thresholds

in memory of Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis

I see the headline, but my brain can’t process it at first. A 20-year-old woman had been killed just four days ago after pulling into the wrong driveway.

What?

This happened in Hebron, New York, a rural area of hills and dirt roads and no cell service, just like so many towns in the Ohio River Valley where I grew up. Around 10 pm Saturday night, four young people got lost while looking for a party at a friend’s place and pulled down what they thought was just another dirt road…until they came to a house. Without the benefit of cell service, it took them a few minutes to figure out that it was not the location of the party, and they started to leave. None of them got out of the car. None of them approached the house. This didn’t stop the 65-year-old homeowner from stepping out onto his porch and opening fire on the car full of confused youngsters with a 12-guage shotgun loaded with slugs meant for killing deer.

Kaylin Gillis, an aspiring marine biologist and “Disney fanatic,” was riding in the passenger seat of the car while her longtime boyfriend, Blake Walsh, drove. Two friends of theirs were in the backseat. "My friend said, 'They're shooting — go!'“ Blake said in an interview with NBC. “I tried to step on the gas as fast as I could, and that's when the fatal shot came through¹.” Kaylin was struck in the neck as Blake tried to turn the car around. I close my eyes and try to picture what it would have felt like to be in that car. It’s too dark to see anything, but there’s blood, and broken glass, and nobody’s quite sure who is screaming, and the smell of fear is like smoke in the air…I imagine Blake saying her name over and over again—they had been together for four years and “referred to themselves as the ‘2%’…a statistic they'd heard in which only 2% of high-school sweethearts get married².”—but they still had no cell service. Blake had to drive five miles to the nearest town before the stricken friends were able to call for paramedics, but it was already too late. Kaylin was pronounced dead at the scene. "My world was taken from me Saturday," Blake said in an interview. "I didn't want to be with anybody else, and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her."

My body is equal parts horror and sadness. I find a picture of Kaylin sporting a nose ring, which hints that there is more lurking behind her “good girl” face than her plans to attend university in Florida. I wonder, not for the first time, if my husband and I count towards that statistic (probably not since we were just friends with a serious crush on my part during our homeschool years, but still). I have driven roads like those, at night. I have little sense of direction and get lost so frequently that it’s a standing joke in my family. I can’t get anywhere without GPS and I panic when I lose service. I have pulled into random driveways more times than I could count, during the day and after dark, in order to turn around. It never once occurred to me that this was a potentially lethal risk to take, and I feel like I have lost something I’ll never get back, some innocent trust in the goodness of my fellow humans killed as thoroughly as the girl whose picture I can’t stop studying. I hate that I didn’t know she even existed until she was killed so horribly. I hate that millions of people only know her for how she was killed, not who she was. Her family described her as, "a kind, beautiful soul and a ray of light to anyone who was lucky enough to know her,” and said, "Our family will never be the same but we will be guided by Kaylin's positivity, optimism, and joy as we learn to live with her loss³." I want to tell them that I won’t forget.

Then I scroll further down the list of related articles, and there is the next shock.