9812310238
DETROIT FREE PRESS
981231
Thursday, December 31, 1998
METRO FINAL
1E
Photo Top;WILLIAM ARCHIE/Detroit Free Press;above;PATRICIA BECK and AL KAMUDA/Detroit Free Press
Top: Joe Lelli tries to rebuild his upper-body strength at a YMCA.
Above: The Mitchell family -- Tom, Janet and 14-year-old Jennifer -- dearly
miss Jack and Jim.
Joe Lelli, once a star baseball player, goes to rehab three or four times a
week, putting in hours of weightlifting and running treadmills. Here, he works
out at the YMCA in Farmington Hills.
Following photo courtesy of the Mitchell family:
Jack and Jim Mitchell share a brotherly moment. They were killed by a drunken
driver on Jan. 1, 1998.
Donald Hokenson, a 36-year-old from Brighton, wheels himself out of the
courtroom after being arraigned last January on three charges of second-degree
murder. He suffered two broken ankles in the accident.
MITCH ALBOM
DREAMS DEFERRED '98;LAST IN A SERIES ON HEARTBREAKS AND HOPES FROM THE SPORTS WORLD. ;SIDEBAR ATTACHED
Copyright (c) 1998, Detroit Free Press
LAST NEW YEAR'S DAY, A DRUNKEN DRIVER KILLED GRAHAM MORSEHEAD AND BROTHERS
JACK AND JIM MITCHELL.
THEIR FRIEND JOE LELLI BARELY SURVIVED.
IN AN INSTANT, THREE FAMILIES WERE LEFT TO FACE... A LIFE OF NEVERS
This is what awaits the survivors.
Joe Lelli gets out of the car and squints against the cold December wind.
That's the lake, he says, the last place he remembers them all together, Jim,
Jack, Graham and him. It was just before Christmas, the water was frozen over,
hockey time, and he remembers the way they jostled for the puck. "We hit each
other so hard we just started giggling," he says. "It was so much fun."
He sniffs, digs his hands into his pockets and rotates his stiff left leg.
There were other days that followed, but he can't remember any of them. This
blue Ford Bronco keeps crashing into his head. It lands there with a deadly
impact and blows out anything that happened a week before and a month after.
All Lelli knows is that the four of them were together, playing hockey on this
lake, and now, one year later, he is the only one alive.
"I believe they're in heaven," he says. "I really do. And there were a lot of
times this past year I wished I'd gone with them."
This is a story about a life of nevers, which is the life that awaits the
mothers, the fathers, the friends, the relatives, the survivors, the victims,
everyone involved in a drunken driving tragedy. A life of nevers. It was the
phrase Graham's father used at the trial, telling the judge, we will never
look into our son's eyes again. Never know whom he would marry. Never hear him
laugh. Never hug him. Never anything. Ever again.
This is a story about a life of nevers and it ends here, at this lake, where
Joe Lelli tries to piece his body and his world back together. But it begins,
well, it begins one year ago, on New Year's Day, in a bar outside Howell
where, in keeping with the American tradition of starting the calendar with a
hangover, the place was offering a New Year's Special -- a chicken sandwich, a
Bloody Mary and 22-ounce beers.
And a 36-year-old named Donald Hokenson was chugging down every bit of it.
By the time he left the Sports Den bar and got into his vehicle, around 10:30
that night, Hokenson had enough alcohol in his bloodstream -- at least five of
those 22-ounce beers, along with the Bloody Mary -- to triple the legal limit
on the roads. This did not stop him. But then, it never had. Incredibly,
Hokenson, who lived in Brighton and worked in the heating and cooling
business, had at least 43 prior traffic citations in Michigan -- everything
from speeding to accidents to four suspended licenses -- along with a string
of 14 violations in Colorado, including two drunken driving arrests and
convictions.
Somehow, he was still free.
Somehow, he was still driving.
He started the Bronco and headed for the highway.
