One year later, a mother mourns

The Boston Herald

March 22, 1992

BEVERLY BECKHAM

There is no warning. The earth doesn't tremble. The sky doesn't darken. A siren doesn't sound so that you can run for cover, so that you can steel yourself for pain.

It's a direct hit every time and the pain is like nothing you've ever felt before. It burns, rips, chokes, suffocates and inundates every limb,every muscle, every cell, every thought, every breath.

It strikes the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, children, family and friends of 23,000 Americans every year.

The pain doesn't pause. It doesn't sleep. It doesn't abate.

And it never goes away.

Isabella Dartley takes Inderal for the pain in her head and Xanax for the pain in her chest. But the pain cannot be tamed. It wells and spills from eyes that are tunnels into a place you don't want to go, into a place that is dark and cold and empty.

Isabella Dartley's 20-year-old daughter Michelle (pronounced MEshell, like the song) was killed a year ago today. She and her best friend An Trinh, 21, who was also killed, were both students at Boston University. Picture them: young, pretty, enthusiastic, ambitious. Picture your own children. Hear their voices. Feel their warmth. Taste their joy.

The pair had been studying for finals and were taking a break and were crossing Commonwealth Avenue to get something to eat at a campus convenience store, when they were erased from the world. A man ran them down and drove away.

Seven hours later the phone rang at the Dartley house in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

"I have tragic news for you," a chaplain told Isabella Dartley. "Your daughter Michelle was killed."

Sitting in a chair in a room at the Tremont Hotel, the same room where she and her husband and 17-year-old son, David, stayed during Smith's trial, she struggles to talk about her daughter and the trial and the pain that won't go away.

She cannot say the word dead. She cannot say grave. She cannot say bodies. She apologies for her pauses and her tears. "I used to be articulate," she says. "I used to be composed. All through the trial, I never cried. Now I can't seem to stop."

She expected justice. She expected truth. She expected the man who killed her daughter and her daughter's friend to grieve, to be devastated, to stand up and admit he had committed a crime.

Charles Smith, former Celtics guard, did not. He pleaded innocent to two counts of motor vehicle homicide, two counts of leaving the scene of a personal injury accident, two counts of manslaughter and driving under the influence.

He claimed he wasn't speeding. He claimed he didn't run a red light. He said he thought he had hit a pothole, though his window was smashed and splattered with blood, though his van spun completely around, though he accelerated and fled from the scene, then made a U-turn and perused the scene, then drove away again.

He claimed the .06 he registered on a Breathalyzer two hours AFTER he hit the young women and left them in the road to die, was PROOF that he was not under the influence of alcohol. And the jury must have believed all this because 10 days ago, they acquitted Smith of manslaughter and vehicular homicide while driving under the influence of alcohol and convicted him only of two misdemeanors, vehicular homicide due to negligence and leaving an accident scene.

"That morning when the jury came back and I came out of the ladies room, the Smith family was laughing. They laughed all during the trial, in the hall outside the courtroom. How could they? They heard such terrible things, graphic details.

I don't understand. I thought they would be shattered. Their laughter baffles me."

After the verdict was read, and the jury was dismissed, the victims' families were finally allowed to address the court.

"I saw my husband up there on the witness stand," Dartley says. "I saw his heart breaking trying to give the essence of his daughter, trying to sum up a lifetime in a few words. It was all he could do. It was all he had left. He was reading from his soul, and no one really cared. I knew this.

"Then a friend of Smith's shouted, `Enough is enough!' Enough is enough? I stood up and said, `How can you say that?' What did he mean `Enough is enough'? We had said nothing all during the trial. We had sat there controlling our emotions.

"I felt betrayed.

"I never got to say good-bye to Michelle. I never got to comfort her. They wanted me to identify her on a television screen. They said I shouldn't see her. But I had to hold my little girl one more time.

"I thought I understood about this. I thought I had faith. But faith means nothing when it's your child. The devastation is total. There are no words. You walk out the door in the morning and you put on your mask and you function but you don't feel. You see the beauty of the day but it doesn't touch you. I cannot verbalize the agony. I hear myself speaking but I don't feel the words. I feel nothing but pain."

Charles Smith will spend 2 1/2 years in jail, 15 months for each young woman's life. On the street, people say "Poor Smith. His career is ruined." A newspaper headline immediately following the crash said, "Smith's Career Hopes Dashed." The perpetrator is pitied. The victims are mourned, buried and forgotten.

What more do you want of Smith? people ask. He's going to jail. He didn't mean to kill anyone. It was an accident.

But it wasn't an accident. An accident is an UNEXPECTED event. A cab driver testified that Smith ran a red light. A police accident reconstructionist testified that Smith was going a minimum of 49 mph at the point of impact on a rain-soaked road with a 30 mph limit. A police officer who gave Smith a field sobriety test "was not satisfied with some of his performance," and two hours later, Smith's blood alcohol content was .06 which means that two hours after he killed two women he was still legally and measurably impaired.

This was no accident. Add to this the fact that Smith fled and it was only because a cab driver chased him and called the police that he was caught, and the crime becomes even more despicable.

"Ask people how they would feel if it were their child slaughtered, left alone and afraid and broken and bleeding in the gutter?" Dartley says. "Ask them if they would think 2 1/2 years (in jail) is enough. If he was impaired two hours after he was arrested, then how much more impaired was he at the time of the crash?

"I'm not looking for revenge. I'm not a bitter person.

"I want people who have a glass of wine or a couple of beers, then get into a car and drive, to understand that though they may not be drunk, though they may be only slightly impaired, their reactions are off. I want to raise their consciousness.

"I want them to know that one second can destroy a life and all the other lives that that one life touches.

"My husband is on medication. My son David can't concentrate and can't study. He's heard horrible things in the court. My family is devastated. An's family is devastated. They left the violence of Vietnam for the promise of America.

"One individual has shattered so many many lives."