A Phone Call That Changed Everything

It's often said that we see a white light before we die. I wonder if that is what Matt saw that last night of his consciousness, or if the last thing he saw was Aaron McKinney's hateful face.

A phone call woke me with a jolt at about 5 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 8, 1998. My husband, Dennis, and I were living in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a construction safety manager. I assumed that the call was from my 21-year-old son Matt, who was living in Laramie and studying political science and international relations at the University of Wyoming. At that time of day, it was almost always him. Unlike our other family members and friends in the States, who usually calculated the nine-hour time difference between Wyoming and Saudi Arabia before dialing, Matt always seemed to be living in the moment and wanted to share things with someone right now, regardless of what time it was anywhere else. Or maybe he thought it was just too much math to work out the difference.

Sometimes he'd telephone to talk about a new friend he'd just met at a coffee shop—Matt loved to bend a stranger's ear over a cup of coffee. Other times he'd want to get my opinion on something in the news or alert me to a breaking story. "Did you hear what just happened to Princess Diana? She's dead!" he'd blurted when I picked up the telephone a little more than a year before.

Not that I didn't understand, and appreciate, the impulse. Matt and I were incredibly close—so much so that at times it seemed like we were feeding off each other's energy. I always felt that the normal bond between mother and child was for some reason stronger between us—perhaps because we depended so much on each other for company when Matt was a colicky baby, when I was a fledgling parent and Dennis always seemed to be on the road for work.

Now that Matt was an adult and he and I were living continents and oceans away from each other, our conversations were shorter than I would have wished (at $5 a minute, they had to be) and more spread apart than they used to be. But when he did make those early-morning or late-night calls, the joy I felt from hearing his voice more than made up for any resulting loss of sleep.

But the phone call that Thursday morning wasn't from Matt. It was about him. When the man on the other end of the line announced who he was, an emergency-room doctor from Ivinson Memorial Hospital in Laramie, I went numb. I don't remember what he said, or what I did next. I'm not sure whether it was the ringing phone or my subsequent gasp that startled the still-sleeping Dennis. Whatever it was that woke him, Dennis took the phone from me and then, after a seemingly endless silence, made a noise—a sort of helpless and mournful groan—that I'd never heard before and haven't heard since. Coming as it did from my husband, a man whose reserved manner is as typically masculine and Western as his Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots, the moan confirmed my worst fears.

Matt had been attacked. He had sustained injuries to his head that were so critical, his chances for survival were nearly impossible.