"I was the one who started it," Hagan declares. "Well,
it was a line in this book that I lent Brendan, Shampoo Planet by Douglas
Coupland."
"We used it so no one else would know what we were talking about.
And then he quickly adopted the word for his own."
Wagner explains that Brendan's usage of "Marge" was for kitschy,
retro-looking eye-catchers. "You know, like a funny diner," Wagner
says. Hagan interrupts with an example: "Like a '50s-type diner with
waitresses wearing matching pink outfits."
Wagner and Hagan look at each other
and smile. Then Hagan gingerly stands up and extracts a box from a closet.
She dips her hand in the box, and photographs of Brendan emerge.
Brendan, the crown prince of baggy pants and clunky shoes, smiles slightly
at the camera. Cherub-faced and rosy-cheeked, he looked like the poster
child for old school raves.
Brendan, Hagan, Wagner and Stephanie Wilson were on the way to a pre-party
for a rave in Cleveland the night of the accident.
Rain was firing down that morning in Cleveland when Brendan Daugherty
died. It was that time of morning that still seems like part of the night
before it was about 2 a.m. when Brendan, a Kent State freshman at
the time, was killed by a drunk driver. The accident took place on April
20, 1996.
The passengers in Brendan's grey
Ford Tempo Hagan, Wagner and Wilson survived with severe injuries,
and the damage from the collision was massive.
"He was hit so hard that the roof buckled upward," says Emil
Cielic, a case investigator of the accident Investigation Unit with the
Cleveland Police Department. "On the driver's side, both doors were
pushed inward 18 inches."
Cielic says the other driver's car was going at least 55 miles per hour
when it slammed into the driver's side of Brendan's car on the junction
of East 40th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland.
Cielic adds that the driver who hit Brendan's car, Eric Wilkes of Cleveland,
had a blood alcohol level of 0.14 (0.10 is legally drunk in the state of
Ohio). Wilkes, 25, was sentenced to five to 10 years at his hearing on
Oct. 30.
It seems like a closed case. The
drunk driver is doing time after pleading guilty to the crime. It has been
almost half a year since the official book has been closed on the loss
of Brendan, yet the survivors of the accident, Brendan's family and his
friends are still grappling with their lives without him.
His head fell into my lap, but he was already dead," says Holly
Hagan, Brendan's girlfriend, and occupant of the passenger seat the night
of the accident.
Thin and pale with large, intense eyes, Hagan, 20, has a slow, other-worldliness
in her gait. Her eyes look like they are on the verge of tearing, but she
does not wipe them or blink as she stares ahead, saying this past year
has been her worst, as reality seems to have a hard time settling in.
Certain dates in Hagan's personal
calendar seem like a perverse twist of fate. April 20, 1996, was the day
her boyfriend died, and also the day of her 19th birthday. Today, on what
would have been Brendan's 20th birthday, she is reliving his death.
"Today, when I woke up, I remembered what day it was, and I was
like, shit, I wish I could stay in bed all day," Hagan says on Feb.
4, Brendan's birthday.
Her pain is palpable as she emotes quiet sadness through her downcast
eyes and resolute voice. Hagan says she suffers more from a broken heart
than injuries now.
"I only have a few scars now from what they did to me in the hospital,"
Hagan says almost flippantly. Yet she had multiple fractures in her leg
and shoulder, a couple of broken ribs and a crushed spleen.
"They were deciding whether to take it out, but they decided to
save it," Hagan says of her spleen. "I guess it's OK now since
I haven't had any problems with it."
Hagan was out of the Mt. Sinai
Hospital in Cleveland in eight days. "I could barely walk," she
says of her condition then.
The news of Brendan's death was kept from Hagan while she was still
in the hospital. "I only found out about it four to six days after
they had the funeral," Hagan says.
"I remember them (her parents) saying, 'Beth and Stephanie are
OK, but Brendan didn't make it.' "
"I thought it was a dream," Elizabeth Wagner, also called
Beth, adds. Wagner, 20, survived the accident with more battle wounds than
Hagan because she was sitting behind the driver's seat on the side
of the impact.
With injuries ranging from a torn
aorta to multiple fractures nearly everywhere, Wagner says she was so completely
broken up she could not physically support herself for a very long time.
"I was completely out of it," Wagner says. "I had three-fourths
of my body completely cut open and sewn back together."
The harrowing surgeries do not look like
they have taken much toll on Wagner. She looks robust with her olive complexion
and ready smile, as she talks about being wheelchair-bound for six weeks.
She graduated to a walker, to crutches and now attends the dance classes
required of her as a theater and dance major at Kent State. She is thinking
about dropping the dance component of her major, as the stress on her repaired
bones and muscles hurts a little too much.
Although almost a year has passed for Hagan and Wagner, they both say
their memories of the night of the accident are in shards, badly fragmented
because of the drugs and medications they received for their pain while
in the hospital.
One of the hardest parts, according to Hagan, was the lack of closure
to Brendan's death because she and Wagner were in the hospital during the
funeral.
"When I got out of the hospital, it just felt like he had been
gone," Hagan says while staring at the ceiling. "There was no
funeral, there was no sitting around crying with your friends."
After being released from the hospital
and a restful summer, Hagan and Wagner were back to school for fall semester
1996. They resumed being roommates, but the close quarters of Beall Hall
were not conducive for their post-accident situations.
Their relationship was tested since both had personal traumas to work
through while sharing a confined space. Hagan says Wagner moved out by
November 1996 because they were fighting.
Wagner still lives in Beall Hall, and Hagan now lives in Verder Hall,
where Brendan used to live. They agree they are much better friends, and
Wagner says, "Maybe we'll be roommates again next year."
Hagan and Wagner add that they were both concentrating more on personal
recuperation than catering to each other at the time.
"For me, it was that my independence was totally gone," says
Wagner, who asserts that she used to do everything herself before the post-accident
physical problems.
While having to rely on others
was difficult for Wagner, Hagan's problem was just the opposite. "I
was very, very dependent before the accident happened," Hagan says.
"I really loved Brendan and cared for him, and the only time I was
happy was when he was around."
Hagan softly adds, "For a while, I wish I had been the one who
died instead of Brendan."
Depending on Brendan to be the sociable one and only feeling happy around
him were crutches for Hagan, but crutches she has learned to shrug off.
"I've just gotta get out there to do things and meet people,"
Hagan declares, strong yet shaky. "Brendan was such a good role model
for that. Now I've got to learn to do it myself."
"At the time of the accident, I didn't know them very well,"
says Stephanie Wilson of Hagan and Wagner. "Since then, we've become
pretty good friends."
Wilson, 20, recalls she had met
Hagan a few times through Brendan, and only met Wagner the night of the
accident. Rolling her Camel Light between her thumb and forefinger, Wilson
narrows her eyes as she says, "Brendan was one of my closer friends.
He used to stop by everyday and have a cigarette, talk about what was going
on."
Friends since their first semester at Kent State, Wilson says she and
Brendan went to a lot of raves together, as they were the night of the
accident.
"We had planned this for months ahead of time," Wilson says,
grinning. "We had to get everything and everyone together. We had
planned to be there around 12:30, but we didn't leave till around 1:30.
"We were really excited about it. We planned to go Friday night,
Saturday night and Sunday night."
Like Wagner and Hagan, Wilson's
memories of the night are clouded. Her memory kicks in when she recites
a list of her injuries: a compound fracture in her left leg, a pelvis broken
in 10 places resulting in torn internal organs, a collapsed lung,
a cracked clavicle, a broken thumb and a broken left arm that she rolls
up the sleeve of her military surplus shirt to exhibit.
"See the stitches?" she asks, grinning. "That's from
when they took the rod out." She unrolls her sleeve and lights another
cigarette, continuing her damage list nonchalantly.
"I was in a wheelchair for a couple months and didn't start walking
until July," she says.
Wilson adds that the past year
was more emotionally than physically trying for her because she was assailed
by flashbacks and pressure from the pre-trial hearing and sentencing of
Eric Wilkes. She laughs when reminded that she was quoted as saying that
the sentencing was "a bunch of shit" in the Daily Kent Stater
last year.
Wilson says about Eric Wilkes at the sentencing: "He had the Bible
in his hands, but I think he's just sorry because he's going to jail."
Wilkes is in the reception process at the Lorain Correctional Institute;
he is waiting to be sent to a permanent facility. According to prison warden
Mark Houk, Wilkes is not allowed to talk to the press at this stage.
Wilson inhales deeply and gazes ahead. She nods when asked if she misses
Brendan. His death did not seem real to her because she also was told about
it after the funeral.
"For a long time I was in total denial that he was dead,"
she says. "I was just expecting him to pop in. But when Ben Barnes
went into details in a paper he wrote about the funeral, it just struck
me. He was gone."
Ben Barnes stole a coffee cup and
ashtray from Brendan's funeral," Hagan says of their friend. "He
told me about it, saying, 'Yeah, Brendan would have wanted us to have this.'
"
Hagan smiles as she says Brendan probably would have told Barnes to
go for it. Wagner interrupts, saying that Brendan would have probably been
the leading coffee cup thief at his own funeral.
"The funeral was a bad experience," says Barnes. "Joe
and I together went through five packs of cigarettes in a day's worth of
time, which was really abnormal."