Had it been one minute later or one minute earlier, what Hokenson did still
would have been reprehensible. But it would not have involved Lelli, a former
Brighton High baseball player, or Jim Mitchell, a handsome soccer star, or his
younger brother Jack, an accomplished wrestler and placekicker on the football
team, or their friend Graham Morsehead, who played guitar in the basement of
his house where they hung out all those years. The four of them, friends since
childhood, were on their way home from Kalamazoo, where they had watched TV
and seen Michigan win a slice of the national football championship with a
victory over Washington State in the Rose Bowl.
Now their car was headed north on U.S.-23. Jim was driving. They were going
the speed limit. They were 20 minutes from home. Had it been one minute
earlier, one minute later . . .
But no. Hokenson, with all that alcohol in him, was already speeding and
weaving on the road. He zoomed up behind one vehicle, swerved to barely avoid
it, and now was ready to make contact. He came up hard on a black Dodge Ram
truck, banged it from the rear, and forced it into a ditch. He then veered to
his left, lost control, sped across the median in excess of 80 miles an hour
and lifted off, the entire weight of his 1990 blue Ford Bronco suddenly
airborne, a four-wheeled missile of chromium and steel, dropping over the
northbound lane.
And then it crash-landed.
It plowed into Jim Mitchell's 1988 red Pontiac Grand Prix, and it literally
tore the roof off. The Mitchell brothers were crushed beyond recognition.
Morsehead, likewise, never knew what hit him. Lelli, who had been sitting in
the back on the passenger side, was somehow ejected from the car and hurled
alongside the highway, landing close to death, with critical injuries to his
skull, spine, leg, arm, knee and jaw.
And the perpetrator, Hokenson? He came down relatively unscathed, with two
broken ankles. He was awake and yelling when people began arriving, and his
breath so reeked from alcohol that several witnesses who stopped at the scene
mentioned it to police.
One of those witnesses was an off-duty nurse. She stopped her car and
instinctively ran to the bodies in the Grand Prix. One glance told her it was
too late. She looked up at the dark winter sky.
"Lord," she whispered, "we give you these three boys...."
For the mothers
This is what awaits the mothers.
In the tidy kitchen of the Mitchell home in Brighton, sunlight beams through
the squared glass panels on the backdoor. Janet Mitchell puts out cinnamon
buns and cheese Danish, then sits down and begins to cry.
She is talking about the doorbell that rang that terrible morning, around 6
o'clock, the one she and her husband, Tom, were so sure signaled the return of
their sons. Probably forgot their key, she figured, as Tom stumbled down to
let them in.
Then she heard strange voices and she came nervously down the steps and there
were these two police officers and Tom was asking, "What? Is it about the
boys?"
"May we come in?"
"Were they in an accident?"
"Yes."
"How bad were they hurt?"
"Fatality."
Fatality? Fatality?
And then Tom was fainting, and Janet was running for a washcloth to revive him
and she was screaming and she was numb and this couldn't be, this just
couldn't be. Fatality? That means death. Not her boys. Not the boys!
Not Jim, not her first-born, the one with the magnetic smile and the iron
will, the soccer star at Brighton High who made all-state and went to Western
Michigan and played soccer there and was now, at 22, on his way to being an
engineer at Michigan Tech. He was too focused to die, he had so much in front
of him, his girlfriend, his sports, his motorcycle, his camping, his
confident, relaxed, flannel-shirted way of taking things on. Hadn't he just
earned a 4.0 in his last semester? Hadn't he called his younger sister,
Jennifer, and taught her how to download on her computer? Hadn't he once been
in the hospital, after knee surgery, and his pulse rate was so low that Janet
screamed for the doctor, only the doctor said, "Your son must be some runner;
he's in such good shape his pulse rate is 40."
Kids like that don't die, right? Not Jim. And not Jack. Oh, God, not Jack, the
younger brother. Jack was too sweet. And too indestructible. Hadn't he once
windsurfed halfway into the Atlantic Ocean down in Florida? And he came back.
