Hard Work Her Guide To Healing The Past Woman Relocates Family After Valley Tragedy

Becky Toombs stands in the bright, midday sunshine, watching her 15-year-old son play daredevil.

He darts around on his Honda dirt bike, its high whine echoing across the family’s 2-1/2 acres in the Spokane Valley. Toombs gasps as her boy takes a jump.

“Whoa, there he goes!” the 36-year-old mom says with a nervous laugh. “It scares me when he goes into the air like that.”

Despite the noise, there’s a sense of peace in the air.

The bike screams, bees buzz, country music blares from Toombs’ ceramics shop.

The tragedy of gunfire and gasoline, authored by her brother Richard Ross in September, seems long ago.

Fearing the loss of the home he shared with his mother, Richard Ross shot and killed his brother, Bob Ross. He also shot and crippled his sister Barbara Janosky. His mother suffered severe hearing loss because he fired his gun so close to her head.

Then, he soaked the family home in gasoline and set it ablaze, perishing in the flames.

As she watches her son, Toombs is taking a short break from pouring liquid clay into molds, the staple chore at Valley Ceramics and Crafts. The month-old business is located at 14115 E. Eighth, next door to the home her family moved into last year.

Toombs and her husband, Larry Toombs, moved here from Mukilteo, a Seattle suburb, in November in an attempt to hold the shattered family together.

She shut down her profitable ceramics business; he left his construction job. Toombs’ youngest children, ninth-graders Kris Johnson and Melanie Johnson, said goodbye to friends. Jeremy Johnson, 18, stayed in Mukilteo to finish high school.

Toombs and her husband separated two weeks after the move - the sudden, cruel upheaval of her family compounded other marital problems.

She survived by baptizing herself in the sweat of labor.

“I think that shop has been my salvation, with all that happened in the family,” she says. “They say time heals all wounds. Well, I think good hard work does, too.”

Like the clay she works, Toombs is pouring herself into a new mold, shaping a new life for herself.

Toombs runs between home and work from 5 a.m. until 10 p.m. She helps her live-in mother, 74-year-old Ruth Ross, bathe in the morning. Then comes breakfast, then the shop.

Toombs goes home to prepare lunch and dinner and then it’s back to the shop again.

The horrors of what her brother brought are starting to fade.

The loss of her brother Bob hit Toombs the hardest; the two were close in age and fast friends.

When she first learned of the shootings, she couldn’t make the long drive to Spokane until she found out who had been killed. “I was praying that it wasn’t Bob,” Toombs remembers.

When she heard it was, her racing mind skidded to a dead stop.

“I was numb for two months. Numb,” Toombs says. “It took me just forever to believe my brother Bob was gone.”

She was angry at Richard Ross at first, but says she has relearned to love him. “He was my brother,” Toombs says. “I guess I mostly feel sad for Richard.”

Even though she was 300 miles away when Richard Ross exploded, Toombs still has nightmares. She dreams she is another of his victims, as if she had been there when the Vietnam veteran went crazy in a dispute over selling the family house.

He was never the same after returning from the war. “It really left a mark on him,” Toombs says.

Richard Ross was polite to strangers, but closed off to family.

Ruth Ross says he would complain when asked to do simple chores. He withheld mail Toombs sent to their mother, and he was especially jealous of Bob.

And he collected guns. But no one suspected he would turn them on his own family, Ruth Ross remembers.

Toombs now centers her attention on the family that remains.

As she makes her way around the backyard trail Kris shreds on his motorcycle, Toombs limps a little. One foot is in a brace; she chipped a bone after crashing her own new Yamaha.

“Well, I’m mom and dad both,” Toombs says, explaining her motorcycle purchase as something she can do with her son.

Both Kris and Melanie say they were never close to their stepfather. Their natural father died years ago, killed by a drunken driver.

Toombs says her marital split made her stronger.

All denim jeans, plaid shirt and muscled arms, she looks like a pioneer. She’s pioneering the deepest frontier of all - her own spirit.

“For the first time in my life I really like myself,” Toombs says. “I’m really finding out who I am and what I like to do, and I’m enjoying life - which is amazing considering what happened.”

She spends hours in her tidy shop, creating greenware sculptures from her 5,000 molds. Her customers buy them unfired, unpainted.

Her kids spent a busy year at Evergreen Junior High. Kris wrestled, Melanie ran track.

They bought a 4-month-old Siberian husky, Kamiak. He loves to steal the yarn from Ruth Ross when she crochets in the living room. Though legally blind, she crochets by counting stitches to keep her place.

Two hearing aids help restore the sense taken by the ring of gunshots. She listens to books on tape.

Ruth Ross, too, needs to stay busy.

“Sometimes I have a hard time going to sleep at night,” she says. “(But) I don’t cry. I’ve cried enough already.”

Even though her diabetes stifles the healing of a knee injury sustained while fleeing her burning home, Ross has no anger about what her oldest son did that September afternoon.

“I was so glad, a few nights before the tragedy, out of the pure blue sky I said to Richard, ‘You know I love you very, very much.’ And he said ‘I love you too, Mom.”’ The memories remain. But the nightmares are less frequent.

The sister who survived the attack, Barbara Janosky, is a regular at Toombs’ ceramics shop. Janosky says she just finished a Southwestern-style vase that took seven hours to paint.

The damage done by the gun blast that tore through her left leg heals slowly. That leg is 2 inches shorter; she lost bone to the gunshot.

Recently, she took her first bath without using a bench. She uses a walker or a wheelchair, but can get around. Janosky can also drive again and has returned to work, managing the Sullivan Gables apartments in the Valley.

The family’s triumphs are to be savored slowly. What’s most important to them is right now, today.

“Losing Bob at 37 years opened my eyes,” Toombs says. “It was like, ‘Hey, I feel young, but you never know.’ You don’t know when your number is going to come up.

“Life is too short and too precious to be unhappy. So I am really making an effort to enjoy every moment of every day.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo