FALLING STAR
By the time Josh was 16 and a junior in high school, he was the top runner at his school—but he began to feel overwhelmed by pressure from his coach to win every meet. After school one fall day, he simply told his dad, “Running isn’t fun anymore.” And he quit, just like that.
Not wanting his son to feel more pressure, Mr. Horne didn’t say anything. But within weeks of leaving the team, Josh, who’d always had trouble keeping up his grades, began cutting classes. Then one day, about two months before the end of his junior year, he came home from school and told his parents, “I’m not going back.”
Even though they knew Josh had been having a rough year, his parents were shocked and upset. But they knew their son: When he set his mind to do something—like running across Kansas—they couldn’t change it. So after days of trying to persuade him to at least finish the semester, Mr. Horne agreed to let Josh get his GED instead.
Josh began working odd jobs, like pulling hay on farms. He also began staying out late with some new friends—other dropouts he’d met hanging around town. One night, about a month after Josh quit school, he came home at midnight to find his dad awake. “You’ve been drinking?” Mr. Horne bluntly asked when he smelled alcohol on his son. “I just took a sip from a friend,” Josh said nervously—he knew alcohol was forbidden in his Christian home. Wanting to believe that his son wasn’t breaking any rules, Mr. Horne simply said, “Don’t do it again,” and sent Josh to bed. But just three weeks later, Mr. Horne heard Josh come home at 1 A.M.—and throw up. The next morning, he pulled Josh aside. “Liquor is going to get ahold of you if you’re not careful,” he sternly warned his son.
ROCK BOTTOM
By the time Josh turned 19, he had lost touch with his school friends—and was still staying out late with the new friends he’d made. One day in June 2002, right after his 19th birthday, Mrs. Horne got an urgent call from one of the new friends: “Josh just got into an argument—someone’s after him,” she quickly said. “He’s going to your house.” When Josh showed up, he smelled of alcohol and had a glazed, almost crazed look in his eyes. Once inside, he began pacing back and forth and cursing his mom and brother Tony. “F*** you!” he screamed. Recently, Josh had been losing his temper— but he’d never been this out of control. Frightened and confused, Mrs. Horne began crying. Suddenly, Tony turned to her. “Tell the hospital we’re coming,” he said. Then he tackled Josh onto the couch and told him, “You’re going for some treatment.” At first Josh tried to get free, but after a few minutes he just went limp and mumbled, “Okay.” Tony then helped Josh into their truck. As Tony drove, Josh laid his head down on his big brother’s leg and sobbed.
Two weeks later, Josh was released from the hospital’s alcohol-treatment program and went home. For a few months, he stayed out of trouble. He and his 27-year-old brother, Jonnie, even thought it would be fun if they moved in together, so Josh went to live with Jonnie. But around 12 A.M. one night in October 2002, about four months after Josh was let go from the hospital, Jonnie heard a commotion out front. So he got up, walked outside—and saw Josh getting handcuffed. He was being arrested for drunk driving. “I’m so sorry, Jonnie!” Josh called out, and he began to cry.
DESPERATE INTERVENTION
The next day Mr. Horne went to bail his son out of jail. He couldn’t overlook it any longer: Josh’s drinking was just getting worse. “You need to go to a real rehab,” he told his son. “I’ll take you anywhere for help.” But now sober, Josh seemed to forget his regret from the previous night and completely denied having a problem. Since Josh was legally an adult and no longer living at home, Mr. Horne didn’t feel he had the power to force his son to go get help.
By April 2004, a year and half later, Josh moved in with his girlfriend of four months, Cynthia, 20, and her baby, Jared. Shortly after, two of Josh’s friends were at his place drinking, when one began flirting with Cynthia. Josh got really angry and demanded that they leave. As they walked out, one guy threw a garbage can through Josh’s patio window. Fuming, Josh started yelling and raced out after them. When he caught up with them, the guys smashed Josh’s eye socket and cheekbone, and knocked out his two front teeth.
Josh spent the next week in the hospital under observation for his head injuries. When he got out, his parents, who’d moved three hours away to Branson, Missouri, urged Josh to stay with them while he recovered. “Okay,” Josh agreed, “I just want to get away from everybody.” Josh was still pretty vain, so he grew a goatee to help cover his scabs and stitches, and his parents offered to replace his teeth once he healed. Until then, Josh hid his gap by rarely smiling. “I can’t stand looking like this,” he told his mom. The only thing that seemed to cheer him up was finding out that his girlfriend, Cynthia, was pregnant—the two started talking about marriage.
