My Life With My Brother’s Killer
Thirty years ago, a drunk driver killed my brother. I’ve been thinking about the homicidal driver ever since. Then, I found him on the Internet…
By Beth Greenfield
This past year, I wrote and published a book, Ten Minutes from Home, about how my family was affected by the drunk driving accident that killed my brother and my best friend nearly thirty years ago. While working on it, I began to wonder about what had happened to the man who hit us.
All I knew about him was that his name was Edward Pahule, that he was a Milwaukee native stationed at a Jersey Shore naval base, and that he was on a liquor-fueled bender on the June night my family and I happened to be heading home from my yearly ballet recital. When he hit us, he took the lives of my brother, who was 7, and my best friend, who was 13 — just a year older than me.
I found Edward Pahule quickly on the Internet. And I learned that he is back in Wisconsin, and that he is a blogger. I even found a photo of him—a tiny headshot, in which he looks like a normal-enough guy, with a graying beard and wire-framed glasses and a mellow smile—and I stared into his eyes for a while, conscious that I was, at last, looking into the face of Adam’s killer.
I used to fantasize about looking him in the eye.
Edward Pahule got off easy. He was sentenced to just six months in jail. This was New Jersey, 1982—the highest-record year for alcohol-related car fatalities in the state, and a low point for drunk driving laws and penalties. It was an irony that filled my grief-stricken father with a burning anger, and he set out to find ways to right our wrong.
“We’re just going to put those scumbags away!” he would report after returning home from frequent meetings of the New Jersey Task Force on Drunk Driving. He joined the group shortly after being released from his post-accident hospital stay, during which he’d recovered from a punctured lung, a broken shoulder and a bruised heart. “They want to suck down the booze and then get in their cars? Fine. No problem. We’ll let ’em rot in jail, that’s all.”
My mother, though, was not interested. “Is that going to bring him back?” she would shout, stone-faced, at my father who would sigh and look at the floor. “Then I don’t want to hear it!” She had no use for any form of revenge or justice, from what I could see, because none of it could make our family whole again.
My own thoughts on the subject hovered somewhere in between my parents’ two extremes. Mostly I didn’t think about blame or punishment, as I, too, saw it as useless—unable to make me a big sister to Adam or best friend to Kristin again. But I would sometimes think about meeting the drunk driver face to face. I would watch those early-’80s TV talk shows as they brought together sobbing, chest-thumping survivors with the killers of their children or parents or lovers, and something in me would long to be a part of the action—to walk onto Phil Donahue’s set and stand before Edward Pahule so he could crumple and apologize with the world watching.
Later, when I was in high school and working a part-time job in a clothing store at the mall, I would have distracting daydreams in which I would take someone’s credit card for a sale, look down at the raised-plastic cardholder’s name and see that it read EDWARD PAHULE. Some days I would think that every card handed to me would definitely be his—even if the purchaser was a woman, which it almost always was—and I would shake with anticipation and will myself not to read the name on the card until the moment before I handed it back so I could ready myself for an appropriately fired-up response. But what would I have possibly said? I had no idea. I just thought that making him see me would stir something in him and make him truly regretful.
My father’s brand of justice never appealed to me. In high school, when I learned that a few of my friends were banding together to form a chapter of SADD, I was horrified—self-conscious and guilty that I wasn’t involved. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk sitting in a classroom after the final bell of the day had rung, hanging out with this handful of well-meaning peers and trying to look like anyone else, like a normal student who just happened to choose SADD as an extra-curricular activity, the same way I might’ve chosen debate club or field hockey or chess.
Eventually I’d head off to college—a private liberal-arts school in Connecticut—and it quickly dawned on me that I was among spoiled rich kids, and so I asked my parents, a pair of teachers, how we were able to afford such an education. “Money from the accident,” my father blurted out. It made me sick to know it, that we’d gotten money out of the deal, and that I was going to school with it. It didn’t only feel unjust, but rotten, and cheap. But it was the way of the legal system; money for the victims and jail time for the offenders was pretty much all it had to offer—and neither one, as far as I was concerned, could offer anything that worked to take the edge off grief.
All these years later, I haven’t thought much more than I had as a teen about seeking justice for what our family went through. The idea of more jail time for the man who hit us sounds like it would have been a good idea, but even if he was still locked up to this day, I know that fact alone wouldn’t have eased my years of grief and healing.
Beth Greenfield, is the author of Ten Minutes From Home.