Barnes, a 20-year-old English major
at Kent State, says he and Brendan got to know each other during spring
semester 1996 when Barnes' comic strip, Despot Theatre, made its debut
in the Daily Kent Stater, where Brendan worked in the composing room.
Barnes later found out that Brendan lived next to his friends in Verder
Hall, and they started to hang out and smoke cigarettes more regularly.
He says they were on the verge of forging a good friendship before the
accident occurred.
"It was at that point when every conversation was pleasant and
new and exciting because everything we were talking about was hitting off
right," says Barnes.
He says he knows Brendan would have "kicked (their) asses"
at the funeral for drinking "shitty, shitty coffee."
"I didn't want Brendan's memory to be left like that so I stole
three or four coffee mugs at the wake," Barnes adds. "Now we
have good coffee in the mugs everyday, you know?"
Coffee crusader, enthusiastic raver
and pretty little man-child Brendan's legacy was more quirky than
resumé-worthy.
Born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1977, Brendan was part of a nuclear family
consisting of his parents, Kent and Sharon Daugherty, and a younger brother,
Adam.
The Daugherty family moved to Sicily in 1988 when Brendan's father was
transferred. Daugherty is employed by the U.S. government to teach school
on American military bases.
Brendan lived in Sicily for eight years before deciding to attend Kent
State and major in graphic design. Wanting to study in the United States,
Brendan made a trip with his father to visit Ohio's universities in his
junior year of high school. "Kent State was the one he liked best,"
Daugherty says.
She was worried when Brendan first
left that he might have trouble assimilating into American culture. Growing
up in Sicily, Brendan had to live inside two cultures because he attended
an American high school there.
"He wasn't your typical American," says Mrs. Daugherty, "not
all apple pie."
"I learned from Brendan's brother that he was homecoming king one
year in high school," says Joe Cline, Brendan's best friend.
Mrs. Daugherty laughs as she recalls Brendan's mortification at being
named homecoming king. "He was so embarrassed because he wasn't that
kind of person," says Mrs. Daugherty. "But the one that killed
him most was winning 'athlete of the year.'
"We teased him about winning a huge, big trophy, and he would try
to shut us up."
"Athlete of the year?" yells Ben Barnes. "With his lungs?
Damn, damn."
Putting the shameful past behind
him, Brendan never breathed a word to his new college friends that he used
to be 'best jock' in a graduating class of 22.
Choosing to practice the education he was getting in graphic design,
Brendan started working in the composing room at the Daily Kent Stater
in fall 1995. There he designed advertisements and worked with the paste-up
process of publishing a newspaper.
"I officially met him in spring '96," says Shawn Hoefler,
who was a foreman at the Composing Room at the time. "That's when
he had that funky bangs-thing going on. He also had a little raver-thing
going, but he still had style."
Brendan's personal style had evolved since the homecoming king era.
Gone was the side-swept hair, and a tousled Caesar-cut became its replacement.
Barnes remembers bringing his sister
to visit on the weekend of April 13 last year, and she had met Brendan
then. A week later, when he told her about the accident, Barnes remembers
her telling him, "Oh Brendan. I liked him. He was the one with the
really good shoes."
"They were those burgundy and black things that looked like wingtips
with lug soles," Hoefler gushes about Brendan's shoes. "I loved
those shoes."
Brendan's appearance was important to him. Wagner remembers that prior
to the accident that night, Brendan, Hagan and she were having dinner at
Rockne's with two other friends.
"Brendan sat in gum and got really pissed off because they were
his favorite pants," Wagner says.
Brendan's appreciation for style
was linked to his strong visual inclination.
"He looked at visual things normal people wouldn't bother about,"
Wilson says. "Like streaks of light, colors, the way the snow falls
in a pattern."
"We had a little bitch-out the week before the accident,"
says Hoefler, who was very close to Brendan. "He said, 'I hate getting
into arguments with you because you're the only one I'm intimidated by.'
"
Hoefler sounds relieved as he says they reconciled a week later, and
he told Brendan to give him a call on Saturday night. That was Hoefler's
farewell to Brendan.
Joe Cline says his last contact
with Brendan was just before Cline was leaving for work on Friday evening.
"I was standing in his room, planning how our room was going to
look next year," Cline says. "We were like, this will go here,
that will go there and the disco ball will go up there."
Unfinished memories, adjusting to his absence and dealing with anger
seemed to fill the year for those who loved Brendan.
The Daugherty family moved from Sicily to Munford, England, in August
1996 when Mr. Daugherty was granted a transfer, says Mrs. Daugherty. Although
they have moved, their memories of Brendan were not left behind.
"Brendan was kind of the spark in our family," says Mrs. Daugherty.
"The three of us were talkative, but Brendan was the one who always
had the punchline at the right time."
Denise See is a senior magazine journalism major. She worked with Brendan
in the Daily Kent Stater composing room.
