the father of her two daughters--but visited often and would spend summers and vacations with his mother.

At 19, he was going to graduate from high school in October 2001. He and Scotty had both repeated the fifth grade. But Joseph had been attending summer school to catch up and worked as a security guard at a convention center.

He loved the job because he got to see monster truck shows and rock groups such as Def Leppard.

Joseph was more sensitive, the son who taught his mother the words to a “Beauty and the Beast” song and took care of his 100-year-old great-grandmother. He still liked to play army in the woods.

He and Scotty talked on the phone often and put on silly plays for their mother.

Joseph started writing poetry about his half-brother and read the poems to his mother.

“We didn’t realize the depth of his grief,” Doug says. “He wanted to be with his brother. He wanted his brother to be here.”

Last Aug. 19, Joseph and some friends had been camping in a cabin outside Bakersfield. A friend, 37-year-old Robert Grabinski, offered to drive them home. Joseph was in the jump seat of the pickup truck with the 15-year-old sister of a friend who rode in front with Grabinski.

The girl told authorities she begged Grabinski to slow down. But he passed a car on a curve and lost control. The truck overturned; Joseph smashed through the windshield and hit a rock. The others survived.

The unthinkable had happened again.

Vicki threw down the phone.

“I just screamed, ‘There’s no way.’ ”

Grabinski had been drinking and taking pain pills that day, the Highway Patrol said.

He pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence and was sentenced to four years in prison.

Friendships she formed with families of other DUI crash victims somehow changed after her second son died.

Her torment is constant. Doug helps wipe away her tears. She won’t go back to the McDonald’s where she took Scotty. The car she drove to drop him off for community service is in storage.

An anti-drunk driving group planted a tree for Scotty, but not for Joseph because he wasn’t killed in Nevada.

Friends call and come by, but conversation is awkward. She forgets answers to simple questions. Often, she is in a daze and unaware of conversations.

She was fired from her hospital job because she took too much time off to mourn; Doug was laid off from his job as a truck driver.

This day, she is looking for a certain photograph of her boys together, one she knows she has. But she can’t find it and she punishes herself with tears.

“I try to think of the good memories,” Gould says, clenching her fists. “Sometimes it’s like I can’t find any. That bothers me.”

Finally, the memory comes. It’s a tree Scotty used to climb when he was younger and always needed his mother to help him down.

In her walks around the neighborhood she pauses at some black marks on the concrete. They’re from Scotty’s in-line skates, and it soothes her to see them, to imagine him skating.

She can’t comprehend what has happened. It’s so strange, both boys stolen from her.

“I do wonder all the time, how can I do this?” Gould says, sitting on the couch in her living room.

She tries to dream about them, but never has.

Often, she goes to the beach in California, where she spends hours alone near the water.

She curls up on a towel, watches the waves and looks into the sky. Once, she swore she saw a wispy “S” in the clouds.

“But is it because I just imagined it so much?” she wonders.

She waits until evening comes and the sun fades, when calm envelops her. It is then that comfort comes, if only in a small way.

“I must be just blessed,” she says. Blessed that they didn’t suffer in death. Blessed that they’re together now--angels to watch over her.