Warning: I almost didn't release this piece. Please handle with care. 
On October 3, 1995, I was a recent high school graduate assembling sub sandwiches on the long, white deli board of a bustling pizza joint. There was a small TV hung high in the corner of the checkout area that played the news every day through our busy lunch rush. 30 years ago this morning, I stood there in a hushed crowd watching OJ Simpson face his jury.
Boy, time is a funny thing.
Perhaps the most infamous verdict of our lifetime, its details are still retrievable— brown suit, Johnny Cochran, that relieved smile. But ask me to go back one year prior to my own trial, and memory fails. Before OJ, I was a 17-year-old girl who had been ordered to stand and face a jury on charges of negligent homicide.
Three decades later, I am still processing.
You would think that I have already wrestled and wordsmithed this story by now. You could assume that I, writer of criminal justice and matters of consequence, have already told about my own courtroom drama in great detail, but I have not. Only those closest to me have ever heard about the events of May 25, 1993— and though it was never my intention to hide it, maybe I have been avoiding it somehow.
A few weeks ago I was at my desk writing about some justice-related thing when in a shock of realization, I sat bolt-upright and took a sharp inhale. I have been a defendant, I thought. It was like emerging from amnesia. A sudden cascade of recall spilled out and all around and I plunged headfirst into a dizzying series of connections. The moments that followed took my breath away.
With God as my witness, I have never thought to share any of this with you until now and after considering it over the past few weeks, I understand why my subconscious kept it boxed on a shelf deep in a closet somewhere. This is the hardest thing that I have ever written.
I had only had a driver's license for four weeks when one of my best friends tumbled from the trunk of a car and hit his head on the pavement, causing his death. I was the stupid girl in the driver’s seat of the car from which he’d fallen. I stood there helpless on the side of the road, unsure what to do, and watched him struggle to take his final breaths. Breathe, I begged him. Please, get up. Please.
When the paramedics arrived and I knew that it could not be undone, I ran to a neighboring house to call his mom from a wall phone. He's gonna be okay, I told her, and I had the audacity to believe that.
The next morning, he was taken off of life support and some time in the following weeks I was formally charged with his death.
On that warm spring day, five of us had been playing basketball at a neighborhood court where my friend’s car was parked— doors open, music blasting. It was a school night and the day was getting late so we lingered around the trunk prolonging our inevitable goodbye. A few of us were tempting fate by smoking cigarettes, a big deal since we were all serious athletes and as far as our parents knew, ‘good kids.’ That moment would be the last time we had no sense of lasting consequences. It was also the last time I would be considered a good kid.
It comes to me now in flashes. I was sitting on the trunk, laughing. The car lurched forward. It stopped. More laughter. The car rolled forward again. ‘Stop! It’s not funny!’ I shouted. Then I am clinging to the small lip between the trunk and the back window, fingertips white, the car speeding past the lawns of suburban houses. ‘Seriously, stop!’ I pleaded.
In the next scene, we are standing in the roadway arguing— him saying it was ‘his turn’ and I had a license and why was I being such a prude? ‘Fine. Fine, I’ll do it.’ I walked to the driver’s side and another friend slid into the passenger seat while the two other boys climbed aboard the trunk. It was a heavy 1984 Oldsmobile with blue velvety seats— my God, he loved that car. I checked the rearview and pulled the gearshift downward into drive.
We were only meters from the stop sign, the one that would have made us follow the rules and go home safely but before I could get there the passenger-friend reached over and jerked the steering wheel hard to the right— some attempt at adding an extra thrill. The newspaper headline read: “Teen’s Fatal Fall Stuns School.” My principal was quoted, grief counselors were brought in, and I stopped going to school for the rest of my sophomore year. There was a massive funeral in a huge church, and the football team came in their jerseys. Our #12 was in the casket.
I have only retained two reliable memories from my trial— one, when the prosecutor placed a framed 8x10 picture of my deceased friend on their table facing the jury. As if to say the victim is here, and the victim is against this girl so you should be too. I have no other recollections of the days between then and the moment someone said ‘the jury is back.’ I rose slowly from a bench somewhere deep inside that echoey marble courthouse, and walked into a blur. Try as I might (and I have really, really tried), I cannot hear the words ‘not guilty.’ I wish I could. I wish that I could rewind and replay that tape again and again, until I believed that it was true.
After the trial, I locked myself away. I quit sports. I let my grades go, and I showed up to graduation drunk after giving up on college dreams. I had gone from a 4.0 student and a promising varsity athlete to a reckless class partier who skipped school and got into fist fights. Several times a week, I would sit at my friend’s headstone, chain-smoking, wondering how long it would be before they would bury me too. I decided then and there that I would rather be cremated when I die because the thought of my bestfriend beneath all of that dirt made me feel panicky and trapped.
His family had been inexplicably gracious to me, a fact that likely saved my life. I visited his mom often in those days, bonding in grief and making promises to keep his memory alive. I even told her that someday I would give my firstborn her son’s name. How foolish that must have sounded coming from a teenage girl— and how potentially insensitive. All of my hope still ahead, hers in the ground.
