Because You Loved Me (34 page)

It was a typical afternoon in northeastern Ohio. The type of day when blackbirds, grazing together by the thousands in fields off to the side of the road, are spooked by the slightest sound—a beep of a horn, a shout, a kid speeding by on his skateboard, an impatient motorcyclist whining his engine at a stoplight—and, in an instant, flutter away like a school of minnows, darting from one grassy knoll to the next.

On this day, June 16, 2001, a busy spring Saturday, Carolyn Ann Hyson was sitting inside the employee kiosk of the Akron, Ohio, BJ’s Wholesale Club fuel station, going through the motions of her day. At a few minutes past noon, that otherwise ordinary day took a remarkable turn. Carolyn looked up from what she was doing and saw a motorcycle—“black with lime green trim”—speed past the front of her booth and stop sharply with a little chirp of its tire by the pump closest to her workstation.

At first, none of this seemed to be unusual. Carolyn had seen scores of customers throughout the morning. Some punk on a motorcycle acting unruly was a daily event.

The door to Carolyn’s booth was slightly ajar. It was pleasantly cool outside, about 71 degrees. Clouds had moved in and made the day a bit overcast; yet, at the same time, a cheery manner hung in the air. On balance, what did the weather matter? It was the weekend. Summer was upon Akron. Unlike Carolyn, who worked full-time during the week as a teacher’s aide, most had the day off. As she could see, many had decided to go shopping. BJ’s parking lot behind her was brimming with vehicles, same as the Chapel Hill Mall to her right. For most, it was just another weekend afternoon of errands and domestic chores, shopping with friends, and enjoying time off. “It was nice,” Carolyn remarked later. “It was not too hot, not too cold. I was sitting there…just sitting in the booth with the door open.”

But then, in an instant, everything changed.

While Carolyn went about her work, preparing for her next customer, the motorcycle captured her attention. “Because,” she said, “it was making some loud noise.”

The driver, dressed in black from head to toe, wearing a full-face shield, was rocking the throttle back and forth, making the engine whine loudly. The black-clad driver had pulled up almost parallel to a dark-colored SUV, which was sitting at the same pump on the opposite side of the fuel island, about twenty feet from Carolyn’s booth. The SUV had just pulled in. The guy hadn’t even gotten out of his vehicle yet.

After Carolyn shook her head in disgust at the rude motorcyclist, she heard a loud crack—and it startled her. For Carolyn, who “grew up around guns,” and knew the difference between a backfiring car and the steel hammer of a handgun slapping the seat of a bullet, that loud crack meant only one thing.

Several people stood at the other pumps, oblivious to what was going on. Some were fumbling around, squeegeeing their windows clean, while others pumped fuel, staring blankly at the digits as they clicked away their money. Undoubtedly, all of them were thinking about the gorgeous day it was turning out to be.

As Carolyn stopped working, that earsplitting explosion—a quick pop—shocked her to attention. It was rapid. A snap, like a firecracker, or the sound of a brittle piece of wood cracking in half.

Realizing it could possibly be a gunshot, Carolyn jumped out of her seat and followed the noise.

At the same time Carolyn heard the loud
pop
and saw the person on the motorcycle,
Mark Christianson
(pseudonyms appear in italics on first appearance) was wandering around the “tirebox” area of BJ’s, a few hundred yards in back of the fuel station area. A few minutes before, Mark had seen someone on a motorcycle inside the parking lot. “He was riding his bike back and forth,” Mark said later. Mark had used the pronoun “he” more as an expression than a literal term, because he had no idea, really, which gender the person on the bike was.

Not thinking anything of it, Mark went back to his business, but was soon startled by the same loud noise Carolyn had heard. “I thought it was the kids up the hill to my left setting off M-80s.”

So when Mark heard the loud crack, he took off up the steep embankment, hoping to bag the kids and give them a good tongue-lashing. But when he made it around the corner of the building, near the foot of the hill, he noticed there wasn’t anyone around.

Son of a gun. What was that noise?

When Mark got back to the tirebox, he heard Carolyn, who had assessed the situation at the pumps and had run back into her kiosk, “panicking over the PA system.” Then Mark looked toward the fuel pumps and noticed two BJ’s managers running toward Carolyn and the pumps.

Something had happened. Somebody was hurt.

So, Mark took off toward them.

Coming out of the booth a moment later, Carolyn saw the motorcyclist standing near the driver’s-side door of the SUV. So she stopped by a pillar and stared. Standing, stunned, Carolyn saw “a fully clothed…[person]. Let’s put it that way because I could not tell you what he was. I see a person standing there….”

The person she saw, Carolyn explained, had his or her hands stretched out, pointed at the SUV, much like a cop holding a weapon on someone and saying,
“freeze.”
But at that moment, the motorcyclist turned to look at Carolyn. The rider, underneath his or her face shield, looked directly at Carolyn for a brief moment, perhaps sizing her up. Then hopped back on the bike and sped off toward Home Avenue, just to the west of the fuel pumps, and down a short inlet road. Carolyn later described the look the motorcyclist gave her as a “chill that went through” her. The person had a steely gaze about him or her. One of those rigid, “forget what you just saw” looks. It seemed threatening to Carolyn. She was terrified.

Within a few seconds—or so it seemed—the person on the motorcycle drove past a small grassy area near the fuel station entrance, stopped momentarily to miss hitting a car, floored the gas throttle and, leaving a patch of rubber behind, sped off through a red light, took a sharp left near Success Avenue, jumped over the railroad tracks and disappeared out of sight.

The entire sequence of circumstances took about ninety seconds.

Carolyn had already approached the man in the SUV. A big man, she remembered. Tall. Handsome. White hair. “I went over to him,” she remembered later in court, “and he was sitting there…and his head was rolling back and forth, back and forth. I could see the life going out of him because he was turning completely white.”

Then Mark approached. He saw a “white male with his head down,” slumped over, inside the same black SUV. “I thought he passed out…that there was a fire or something. But when I got in front of the truck, I noticed both windows were busted.”

Carolyn was shaking so bad after seeing the color flush out of the man’s face that she had trouble dialing 911 when she returned to her kiosk.

Located about three miles north of BJ’s Wholesale Club, Akron City Hospital, on East Market Street, employs dozens of doctors and nurses who stop at BJ’s to gas up and grab a few gas-and-snack items—chips, soda pop, gum, candy, whatever—on their way to work. Many even live in the Chapel Hill Mall area and frequent the different shops on weekends. After Mark took another look at the guy in the SUV and realized he was hurt pretty bad, he heard one of his bosses call out over the PA system for any doctors and/or nurses in the immediate area. No sooner did the plea go out did “five women,” Mark recalled, “[run] over, who were nurses and doctors, and proceed to pull the gent1eman out of the truck.”

One of them, who claimed to be a doctor, asked Carolyn if she had any alcohol around. Quick-thinking Carolyn grabbed the eyewash solution, which she knew was loaded with alcohol, and poured it over the doctor’s hands.

Standing there, watching everything going on, with a crowd of people now swelling around, Mark knew immediately—after the nurses and doctors dragged the man out of the SUV onto the ground and began working on him—that the guy was in serious trouble.

“There was blood all over his shirt,” Mark recalled.

Beyond that, there was even more blood draining down the back of his head and a starfish-shaped hole about the size of a dime on the opposite side of his cheek.