Hadn't he once bicycled from Brighton to Ann Arbor -- in the rain -- just to
see a girl? And he came back. Hadn't he flown his mountain bike down
treacherous hills, hadn't he wrestled all those muscular opponents in high
school, hadn't he gone out to kick on the football team, week after week? And
he came back. He always came back.
He had to come back. He was only 21. He was too caring, too compassionate.
Hadn't he gone with a relief team down to Florida, after Hurricane Andrew, and
helped the victims recover? Kids like that don't die.
Fatality?
Their mother dabs her eyes now, softly choking on words. She never saw her
sons' bodies. The crash was so devastating, police needed dental records to
tell the boys apart. Every few weeks now, she gets together with neighbors and
they sew a quilt with material from the boys' shirts. It makes her feel better
somehow. Closer to them. Sewing their shirts.
"Just before the crash they had signed the nicest Christmas card," she says.
Her husband holds it out for a visitor. Already on the table are photo albums
of their family trips and prom pictures of Jim and computer drawings by Jack
and now the Christmas card to their parents that begins, ironically, with
"Look down, Dear Lord, on two special people. . . ."
And this is what awaits the mothers -- souvenirs and snapshots, because the
sons are all gone.
For the fathers
This is what awaits the fathers.
In the lakefront home of the Morsehead family, you can look out over the spot
where the boys would play hockey. It is a lovely view, maybe even privileged,
but, at this moment, it is totally worthless to the saddened gathering at the
large living room table. Here are the grandparents, mother and younger brother
of Graham Morsehead. They are listening to his father, Richard, talk about the
last time he saw them all alive.
"They were getting set to go to Kalamazoo, they were gonna go to that New
Year's party and then stay over and watch the ballgame. I remember pulling Jim
Mitchell aside and saying, 'Be careful driving out there.' And he was almost
surprised. He said, 'Mr. Morsehead, you know I'm not gonna drink and drive.'
And I said, 'I know you won't. But you gotta be careful of the other guy.' "
He pauses, and he, too, begins to choke up.
"And Jim said, 'I'll be careful, Mr. Morsehead. I will....' "
Graham Morsehead -- whose real first name was Richard, like his father -- was
a smiling kid who was deceptively quiet. Sometimes, he was only being quiet
because he refused to say anything bad about anyone. He was in the same grade
as Jack Mitchell and was great friends with Joe Lelli, and together they
dubbed the lake outside his house "Graham's Lake."
How many afternoons had they spent fishing out there in a pontoon boat? How
many nights had they all gathered in Graham's basement, playing guitars and
pantomiming rock stars? It was so often, such regular chaos, that Richard and
his wife, Kathy, had no idea they should have been counting the memories.
And then their doorbell rang that cold January morning, and there were police
officers, and they were saying "dead" and the tears started flowing and no,
no, no, "dead" does not happen to your oldest boy, not this way, not so
sudden, so brutal. Earlier that week he had told his father, "Dad, this is the
best Christmas I've ever had."
And now the police didn't even want them to see their son's body, and Richard
and Kathy so desperately wanted something positive to happen they kept saying,
"You can use any organs, Graham would have wanted that . . ." and the police
said nothing back, because they didn't have the heart to tell them that the
impact of the crash had destroyed their son's organs beyond salvation.
Richard bites his lower lip now and stares straight ahead. He is a teacher, as
is his wife, and teachers are supposed to set examples. But at the hearing for
Donald Hokenson, it was all he could do to control his anger.
"We pulled into the parking lot at the same time, and it took me an hour to
calm down.... All we kept hearing about was his rights. Here were three young
men laid away in the prime of their lives. What are three lives worth in our
legal system?"
A bond was set at $75,000, and Hokenson was free for months before judgment.
Meanwhile, Graham was buried with a shirt from his brother, Matt, and some
favorite fishing lures, and a U-M hat from the championship game that was the
last happy moment the friends had together.
