Re: A night to forget -- but he can't/Driving drunk, he took 6 lives in '03

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.

"tiny dancer" <tinydancer357@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Hvh9f.24424$NJ.7178@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Photo at link below:
>
>
> 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
>
>


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