On Sunday, June 13, 2004, a few weeks after leaving the hospital, Josh’s parents decided to spend the afternoon looking for a car to buy Josh. He’d just gotten a job at a gas station and needed a way to get to work. “Want to come?” Mr. Horne asked. “Nah,” Josh replied. “I’m going to watch a movie.” A half hour later, Jodi, Josh’s twin, called. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Looking in the phone book for a club,” he said. “I’m so bored. If I don’t find something to do soon, I’m going to put a noose around my neck.”
LOST HOPE
After a few hours of car shopping, Josh’s parents pulled into their driveway at 7:30 P.M. They saw Josh in a white T-shirt and blue shorts, sitting against the garage wall. His head was slumped forward and his eyes were closed. “What the hell?” Mr. Horne asked, as he got out of the car and began walking toward his son. Suddenly, he stopped. There was an extension cord hanging from a rafter—and the other end was wrapped tightly around Josh’s neck.
Mrs. Horne was standing near her husband and yelled Josh’s name. Mr. Horne sprinted to his son and screamed out for his wife to call 911. He tried to relax the cord’s tight hold but couldn’t. “Get me a knife!” he shouted to Mrs. Horne, who was now inside, sobbing into the phone: “My baby boy hung himself! You need to send someone!” Then Mrs. Horne hung up and ran back to the garage with a knife. Mr. Horne grabbed the knife and frantically sawed away at the cord until in snapped. Once it did, Josh’s limp body fell forward into his father’s arms.
“Open your eyes, Josh,” Mrs. Horne cried. “He can’t be dead!” But as Mr. Horne held Josh tightly, he knew his son was gone—and he began to cry too. Then he looked down and saw a folded note in Josh’s waistband. What if I’ve done something to cause this, he wondered. He didn’t want to know if he had, so he left the note where it was.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
On June 17,the day before Josh’s funeral, Jodi had her 21st birthday—without her twin. “I didn’t want a cake,” she says. “I felt so guilty for not taking his threat seriously.”
For three months, no one in the family read Josh’s note; the police had it. But when they gave it back, Mr. Horne finally opened it. “I did what I did because I was weak,” Josh had explained. “I couldn’t handle life.” But today, a year after the suicide, Mr. Horne blames himself. “I let Josh down,” he says. “I just hoped that he’d go back to his old self. I never realized that everything—his change of friends, his mood swings— were cries for help.”
Angel
of Death
When Michele, 18, had a fight with
her dad, she had no idea it would be the
last time she’d see him alive.
It was 3:30 P.M. on a Sunday when Michele, then 16, got the call. She’d been lounging around, watching TV at her home in South Plainfield, New Jersey. It was her cousin who worked at a nearby hospital, on the line: “I’m not sure,” her cousin blurted out, “but I saw a guy who looked like your dad being brought into the emergency room.” Shocked and confused, Michele mumbled, “Thanks,” hung up, and immediately told her mom, Janette. “It’s not Daddy, right?!” Michele asked, panicking, as her mom frantically dialed the hospita
l. But as soon as Janette got through, she was told that Chris Hardgrove, Michele’s 38-year-old dad, was in the hospital—in the critical care unit, in a coma.
DADDY’S GIRL
When Michele was young, she was very close to her father. “I was the apple of my dad’s eye,” she says. He would build her dollhouses, and they’d watch cartoons together, but her favorite pastime was simply hanging out and listening to her dad play the drums. “I’d squeeze inside the bass as he’d bang away,” she says.
Then in 2001, when Michele was 15, her parents got divorced. Within a year, her dad moved in with his girlfriend. “She’d try to start trouble between me and my dad,” Michele says. “She’d say things like, ‘Your dad wants to disown you.’ And for some reason, I believed her, so I was too scared to say anything back.”
One day in the summer of 2002, before Michele’s sophomore year of high school, she went to visit her dad. “He started throwing accusations at me,” she says. “He said he’d ‘heard’ that I’d started smoking and doing drugs—but it wasn’t true! He’d also heard through my grandmother that I’d gotten my belly button pierced, which he wasn’t happy about.”
