Faith sustains those Lacey left behind

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I expected him to be angry, furious, out of control. I expected him to be screaming and yelling "Why."

I should have known better. I have never seen him angry. Wounded, puzzled, defeated, yes. But I have never seen hate in his eyes.

Not the first time I met him, shortly after his daughter's death, when I drove to his house and sat on his couch and looked through albums filled with photos of a beautiful, smiling little girl.

Not when I followed him and his wife Donna into their daughter's bedroom, which was exactly as she'd left it on the final day of her life.

Not even at the trial when the man who killed his 10-year-old sat just a few feet away.

Gordon Packer was coming home from a New Hampshire Toys for Tots fundraiser in October, 1989. He had taken his daughter Lacey with him because it was a perfect fall day, because she had begged to go, because she had wanted more than anything in the world to take a long ride on her father's Harley Davidson, because she loved her father.

Just before the Massachusetts border, Packer pulled his motorcycle into the breakdown lane so he could put on his helmet, as required by Massachusetts law. Lacey, who had been wearing hers the entire trip, remained seated on the back of the motorcycle. In the space of a few minutes, in the time it takes to get off a motorcycle, unstrap a helmet and put it on, a drunk driver came flying down the road, into the breakdown lane and smashed into the motorcycle and into Lacey.

She died without ever knowing what happened to her. But her parents learned all the details in a trial that was graphic and grim and painful.

Peter Dushame had a blood alcohol level of 0.33, more than three times the legal limit. He was a man with a history of drunken driving, a man who had been involved in other drunken driving fatalities. Seven months after he killed Lacey, a jury found him guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to 30 years in prison.

This should have been the end of the story, but it isn't.

On Wednesday, New Hampshire's State Superior Court overturned Dushame's conviction. The court ruled that his constitutional rights had been violated because the court allowed the substitution of an alternate juror at his trial. The ruling means that Dushame will get a new trial and unless he decides to plead guilty, the Packers will have to sit through all the grisly testimony and relive their daughter's death once again.

The ruling made me furious and contemptuous of a system that continually bends over backward for drunk drivers. But in Gordon Packer's voice I heard no anger, no bitterness, no demand for revenge.

He isn't "over" Lacey's death. He will never get "over" it. There is in his life and in Donna's and in their son Joshua's, a huge hole, a cavernous space where a child used to be.

But they have not stepped into that hole nor let it devour them. They are not empty. They survive by taking comfort in Lacey's life, by praying for strength, by clinging to their faith and holding on to each other.

"How are you doing?" I asked Gordon a few months before the ruling.

"Better," he said then. "We're healing. God is answering our prayers."

"How are you?" I asked again Wednesday, sure that his faith wouldn't sustain him now, certain that it was like ice that could hold only what it was holding, that it would crack under this added burden.

"We're OK," he said. And he sounded OK, resolved even.

"Donna and I have talked this over and we've decided we're not gonna let this get in our way. We look at this as a little obstacle that's been thrown in our path. Let's kick it out of the way and continue on with our lives. We're not gonna let the world take away our faith."

"The ruling a disappointment. But the world is too full of anger and revenge. We'd be living in bitterness and anger without the faith we have in God. We'll just have to trust this to Him, too."

It's strange, isn't it? A man talks about faith and trust in God and the words stun. We are so used to curses, frustration, despair, constant screams.

Quiet faith is what sustains the Packers, total trust in a judge no court can overrule.