A night to forget -- but he can't/Driving drunk, he took 6 lives in '03
tiny dancer
MAURY -- He sits in a beige plastic chair, looking away from the dull
linoleum floor and cinder-block walls of the prison visiting room.
Two years ago, Larry Robert Veeder Jr. killed six people. He struck them
with a van in West Raleigh on a Saturday night after an N.C. State football
game. He was drunk.
The deadly wreck on Nov. 1, 2003, will keep Veeder, now 34, in prison until
2012. He is now at Eastern Correctional Institution in Greene County.
Prison chaplain Harry Grubbs, who has become a close friend, accompanies
Veeder as he meets a visitor. "You're not going to hold it against yourself
forever," Grubbs says. "You'll be able to forgive yourself."
"I'll look forward to that," Veeder says quietly.
He corresponds occasionally with Phil Myers, the father of an 18-year-old he
killed. Myers has forgiven Veeder for his son's death.
"The burden he carries is more having to live out his life," Myers says in a
telephone interview.
But Veeder struggles with his responses to Myers.
"It almost feels like I'm insulting them," he says. " 'Sorry about killing
your son' doesn't fix it.
"It doesn't do anything."
* * *
On the afternoon of the accident, Veeder said in an interview, he was
nursing a hangover. So he tried to order a coffee when he walked into his
regular watering hole, Sadlack's Heroes on Hillsborough Street.
No coffee had been made, he recalled, so he said, "Well, I tried. Give me a
beer."
He continued to another regular haunt, East Village Grill & Bar, and downed
several drinks there. He ended his night at Pure Gold, a Cary strip club he
chose over Raleigh's Foxy Lady by flipping a business card as if it were a
coin.
Very intoxicated, Veeder left Pure Gold to buy a pack of cigarettes, then
head to a friend's home in West Raleigh.
He says he often drove drunk.
"I wasn't worried about getting in an accident and hurting anybody," says
Veeder, who had no prior drunken driving convictions. "I guess I always
figured I'd hurt myself, eventually. But I really wasn't worried about
hurting myself."
A few miles away on N.C. 54 in West Raleigh, several people stood in the
roadway. They had stopped to help after a sport utility vehicle ran a stop
sign at the Nowell Road intersection and hit another SUV. It was 8:45 p.m.
Veeder's Econoline van topped a small rise. He never saw anyone. At first,
he thought he had hit trees, not people.
Arrested at the scene, Veeder blew a 0.18 on a Breathalyzer two hours after
the accident -- more than twice the legal limit for blood alcohol content in
North Carolina.
Killed in that roadway were Robert Alfaro Jr., 46, and his wife, Gene-Marie,
48, of Waxhaw, a town outside Charlotte, visiting their twin sons at N.C.
State University; Dennis W. Bowes, 28, of Cary, and Bryan M. Tutor, 29, of
Coats, in Harnett County, friends and and fellow Wolfpack fans who had just
seen their team beat Virginia; and Nolan P. Myers, 18, a Campbell University
freshman from Minnesota passing through the area with friends.
Christopher Clemons, 41, of Raleigh, who had hopped on his bike and rushed
to the scene when he heard the initial crash from his home nearby, died on
the way to the hospital.
* * *
Veeder's days are now ones of structure. Wake up at 6 a.m., go to culinary
and horticulture college classes until noon. Eat. Play piano in the prison
gospel group's band practice (other band members deemed his favored
harmonica too bluesy). Study some more. Eat. Read. Go to bed.
He recently won a writing contest for prison inmates for an essay about the
first visit with his father in the Wake County jail after the accident.
Every now and again, he tries to cheer up fellow prisoners by juggling, a
holdover from the days when he would perform for children in Raleigh as the
clown Blinker T. Chapman.
"I'm doing pretty well in prison, but I'm not so sure people want to hear
that," Veeder says. "I can understand that, for some of them, they'd rather
hear that I was suffering.
"And I think I do," he adds, "but not with my physical environment."
He often has nightmares.
The accident plays out in his head. He thinks of the victims, whose names he
had to memorize because he had no idea who they were before he killed them.
The pain continues, too, for the families of the victims.
"I hope no other parent has to go through what we have to," Phil Myers said.
Nolan Myers was a couple of months into his freshman year at Campbell. An
avid drummer and certified pilot, he had a strong devotion to God, his
father said.
"It isn't the first thing you think about each morning," Phil Myers said.
"It's during my coffee that it'll hit me."
Lauren Murphy, the longtime girlfriend of Dennis Bowes, is no longer angry
at Veeder but rarely thinks about him.
"I don't really feel like it's my place to forgive him or not to, I feel
like it's his victims' place," she wrote in an e-mail message to a reporter.
"Sure, I lost my best friend, but Dennis lost so much more than that; they
all did."
Two lawsuits, filed by Myers' family and Mandy Tutor, Bryan Tutor's wife,
are pending against the two bars and the strip club Veeder went to that day.
If any money comes of the lawsuit, Tutor hopes to provide for her son
Carson, who was 6 months old when his father died.
Myers hopes to fund a foundation in his son's memory that gives drug and
alcohol treatment to convicted drunken drivers. He has urged Veeder, who
wants to become a drug and alcohol abuse counselor when he leaves prison, to
share his experiences.
"Think of the hush that would overcome a crowd of drinking drivers as they
would listen to your story," Myers wrote to Veeder.
* * *
Veeder spent much of his childhood in Cary, where his father worked as a
nuclear consultant. He went to college for a year in Alabama, then returned
to North Carolina, where he immersed himself in Raleigh's art and music
scene. Daytimes he worked in construction and home repair jobs.
Veeder says he thinks often about his past -- his reckless life of daily
hangovers, constant highs and loneliness.
After a decadelong relationship he had with a woman ended in December 2001,
Veeder says, he fell into a deep depression and began drinking nightly. He
straightened himself up for a bit; but after a close friend died, he turned
back to his old diet of marijuana and beer.
"At that point, I had lost any will to try and get clean," Veeder wrote in a
letter.
He often smoked marijuana during the day while working but waited until
quitting time to lift his first beer at local bars. Pabst Blue Ribbon if he
was short on cash; Guinness or Harp if he wasn't. But always beer.
Today, he writes friends in Raleigh to warn them against that lifestyle. His
preaching, he acknowledges, has turned some off. But he thinks he must at
least try, in hopes they can avoid the mistakes he made Nov. 1, 2003.
"The one thing he could have done ... is not to drive that night," his
mother, Pat, said in a telephone interview from Alabama.
"And he drove."
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/crime_safety/november1_wreck/story/2828266p-9277898c.html
cro...@earthlink.net
hours out in the sun raising vegetables or picking potatoes or something? I
suppose he'll get a college degree on my dime, also.
10 or so years for killing 6 people is getting off very easily, I must say.
"tiny dancer" <tinyda...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:Hvh9f.24424$NJ....@bignews7.bellsouth.net...
tiny dancer
<cro...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:yKh9f.1917$8c5...@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net...
> sounds like he's having way too much fun in prison...how about some long
> hours out in the sun raising vegetables or picking potatoes or something?
I
> suppose he'll get a college degree on my dime, also.
> 10 or so years for killing 6 people is getting off very easily, I must
say.
Yeah, I was really shocked he'd be out so soon.
td
