Roger

A few years ago I worked with a fellow named Roger.  He was a decent, likable guy.  I never did get it straight whether he had been an accountant in the Navy or if he had been an accountant that worked for the Navy but, like I said, he was a decent, likable guy.

Roger put the "F" in Frugal.  We drove a lot in our line of work and he had a 3 cylinder GEO.  We called it the door stop.  He could buy a whole set of tires for less than what it cost me for one tire for my Jeep.  He never went out for lunch either.  He brought a can of tuna every day and sat in his office and ate that for lunch.  He did that every day for as long as we worked together.  He would fight you for work orders that came in over the fax.  You'd never ask him to handle a job for one of your clients because, in his mind, if he had done work for anybody, they were his client. He wasn't being dishonest.  That's just how his mind worked.   I still look up when I hear the fax machine ringing something like five years after Roger left our office.

Politically Roger was conservative.  A big fan of Ronald Reagan long after Reagan was dead. Roger was a Christian but not one that was always telling you what a Christian he was.  He just was.  All in all, he was kind of geeky but a decent guy.

I met Carolyn, his wife, a few times over those years and she seemed like a good fit.  Didn't get to know her well enough to have much more opinion than that.  The two of them just looked like they belonged together.

Roger and Carolyn had one son.  I don't think I ever met him. I believe his name was John.  Roger was always proud of him.  He did well in school and went on to do well in law school.  We always thought John's schooling might be why Roger was so frugal. 

A couple of years ago, and that would be a couple of years after Roger left our office, He and John were on a sight seeing trip to Canada.  They took a side trip to hike up some mountain in Washington State.  Roger fell into a ravine, went over two waterfalls and was killed.  The search team didn't find his body until the next day.

It was a shock to all of us.  I know that's kind of a "well - duh" thing to say but it just didn't seem like good old, conservative Roger to lean out over a ravine to take a picture.  The only witness was John and that's how he said it happened so we all just sort of made peace with the idea.

Shortly after this past Christmas, Carolyn was found murdered in her bed.  The back door to the house was unlocked but not much else was out of place.  The Sheriff's Investigators were pretty tight-lipped about it.  I guess that's normal with a new homicide. They probably didn't want to give anybody any idea of what they were learning.

John lived up North and had just come down for Christmas.  It didn't take long to find out that John had bought a gun up North just before he drove home for the visit and that it was the same kind used to kill Carolyn.   It didn't take much to track his route home by tracking his cell phone records.  Carolyn's purse and phone were found in another State and John had driven right by where they were found.  The forensic analysis of his computer showed that he had been doing research on ways to shoot someone without getting gunshot residue on yourself.

When our Deputies and the Police up North knocked on his door this past weekend, John killed himself.

John had a law degree but wasn't making any money.  In hindsight, it looks like he probably pushed his dad into the ravine.   I'm not sure what-all I think about all of it just yet.  I can't help but think that the world would be a better place if he had just killed himself instead of his parents. John destroyed his whole family.  Its just gone now.    How they managed to raise a son that would embody that level of evil is something  that I don't think I really ever want to understand.