Oxygen Thief
Years later, when I heard the details of my father’s death, I imagined a different ending: instead of trying to exit the truck when the driver pointed a rifle at his face, my father handed over the money in his pocket, slipped off his wristwatch, and encouraged the murderer to retrieve the wrapped meat on the back seat of his abandoned car. In my ending he said something like, “Take whatever you want. I just want to see my children again.”
He was 31 when he died; my mother was 29, and my older brothers were 4 and 5 years old. I was one and a half, and my younger brother was a three-month-old fetus in my mother’s belly.
What really happened was this:
At approximately 11:45pm on a summer night, my father called my mother to say he was having car trouble and would be late getting home. At the same time a man left a bar in New Jersey where he had been drinking since 8pm. While traveling north on Highway 35 the man saw a Chevy station wagon stopped on the side of the road. He offered help, and he and my father pushed the car to the parking lot of Monmouth Rug and Carpet Cleaning. My father got into the man’s Dodge pick-up truck, and they drove South on Highway 35 toward Belmar.
Somewhere between Deal Road and Sunset Avenue the man pulled off the side of the road, got out of the truck, grabbed his .22 rifle, and walked over to my father’s side of the car. He told him to empty his pockets. My father started to open the door and the man fired the rifle, striking my father in the right side of the head. The man then opened the door and fired the rifle again, striking his torso. He confiscated approximately $80 from my father’s pockets, got back in the truck, and drove south on Route 35.
At some point he stopped and pulled my father’s body out of the truck. As he dragged him out, my father’s wristwatch got caught on the door so he picked it up and put it in his pocket. He placed my father’s body on the ground and covered him with newspapers. My father had mentioned some perishables left in the car, so the man returned and took the food off the back seat. He also took a toy, a tire, a briefcase, and a car jack.
The next day two teenage boys riding a tandem bicycle noticed my father’s feet protruding from the grass on the north side of the street near the Seacoast Ice Company plant in Neptune, NJ. When the police retrieved my father’s body, he had gunshot wounds to his head and stomach.
We know all this from the police report. My brother Mark, born seven months after my father’s murder, had been on a mission to learn all he could about our father’s death. We were in our forties, all married with kids, when he went searching for details. My brothers and I met with detectives who referred to us as victims, shared transcripts and photos of the crime scene, and drove us to the spot where the young boys had found my father’s body. We learned the murderer had killed another person before being caught, had been in jail most of his life, and had died an old man. An oxygen thief, the detective had called him. Stealing lives for no good reason.
Nearly a year after my father’s death, the wife of the murderer gave a statement to police, leading to his arrest. She had become suspicious when she learned her husband had given his brother a tire from a man’s car on Highway 35. She noticed he was wearing a stainless steel watch, which he said was from a guy at the Neptune Diner.
She remembered that on or about August 22, he brought home a package of meat, a briefcase, and a small stuffed toy.
I don’t remember much about that day with the detectives, nor have I had reason to look back at the transcripts and the pictures. But that one tiny detail, the small stuffed toy, still haunts me. The ending I like to imagine is this: after the gunman ran off with his money and his watch and the meat, my doting father retrieved a teddy bear from the back seat of his car and brought it home to his baby girl.
While horrific, this story is stunningly written. Hair-raising and humane, the opposite of a cold case.