"You hear these things happen," Richard says, "but it's not supposed to happen
to your son. Our life has changed. I'll never walk the same. I'll never look
at things the same. I'll never move the same...."
He pauses to catch his breath.
"I will never have another drop of alcohol. That industry has caused so much
pain to my family.... I will not contribute to the myth that having a drink to
relax is all fun and games and parties and there's no pain to it, because . .
."
He is crying now.
"...because it's completely unbearable . . ."
Crying.
"...it is heart-wrenching . . ."
Crying.
"...it is so real . . ."
Not too long ago, Kathy called home.
"How are you doing?" she asked her husband.
"I sold the couch," he said.
Sold the couch?
"I couldn't bear to look at it without Graham."
That is what awaits the fathers -- wandering around a beautiful home, selling
off the furniture, because the dead child is in everything you see and do.
For the drunks
This is what awaits the guilty party.
Donald Hokenson sat in a wheelchair during the hearings. At times he hid
behind a podium, to avoid face-to-face contact with the victims' relatives.
And at other times he simply looked at his feet. His lawyers argued against
the second-degree murder charges. They questioned the accuracy of the
blood-alcohol tests, which showed Hokenson at a level of .24, more than twice
Michigan's drunken level of .10 and three times the impaired level of .08.
They also argued that his driving record -- which by anybody's standards was
an abomination -- should not be admissible.
It didn't seem to matter that Hokenson had lied about his Michigan driving
record -- which featured 43 citations -- when he applied for a license in
Colorado in 1993. And despite two alcohol-related convictions in that state
and charges of driving without a license or insurance, he was still able to
get another license here in Michigan. (A new law, which goes into effect in
October 1999, would have prohibited him from acquiring a Michigan license for
at least one year because of his Colorado offenses. But the secretary of
state's office says that because the Colorado charges were for impaired
driving instead of drunken driving, enough time had passed that there was no
legal way to deny him under existing law.)
The hearings were emotional. Prosecutors sought the most severe penalties. But
in the end, after living free for nearly nine months, Hokenson offered a plea
bargain a week before his trial was scheduled to begin. He pleaded no-contest
to three second-degree murder charges and one charge of operating a vehicle
under the influence of alcohol.
At the sentencing, the mothers and fathers of the murdered sons spoke of their
pain and loss. Richard Morsehead pleaded for a severe punishment, saying,
"Some people get messages, others don't.... Just as Mr. Hokenson has brought
the full meaning of 'never' to our lives, we think it is time for the courts
to return the favor to him."
Finally, Hokenson made a brief statement.
"I am truly sorry. I didn't mean to do it."
This from a man who had at least 100 ounces of beer and a Bloody Mary in his
bloodstream when he started his car.
The judge gave the sentence: maximum 15 years in prison. They took Hokenson
away.
With parole, analysts say, he could be out in seven years.
For the survivors
This is what awaits the next person who lives through it.
Joe Lelli now dreads sleeping. He stays on the couch as long as he can each
night, staring at the TV, flipping channels, delaying the inevitable, because
lying in bed is when the depression is the worst.
He still doesn't recall what happened. Everything is blank. From that hockey
game before Christmas to the day he regained consciousness in the hospital,
five weeks later. All white space.
"I know it's somewhere in my head, but I'd rather it never came back," he
says.
He talks at a small diner in Brighton, a place where he once came for
breakfast with his buddies, who are all gone now. Although he looks, at first
glance, to be a normal 22-year-old -- jeans, flannel shirt, backward baseball
cap, brown bangs poking out from under the brim -- there are scars all over
Lelli's 6-foot-3 body. He has needed 20 surgeries to put him back together,
from the hole in his skull to relieve pressure on his brain, to the metal cage
around his broken spine, to the plate in his broken arm, the rod in his leg,
the screws in his knee, the repairs to his liver and spleen, the skin graft
around his ear where his jawbone snapped and pushed through the flesh.
