Chasing Gideon by Karen Houppert Read Free Book Online

been done to fix a hernia, which struck Huneke as curious. Does one get a hernia from the kind of blunt trauma injuries inflicted in a car crash? she wondered. She wanted to know more, to speak to Stack’s family doctor and the physician who’d done the surgery. Something seemed amiss here. Also, she neededthe standard background for trying a vehicular homicide: Stack’s ophthalmology records, his driving history from previous insurance claims, reports from the paramedics, an expert to examine the photos of the skid marks, and so forth. She realized, sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, transcribing her list onto a laptop, that she definitely needed more than three days to prepare properly for this trial.
    Sean Replogle was waiting for the trial to begin. It was grueling. He was convinced that everyone was pointing to him as he walked the halls of his high school, calling him a murderer. Everyone knew, he insists today. Everyone despised him for what he’d done to Lowell Stack. “In the office at school, they’d be like, ‘Oh, there’s the kid that killed him,’” he says. “On the intercom a month and a half after it happened they announced, ‘Judy Rodeen has returned from her tragic accident and everyone should say “hi” to her in the office.’ And everyone in the class and the school turned and looked at me.”
    Sean started skipping school. “I didn’t want to leave the house,” he says, “over fear that anything I did I could go to jail for. I felt like I was in danger of getting arrested for anything, if I was going to prison for speeding.” He dropped out of school and got his GED in March. In the fall, at his father’s insistence, he took out a student loan and enrolled in Spokane Falls Community College. But he began having panic attacks. “I started breaking down,” he says. There were continuances, delays of all sorts, every thirty days or so for two years, he recalls, and each time he had to assume they would actually be going to trial. He couldn’t shake his terror; the prospect of prison loomed over everything he did and said and thought. He couldn’t focus. Finally, he told his dad, “I can’t do it,” and his dad relented—“If it’s that hard, don’t do it,” he said—and Sean dropped out of college.
    He stayed in the house. “I was really depressed,” he says. “I detached from everyone. I didn’t do anything for two years.” His luck was so bad, he was certain it would continue that way; he’d be found guilty and be sent to prison. “At the time,” he says, “I was just this little eighteen-year-old who had been in maybe two fightsin my life. I tried to mentally prepare for spending three-and-a-half years in prison. I wasn’t mean or anything, but I tried to toughen up.” He started lifting weights and watched a lot of HBO’s Oz . “I tried to picture these tough, crazy people staring at me and wanting to fight all the time,” he says. “I stopped playing video games and worked out all the time.” He told himself: “This is going to be the most crazy environment, and I have to figure out how to survive it for three years.” His family grew worried. He never smiled anymore.
    Sean and his father talked about the accident every night. At first, Chuck Replogle wanted his son to admit he was speeding. He didn’t know the exact numbers the cops were coming up with, but he suspected Sean was lying, Sean says. “At first, Dad said, ‘something bad happened, you have to admit your guilt.’” He, too, was terrified that Sean would go to jail. Maybe if Sean simply admitted he was speeding, if he was sorry, he’d be forgiven and things would go their way. “He didn’t 100 percent believe me because police were saying something different [about the speed],” Sean says.