Otto Penzler - The Best American Crime Writing 2003

To lifetime chroniclers of modern professional sport, there was nothing unusual about the story of Jayson Williams and the night he pointed his shotgun at and took the life of Costas “Gus” Christofi. Like so many before him, vaulted to a place in society for which he was entirely unprepared, Jayson Williams was unable to make a seamless transition when injuries cut a spectacular career short, and his other passions took over. For firearms. For drinking. For boasting. What was unusual was the nature of the victim. Gus Christofi, former addict, former thief, former all-time loser, had done something astounding: He had entirely turned his life around. Sober for years, he was a model counselor at his rehab clinic. The favorite driver of just about every client of the limo company that employed him. Huge sports fan. And gentle? He always walked away from a fight, even as a kid on the mean streets of Paterson. And he had a deathly, lifelong fear of guns .

The night of his death, he’d volunteered for the job. Because he loved sports and admired athletes. Because he’d get to meet Jayson Williams. And he did. Very briefly-but long enough to see how wrong he’d been about thinking that stardom could make a man something special. As Gus bled out his life through his chest on Jayson’s bedroom floor, did he understand the larger message? That as we celebrate our athletes unto godhood, we are also stunting them? No. Gus undoubtedly forgave Jayson with all of his heart, or what was left of it. He left it to the rest of us to take a larger lesson from his death: that until we start paying as much attention to our superstars psychological frailties as we do to their physical triumphs, there will be more victims. For Jayson Williams was a train wreck coming from a long, long way off. Anyone could have seen it coming. If they’d wanted to .

In February of this year, Williams and the family of Christofi settled a civil lawsuit filed by the family in October of 2002. Terms were not disclosed .

The criminal trial was scheduled to start in February, one year after the shooting. But it was postponed when Williams’ attornies appealed the original indictment, arguing that the original indictment was flawed: The prosecutors presentation to the grand jury, they said, had been misleading .

But before a state appellate court could hear arguments on that appeal, the prosecutors trumped the defendants counsel, obtaining a second indictment from a different grand jury-a stronger one, which carries a maximum term of 55 years, instead of the original 45, because of an added weapons charge .

A new trial date has not been set .

She was a pretty girl, thin, with a spray of pale freckles across her face and light brown hair that curled just above her shoulders. The librarian at the high school called her “a quiet-type person,” the kind of student who yes-ma’amed and no-ma’amed her teachers. She played on the tennis team, practicing with an old wooden racket on a crack-lined court behind the school. In the afternoons she waitressed at the Whistle Stop, the local drive-in hamburger restaurant, jumping up on the running boards of the pickup trucks so she could hear better when the drivers placed their orders.

Her name was Treva Throneberry, and just about everybody in that two-stoplight North Texas oil town knew her by sight. She was never unhappy, people said. She never complained. She always greeted her customers with a shy smile, even when she had to walk out to their cars on winter days when the northers came whipping off the plains, swirling ribbons of dust down the street. During her breaks, she’d sit at a back table and read from her red Bible that zipped open and shut.

There were times, the townspeople would later say, when they did wonder about the girl. No one had actually seen her do anything that could be defined, really, as crazy. But people noticed that she would occasionally get a vacant look in her blue eyes. One day at school she drew a picture of a young girl standing under a leafless tree, her face blue, the sun black. One Sunday at the Pentecostal church she stumbled to the front altar, fell to her knees, and began telling Jesus that she didn’t deserve to live. And then there was that day when Treva’s young niece J’Lisha, who was staying at the Throneberry home, told people that Treva had shaken her awake the previous night and whispered that a man was outside their room with a gun-which turned out to be not true at all.

But surely, everyone in town said, all teenage girls go through phases. They get overly emotional every now and then. Treva was going to turn out just fine. She didn’t even drink or smoke cigarettes like some of the other girls in town.

Then, that December, just as the Electra High School Tigers were headed toward their first state football championship and the town was feeling a rare surge of pride, Treva, who was sixteen years old, stopped working at the Whistle Stop. She stopped coming to school. “She disappeared,” a former classmate said. “And nobody knew where she went.”

The new girl arrived at Evergreen High School wearing loose bib overalls, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes, and her hair was braided in pigtails. She was fuller-figured than most teenage girls, wide-hipped, but she had an appealing, slightly lopsided smile and a childlike voice tinged with a southern drawl. She was carrying a graphite tennis racket and a Bible.

Her name, she told school officials, was Brianna Stewart. She was 16 years old, she said, and for almost a year she had been living in Portland, Oregon, just across the Columbia River from Vancouver, walking the streets during the day and sleeping in grim youth shelters at night. She started attending services at Vancouver’s charismatic Glad Tidings Church, where she met a young couple who took her into their home after hearing her testimony. The couple, who had accompanied Brianna to school that morning, said that she was full of potential, determined to succeed-and that all she needed was a chance to get over her past.

“What is your past?” asked one of the school’s counselors, Greg Merrill.

For a moment Brianna said nothing, as if she was trying to maintain her composure. Then she told Merrill that she had been raised just outside Mobile, Alabama, by her mother and her Navajo step-father, a sheriffs deputy. Brianna said that when she was a child, her mother had been murdered, and after that she lived with her stepfather. At about the age of 13, she ran away, hitchhiking from state to state. Because Brianna remembered her mother telling her that her real father lived somewhere in the Northwest, she had come to the area hoping that she could find clues to her past.

It was the most unusual case Merrill had ever heard in his thirty years of counseling students. When he asked about her education, she told him she had only been homeschooled, but she promised she would be a good student. “I’ve never had a normal life,” she said. “That’s all I want-to be a normal teenager like everyone else.”

She was enrolled in the tenth grade at the 1,900-student school. One of her first classes was Algebra I. She walked in and was given a seat toward the back, where she pulled out a notebook and began listening intently to the teacher. Then she glanced over at the boy sitting next to her.

“Hi,” said Ken Dunn, who couldn’t stop smiling at her.

She giggled shyly. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Brianna. I’m new here.”

It didn’t take long for the rumor to spread through town that Treva Throneberry had last been seen down at the police station, where she had given a statement claiming that her daddy, holding a gun in his hand, had raped her. She added that her mother had only laughed when she found out what had happened. A stunned police officer called child welfare, which quickly sent a social worker to Electra to whisk Treva away, and a judge entered emergency protection orders temporarily preventing Treva’s parents from seeing their daughter or even finding out where she was. Soon, Electra was buzzing: Was it possible that Carl Throneberry had raped his own daughter?