Tragedy hits twice for mom

In a small mobile home along a dusty gravel road in Airway Heights, with a stationary fan stirring up the stale August air, Rozella McClary searches for patterns in the universe.

“It’s so hard for me to put my mind around it,” said McClary, a 55-year-old customer service representative for a phone company. “I know that there is something there.”

It must be in the numbers. How else to explain this: two daughters dead. Born seven years apart, they died seven years apart.

Her younger daughter, Chenoa, born in 1977, weighed 7 pounds and 7 ounces. She died in 1999 of a gunshot wound. Seven years later to the week, McClary’s oldest daughter, Samantha, died in a car wreck so bizarre it attracted international attention.

On June 15th, as 36-year-old Samantha N. Murphy drove her two daughters to day care, a man named Alofa Time allegedly rammed his pickup into their car on a busy arterial in downtown Boise. The impact killed Murphy and her 4-year-old daughter, Jaelynne Grimes. Murphy’s 8-year-old daughter survived, as did Time, who now faces murder charges.

At the crash scene, officers found the severed head of Time’s estranged wife, 47-year-old Theresa, as well as a suicide note and cash for unspecified arrangements. The story appeared in newspapers around the world, and attracted such notoriety that Time has his own entry on Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia.

Lost amid the distortion of the media storm was the fact that Rozella McClary, who was raised to believe in and fear God, now had buried two daughters and a granddaughter.

“For a long time I thought God was out to get me,” McClary said, sitting in her mobile home as planes from Spokane International Airport rumbled overhead. “I’ve never hated God. But I was afraid of God.”

McClary has struggled to reconcile the deaths. The trauma has tormented her, and the numbers have haunted her. She said trying to understand the deaths by finding patterns is her way of dealing with her grief.

“I think when you’ve had a lot of trauma your brain changes,” she said. “I’ve always searched for God. These things seem random at first until you start putting them together.”

The trauma has left its mark, she said. Parents dread receiving that one phone call from police or the coroner. McClary’s received the news twice.

In 1999, Chenoa “Shay” McClary, a 21-year-old nurse’s aide, died of a gunshot wound in Tukwila, Wash.

Police said the wound was self-inflicted, but McClary remains skeptical.

She won’t talk about what she thinks might have happened. But after Chenoa’s death, McClary requested that rather than sending flowers, people should send contributions to the YWCA’s domestic violence program or a Spokane shelter for street kids.

“After Chenoa died, I didn’t want to live,” McClary said. “I just wanted to die.”

But with a teenage son to raise, McClary instead funneled her anger and grief into poetry and writing – a pursuit that Chenoa had encouraged.

Through an online writing group she met an English poet and artist named William “Billy” Edge. They plan to marry this fall. She worked to piece her life back together.

For Samantha, too, life seemed to be turning around. After pleading guilty in 2004 to possession of stolen property, theft and forgery, the former East Valley High School student spent 15 months in jail.

While Samantha was in jail, McClary wrote her a long letter.

“I said, ‘I’m really sorry for everything I did as a mother, but you’re an adult now,’ ” McClary said. “The way we live our lives, we can’t go back and change things. We can only try to make them better.”

Mother and daughter’s once-bitter relationship began to smooth. After her release, Samantha got a job at a dry cleaner’s store, and she spoke frequently with her mother.

“She’d turned her life around,” McClary said. “She had her kids back. She had a job. She had a new car. Where a lot of people would have just given up, she persevered.”

On the morning of June 15th, Samantha Murphy left early for work. A longtime boyfriend – they had lived together for seven years – had died earlier in the week, and Murphy wanted to get in a few extra hours so she could travel to Spokane.

A few hours later, a family friend knocked on McClary’s door to deliver the news of the accident.

“I said, ‘But they’re okay, right?’ ” McClary remembered. “It was so unreal. I thought, ‘This couldn’t be.’ “

Samantha and tiny Jaelynne were gone.

Time, 51, was charged with first-degree murder in the death of his wife and two counts of second-degree murder for the car wreck.

A stunned McClary sat through the funeral service in Idaho. But she felt disconnected, and so, this Saturday, she will hold another memorial service in Airway Heights.

For a woman who has searched for meaning in apparently random tragedy, the service is another means to help her cope.

“People say, ‘How can you survive?’ ” McClary said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “What choice do I have? The world keeps on turning.”