But time did what time does.
A few years later when my oldest son was born, I honored that promise. It was precious then, and it still is, but holding my newborn with his meaningful name didn’t assuage my guilt. By then, I had lost touch with my friend’s family.
In recent years, I have quietly wondered if I instead cursed my son with that name— him now serving prison time as some karmic retribution for my acquittal. Maybe somewhere the devil is satisfied that I am suffering this fate by proxy, and that there is nothing I can do but write of my longing and grief and the desire to have my boy home.
There is a voice that often tells me that maybe I should just shut up about prison and be grateful because at least I am still free and got to do all of the things that my friend never got to do in life like go to college and get married and have kids. At least your son is still alive, it whispers.
This past May, a local kid was driving when his car left the road, hit a tree stump, and killed his passenger friend. I knew both of those boys because I was a therapist in their school. When the news broke, I was not among the adults in the discussions— I was back in 1993, reeling in the sudden shock and emptiness of a moment gone wrong.
When another young driver plowed into a picket-line of local UAW strikers— killing a young man and severely injuring another, I joined the chorus of prayers for the victims and their families but quietly, I thought about the hospital scene that I had walked into the night of our accident— my friend hooked to ventilators, being kept alive by tubes, the vacant looks on his parents’ faces.
When a judge sentenced that driver this past July, I was there again in my head knowing that no matter what anyone said or did, he could not take it back. Neither could I. I will never not be the girl who had caused so much pain. Scrolling Facebook news of that driver’s sentence, the voices screamed in my face— “Not enough time!” “P.O.S!” “Travesty!” “What an absolute disgrace!!” “Just wait till you meet our God, our God is Justice!”
I had to stop myself from reading because she was there, in the corner of the room. You dumb girl. You fool. You piece of shit.
My therapist recently asked me if I had anything to say to that girl, and after a long silence, I realized that I don’t. My voice caught when I said, ‘I have already been so mean to her.’ For all of my healing and recovery, I am still unable to tell her that it is okay, that it was a mistake, and that she can let go now. No one has judged her more harshly nor punished her more than I— and maybe that is justified. I never thought she fully deserved the joy of each of her newborns. She should stop to remember more often that she lost the right to be happy with abandon or plunge carelessly into pleasure when she stood there like an idiot over her dying friend.
I have spent three decades thinking twice when checking a box to confirm that I have never been found guilty of a felony. In a parallel universe somewhere, I served that prison time and I am an ex-con. My children are not my children, and my life is not mine. In another life, I died long ago under the weight of it all.
The truth is that no matter what verdict is read out in a courtroom, justice is a mirage of resolve that we chase and chase until we die, parched in the desert, no closer to having our thirst quenched than when we set out on the journey. Thirty years and I am still running, still trying to reconcile that girl to rightness and find forgiveness and live in peace with what I did— I have said I’m sorry one thousand times to the open sky but no final response has ever come. I am not entitled to be free from the consequences of a wrong choice.
It is a prison I’ll never leave.
As if to underscore all of this, I recently attended a funeral where I mingled with people whom I haven’t seen since the early 90s. An old friend and I were discussing ‘back then’ stuff when he casually brought up ‘The Accident.’ He said he had just been telling his teenage children about it— an example of a foolish young driver and what bad can result of poor decisions. I left that gathering with an old, weary sadness. How awful that the worst moment in my life is a cautionary tale for the kids, that my biggest mistake is still synonymous with my name.
If asked, I would tell you that I write about prisoners and prison reform because my son is there, and because he could have used another measure of judgment in light of his addictions and mental health struggles.
But this week I realized this is only partly true.
I write because not guilty doesn’t mean we are innocent. I think OJ knew that, and I sure do. There are a lot of people not in prison who should be, and many in prison who deserve the second chance they'll never get.
I write because criminal justice is not simple and formulaic like we want to believe. At the center of American law and order are people— complicated and flawed and prone to mistakes. Millions of people, just like me and just like my son who can be more than the worse decision they ever made, if given the chance.
I write because every single one of us is only one moment away from a defendant’s chair, and I know that better than most. I write because I will forever be trying to balance the scales— a lifelong errand to make the good in me somehow outweigh the bad.
Thank you for sharing. I'm so sorry that happened to you, to your friend. It WAS a mistake & you do deserve joy, & I can see how there's no way to put it down, to let it go. I know two young men who were at the wheel when others died; both cases were terrible, horrible, unintended accidents. Do you have any thoughts on how we -- the community at large -- can better support those who unintentionally cause harm to others?
You write so powerfully Bridget, of such a very tragic situation for all involved. And I appreciate Jennifer’s question, and your answer, below. I’ve learnt a lot from this courageous piece of writing; one of the things being that to show up in all our vulnerability allows space for love to breathe amongst us all. Thank you for that.