Theodore Decker: Tragedy looms over return to Terre Haute

TERRE HAUTE, Indiana − Expressions of grief and support could be found all around this Indiana city last week, where one of those college rites of passage — the road trip — came to a fiery end that cost three students their lives.

We were dropping my son off for his sophomore year at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, one of four schools here that make Terre Haute a true Midwestern college town.

The largest of them, Indiana State University, was reeling by the time we arrived.

Early on Aug. 21, five ISU students, four of them football players, headed back to campus after attending a house party in Bloomington, Indiana, home to Indiana University.

A few miles outside of Terre Haute, their Toyota Camry slammed into the center of a fork in the road. The car struck a tree and caught fire.

One of the two survivors told Indiana State Police that all five of the car's occupants had been drinking at the party, and that they were going 90 mph in a heavy thunderstorm that left several inches of water on the road and that other motorists said had reduced visibility to near-zero.

The young men in the Camry paid dearly for a cascade of bad choices made worse by the bad weather. Christian Eubanks, 18, of Waukegan, Illinois; Jayden Musili, 19, of Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Caleb VanHooser, 19, of suburban Cincinnati, all perished.

ISU football coach Curt Mallory, whose son plays for the team, said in a news conference that he was awakened that morning by ISU Director of Athletics Sherard Clinkscales.

"My wife and I are parents first," he said. "This is not a joke in any way, but I'd much rather see a burglar than see Sherard Clinkscales at my doorstep at 4 a.m."

We arrived in Terre Haute on Aug. 24, which had been designated "Wear Blue Day" in solidarity with ISU.

The crash dominated the local news. Signs at businesses across the city offered support and condolences.

As the sun set that day, colleges and high schools across the Wabash Valley turned on their stadium lights.

"These were two young men (Eubanks and VanHooser) that we felt were gonna come here with all the right expectations, and that they were going to represent not only their family, but their family here at Indiana State, in a first-class manner," the coach said. "They were going to earn their degree with a 3.0 (GPA) or higher and they were going to help us win the first-ever Missouri Valley championship. Those are the expectations that we have with every young man that comes into Indiana State."

These are the universal fears, right? That a few bad decisions by good kids will end in unimaginable and irreversible personal tragedy.

So many of these fears, on the whole, are irrational.

How else to explain the trepidation that set in as we saw our son's new room at his fraternity house? Previous occupants had constructed what can only be described as a wildly overbuilt "stage." Too low to be a loft, the structure took up almost the entire room, and it is a room is of impressive size, at least by college standards.

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My son and his new roommate detailed their plan to dismantle most of it and convert the remaining third into a true loft by raising it within a few feet of the ceiling. I am far from an expert in such handy matters, and my kid is smarter than I am. Presumably so is his roommate, a biomedical engineering major.

Even so, this contraption was massive. It had to weigh many hundred pounds, and I couldn't see any way to raise it that didn't involve multiple people and multiple heavy-duty floor jacks.

It'll be fine, I was assured.

Surely I was overreacting. And I'd nearly convinced myself of that when my incurable research habit led me to an incident from 2015, in which a Georgia Tech student fell from a 7-foot loft bed at his fraternity house. He fractured his skull, developed a brain bleed, suffered a stroke and was in coma for several months.

Mariellen Jacobs, that student's mom, told CBS News that she had been unsettled upon seeing her son's living arrangements.

"The beds were quite high off ground," she said. "I remember saying, 'Shouldn't we put something on there?' My son laughed; 'I'm not going to roll off.'

"No one thinks that."

But, of course, she had thought exactly that.

Every parent would think that.

Before we left Terre Haute, I retrieved a copy of the Tribune-Star from my car and showed my son the front page coverage of the ISU crash.

Please, please be smart, we told him. He humored us.

And he kept us updated with texts about the ongoing construction. One such text stated they were waiting for "more people to be around ... to lift it and shove the legs under."

This description was not the greatest.

You're using heavy-duty bolts, correct? Like carriage bolts? And braces?

"Just screws for now."

This also did not put us at ease.

When the picture of the finished loft arrived, I zoomed in on the details. While it couldn't be mistaken for the work of a true craftsman, they had braced the supports, at least.

I couldn't help but draw parallels to my own journey as a parent. There remains the sneaking suspicion that I don't know what I'm doing. That I'm just winging it. Even worse is the knowledge that no matter how good a job I might have done, nothing can eliminate the possibility of a knock on the door at 4 a.m.

That's the gig we're stuck with. We hope for the best, forever bracing for the worst.

Theodore Decker is the Dispatch metro columnist.

tdecker@dispatch.com

@Theodore_Decker

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Indiana State fatal crash casts shadow over college students' return