Lelli was in a coma for weeks. He was unconscious for his friends' funerals.
He was unconscious for the TV reports and newspaper stories. He finally came
to -- at least this is when he remembers coming to -- during the Super Bowl,
of all things, at the end of January. On the TV, John Elway of the Denver
Broncos dove for a first down, and for some reason -- maybe because the last
thing he did with his friends was watch a football game on TV -- for some
reason, Joe smiled.
From that point forward, it has been a long, depressing climb. From bed to
wheelchair, wheelchair to cane, cane to limp. Lelli goes to rehab three or
four times a week, putting in hours of weights and treadmills. He is
determined to play sports again, to run again, to lose the numbness on his
left side and put on the new Bauer skates he wore just once before, in their
last hockey game together.
He wants to skate one more time on Graham's lake.
For now, he does what he can. He takes college classes. He goes to rehab. And
he misses his friends. He is torn between the blessing of surviving the crash
and the guilt of being the only one. "Graham's mom likes to see me, she says
it does her good, so I'm glad about that," he says. "Sometimes I wonder if the
other families feel cheated, 'cause I lived and their kids didn't."
About a month ago, Lelli went to the cemetery, to Jim's and Jack's graves. He
stood there for 15 minutes, hoping it would make him feel better. Then he
left.
"Nothing feels like it did before," he says. "My whole life is completely
different now. I don't do the same things I used to. I don't go out. I don't
cut loose."
He shrugs. "I don't know. I'm just not that happy anymore."
Last year, 45 people died every day from alcohol-related traffic accidents in
this country. And every weekday night, between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. -- the hours
in which Jim Mitchell, Jack Mitchell and Graham Morsehead left this earth --
one out of every 13 drivers on the road is drunk. Think about how little time
it takes to pass 12 other cars, and you realize how the odds are stacking up
against you.
But then, they have been for a long time. Thanks to a court system that does
not treat drunken driving as a serious-enough threat to put all offenders
behind bars -- or even off the roads -- the majority of Americans, three out
of every five people, will be involved in an alcohol-related traffic incident
at some point in their lives.
So this might be what awaits you, too, fathers, mothers, sisters or brothers:
At some point, a version of the flying blue Bronco with the drunken man behind
the wheel will come crashing into your life. But as the Mitchells, Morseheads
and Lellis will tell you, it doesn't stop with the police or the funeral or
the weeping friends and neighbors. That car keeps crashing into you. It
crashes into every holiday, every birthday celebration, every time you walk
past the old bedroom, every time you sit down to a meal with one less chair at
the table. It crashes for days, then weeks, then years, then forever.
"I had this dream," Lelli says now. "I was walking through the neighborhood
and I saw Jim and Jack and Graham and they were all in Graham's driveway. And
I came over and grabbed them and hugged them, and they were all laughing and
real happy to see me. It was so real."
And then?
"And then I woke up. And I thought, aw, shoot . . ."
He sniffs.
"You know?"
He looks off at the water. The lake will be frozen soon. Hockey time. You can
almost hear the echoes of the four of them clowning around, jostling for the
puck. But Lelli turns and walks away. Echoes are echoes.
They're never playing hockey again.
Never is very real word now. It is etched in blood in Lelli's life, and in all
the families' and friends' lives, too. And the sad truth is tonight, every
time a boozed-up New Year's celebrant reaches for the car keys, someone else's
life of nevers will be just around the bend.
To leave a message for Mitch Albom, call 1-313-223-4581 or E-mail
albom@freepress.com
DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE
From 9 p.m. to 5 a.m., New Year's Eve drinkers who want to avoid driving in
Wayne, Oakland or Macomb counties can place a toll-free call to the Mothers
Against Drunk Driving's Project Liferide -- 1-877-367-6233 -- for a free cab
ride home.
THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED ARTICLE.
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