“I didn’t defend myself,” continues Michele. “But when I left, I thought, I don’t have to deal with this— and we stopped talking.” Even though they’d been speaking less since the divorce, this was a drastic change. That Christmas, Michele’s dad sent her a card like he had the year before, signed, “Love, Daddy,” with $100 in it. But this time she didn’t call to thank him. “I was still angry,” she says. “But he was my dad. I assumed the fight would just fizzle, and we’d make up.”
SECOND CHANCE?
When Michele found out that her dad was in the hospital, she hadn’t spoken to him in a year. But right away, she and her mom, Janette, rushed down to see him at Somerset Medical Center. Holding Janette’s hand, Michele walked into her dad’s room—and burst into tears. She couldn’t believe how pale and fragile he looked. Soon a nurse came in and told them that his girlfriend had found him at home unconscious that morning. Paramedics were eventually able to resuscitate him, but he still wasn’t breathing on his own. Doctors believed he’d had a massive heart attack. Michele and her mom were speechless. “Chris had always been so healthy and strong,” says Janette. “He was only 38—he’d never had any health problems.”
After the nurse left, Janette hugged Michele tightly and said, “You need to make peace with your dad in case he doesn’t pull through this. Do you want a few minutes alone with him?” Michele hesitantly nodded.
At first Michele stood a foot away from her dad’s bed. “His breathing sounded so forced,” Michele says. But after a few minutes, she stepped closer and put her hand on top of his, hoping he’d squeeze back to let her know he was okay. But he didn’t. “I had so many thoughts in my head that I couldn’t get any words out,” she says. “I felt so guilty for not having spoken to him before this. Now I was scared I’d never get the chance.”
At 11 that night, after they were back at home, Janette called the hospital to find out how Chris was doing. Although he was still in serious condition, his body was functioning—and he hadn’t gotten any worse.
SUDDEN GOOD-BYE
At 6 the next morning, Janette called the hospital again to see if Chris’s condition had changed. She spoke to a male nurse who’d been monitoring Chris through the night. “He went into cardiac arrest several times during the night,” he said. “Should I come down?!” Janette shrieked. “I probably would,” he replied.
Janette rushed there. When she got to Chris’s room, things were eerily calm. The male nurse she’d spoken to had left, but the nurse on duty told Janette that Chris wasn’t doing well: The medication to regulate his blood pressure was at the maximum dosage, but it wasn’t helping enough, and his organs were shutting down. His kidneys had already stopped functioning, and his liver was failing. Janette looked over at Chris and saw a stream of blood begin to run out of his nose.
Moments later, a doctor strode in, and admitted to Janette that they weren’t feeling positive about what was going on. “In my opinion, the best thing would be to take Chris off life support,” she said, explaining that due in part to his failing organs, Chris was most likely brain-dead—and would remain in a coma forever.
After much deliberation, Chris’s family agreed that they should take him off the blood-pressure medicine that was keeping him alive. Within five minutes of doing that—just 24 hours after he was first admitted to the hospital—Chris’s heart stopped beating.
SERIOUS SUSPICIONS
When Janette got home from the hospital, Michele was sleeping on the couch. She sat down and stroked her hair to wake her. “Daddy’s gone,” Janette whispered. Michele rolled away and began quietly crying. She thought to herself, But we were supposed to make up!
In the months that followed, Michele began her junior year and tried not to think about her dad—she wanted life to feel normal again. But then in December 2003, four months after her dad’s death, Michele was in homeroom when she saw a local paper, the Courier News, on a nearby desk. It had a big, intriguing headline that said “Angel of Death,” so she picked it up. She skimmed the story and saw that it was about a nurse named Charles Cullen who had been accused of murdering a patient at Somerset Medical Center, where he’d worked between September 2002 and October 2003.
The article said he’d used a medication to perform what he called a “mercy killing” to alleviate the patients’ suffering. Michele realized, That’s when Dad was there! For a second she even wondered if maybe Cullen had anything to do with her father’s death—but then thought, Something that outrageous wouldn’t happen to us.
A few days later, Michele was watching TV when another story about Cullen came on. He admitted that he’d killed about 15 other patients at Somerset. That’s when it occurred to Michele there was an actual possibility that this monster had killed her dad. She called her mom at work: “Do you think it’s possible that this Angel of Death nurse had anything to do with Daddy?” she asked. “Well,” Janette said, “I’ve already called prosecutors with your father’s information.”
FINAL CONFRONTATION
Four months later, in April 2004, the prosecutor’s office called Janette at work. “You were right,” a detective told her. “Charles Cullen admitted to murdering Christopher Hardgrove.” He then told her that Cullen would be appearing in court two days later, to formally plead guilty to her ex-husband’s murder, as well as to the murders of 13 other patients. The victims’ families were allowed to attend.
As soon as Janette got home from work, she told Michele about the call. “We were right,” she said. “The nurse said he was responsible for your dad’s death.” Michele just looked at her mom in shock and asked, “Why did he choose Dad?” Janette could only shake her head in despair as she answered, “I don’t know.”
At 10:30 A.M. on April 29, Michele, along with her mom, sister, and grandmother, sat anxiously in the front row of a packed courtroom in Somerville, New Jersey. A handcuffed Charles Cullen sat just five feet in front of them. “He didn’t look like a murderer,” says Michele. “He had a Hawaiian shirt on.” Michele held her mom’s hand as she felt a growing nervousness inside. A few times she looked right at Cullen, to try and force him to see the pain he’d caused her, but he kept his eyes on the floor, as if he were ashamed.
The room was silent as Cullen’s attorney began questioning him about each victim. When Michele heard her dad’s name, she held her breath.
Lawyer: Count 11, with respect to Christopher Hardgrove, on or about August 11, 2003, at Somerset Medical, you had access to that patient?
Cullen: Yes.
Lawyer: And medication?
Cullen: Yes.
Lawyer: And you in fact injected that patient?
Cullen: Yes.
Lawyer: With the intent to cause his death?
Cullen: Yes.
Lawyer: And that medication was?
Cullen: Norepinephrine.
<
br /> Lawyer: And in fact he did expire?
Cullen: Yes …
Then the trial moved on. “The part about my dad was so fast, it barely registered,” Michele says, frustrated that she still doesn’t know why Cullen had picked him.
“I still have so much guilt,” Michele says today, nearly two years after her dad died. “I didn’t have the courage to fix things when he was alive; now I’m going to have to live with that blame. But I also blame Cullen. He had no right to control my dad’s fate—or mine.”
Killed for
Getting
Pregnant
Chelsea, 14, thought it was cool to
date an older guy. But she never dreamed the
relationship would result in her death.
At about 8 P.M. on Friday, June 9, 2006, Chelsea Brooks, 14, of Wichita, Kansas, was planning to secretly meet her ex-boyfriend, Elgin “Ray-Ray” Robinson Jr., who she called Ray. Chelsea, then nine months pregnant, was forbidden by her parents to see Ray, 20, because he was so much older—and because he was the one who had gotten her pregnant. So her friend Everett Gentry, 17, took her to see him. Everett dropped her off at his sister’s house and told her he was going to get Ray and bring him there. But when Everett returned an hour later, he wasn’t with Ray—he was with Ted Burnett, 49, a man Chelsea didn’t know. Angry that Ray had stood her up, Chelsea demanded that Everett drive her back to the skating rink where her friends were waiting. He agreed, but said that first they had to drop Ted off somewhere. Chelsea climbed into the front passenger seat of Everett’s car while Ted sat in the backseat right behind her.
Then, according to Everett’s court testimony, as he drove east toward the edge of town, Ted took out an electronics cord and brutally yanked it around Chelsea’s neck. While she struggled and kicked, Ted pulled the cord tighter. She tried to breathe, but within minutes she was dead.
DANGEROUS RELATIONSHIP
Chelsea was 10 years old when she first met Ray, then 16, through one of her best friends. In seventh grade, the girls played basketball at the YMCA, where Ray’s father coached a youth basketball team (Ray was his assistant). Chelsea developed a crush on Ray, and when she was 12, she started calling him her boyfriend and put up a picture of him in her locker at Allison Middle School. Ray, who had dropped out of high school, worked as a dishwasher and was a part-time DJ at school parties and at weddings. Chelsea thought it was cool to date an older guy who had a job and bought gifts for her.
Seventeen Real Girls, Real-Life Stories Page 8