Finally Olga thought to look in her address book for Ken and Deb’s number. Apprehensive but hopeful, she dialed. Ken answered.
“I know there’s been an accident,” Olga said as calmly as she could. “Is Billy still alive?”
Ken spoke slowly. “I’m afraid not.”
Olga screamed and dropped the receiver.
Not long after that, Billy’s father, Bill, showed up at her door. He and Olga had been separated for several years now, though they continued to live in the same town of Bonita Springs. Bill had left the trucking business and opened a small company distributing coffee and bottled water. Olga had never seen her husband look so hollowed out. For him, the boom had been lowered in a call he had received while watching the Kennedy coverage on TV. “Mr. Juse,” the voice on the other end of the line had said. “My name is Dr. Brown from Massachusetts General Hospital. I’m afraid your son has been in an accident.” As soon as he’d heard those words, Bill had gone completely numb. He later told Olga that, earlier that afternoon, something strange had occurred. He’d been making deliveries to clients when his truck ran out of gas. In all the years he’d spent on the road driving a tractor-trailer, that had never happened to him. He had run out of gas just after 1:30 p.m. As it turned out, that was around the same time that, in a tunnel some fifteen hundred miles away, his only son had run out of air.
Riggs stood in the exam room, in a gown, waiting for someone to return his clothes. Back in the tunnel, he’d been the one to remind DJ and Hoss about the importance of not letting anyone separate them. But sure enough, in the commotion that met them as soon as they’d made it to topside, he’d been pried away from the others. Now, after the divers had undergone one round of examinations in the hospital, they had managed to reunite. Riggs watched as DJ approached one of the nurses and asked if she could get a pill to help him calm down. When she returned and offered pills to the three of them, Riggs accepted. But when a psychiatric nurse approached them a little while later with a pill that was designed to lessen the effect of a traumatic event, Riggs declined. He was worried about what might come next for all three survivors, and he wanted to make sure his wits weren’t dulled.
Riggs found a phone and called his wife. “I wanted to let you know that I’m okay,” he told Karen by way of a greeting.
She was caught off guard. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I wanted to let you know that I’m okay in case you heard it on the AP, about this accident in Boston.”
In fact, the Associated Press had moved a story244 on the wires about the accident. But it didn’t appear until 6:16 p.m., once the hospitals had confirmed the two diver deaths. And with the Kennedy coverage dominating the news that day, it didn’t make a big splash even in Boston. In Nevada, where Karen Riggs was, it wasn’t even a ripple.
Riggs had no interest in unloading a lot of details on his wife. His only goal in the call was to reassure her that he was alive. Before he could get into it any further, a group of doctors and nurses entered the exam room. “I have to go,” he told Karen hurriedly. “I have to get some testing done.” He hung up.
Over the next couple of hours, Riggs came to feel like a piece of supermarket produce in the hands of a discriminating elderly shopper—prodded and squeezed and probed and held up under the lights. There were blood tests and lung tests and brain tests. And an endless supply of questions.
Ever since they’d made it back to the shaft, the divers had heard the same question everywhere they turned: What happened? What happened? What happened? But by nightfall in the hospital, that question had become more insistent. And it was now being asked by people with badges.
They started with DJ245. Just before seven o’clock, two state police detectives, accompanied by the union’s Dan Kuhs and a few other people Riggs didn’t recognize, brought DJ into a different room for questioning, while Riggs and Hoss continued to be examined by the doctors and nurses. By nine o’clock, as the doctors seemed to be ruling out any signs of lasting physical injury, Riggs had to brace himself for the second wave of scrutiny. Given the late hour and the fact that the doctors still weren’t finished evaluating Riggs and Hoss, the state police agreed to interview them together246.
The two detectives—a man and a woman—introduced themselves, as did their boss, a sergeant, who had joined them at the hospital and would be sitting in on the discussion. There was also a representative of OSHA, in addition to Kuhs from the union. It didn’t take long for Riggs to conclude that the female detective, who said her name was McCauley and who spoke with a Boston accent, would be the one leading the discussion.
Riggs offered up the details that had most stood out in his mind: how Harald had blown off his suggestion for an in-line analyzer, and how immediately after the accident he’d found the liquid oxygen tank as frozen as an ice sculpture247. Hoss recounted his last communication with Tim, when he’d sounded panicked and disoriented and shouted that the oxygen percentage had fallen to 8.9. Riggs knew he and Hoss and DJ had nothing to hide. They’d been given a lousy system and seen their complaints ignored. The direct result had been the death of two guys and the near-death of the rest of them. Yet if all of that was obvious to the three survivors, despite the shattered condition they currently found themselves in, it didn’t seem so obvious to this lady detective and the other investigators staring at them from across the room. As the interview dragged on, changing in tone from conversation to interrogation, Riggs began to feel as though he and the other divers were being put on the defensive. It wasn’t as though they were being treated as hostile witnesses. It was more that in the cops’ questioning, there was no acknowledgment of the hell the three survivors had been through, no sense that they were victims in all this. As the detectives drilled down with their questions, pressing the divers to explain why they had used a breathing system that seemed so risky, Riggs marveled that the survivors were essentially being asked to defend the very system that they themselves had complained about before the accident. What the hell is going on here?
After about an hour of questioning, the session ended. Riggs and Hoss were given a lift back to their HoJo’s motel, while DJ was driven home to Waltham. Back at the motel, Hoss called a friend and veteran diver who served as his mentor. The guy advised him to write down everything that had happened during the day, while it was still fresh in his mind. After hanging up, Hoss suggested Riggs do the same. This mentor had lived through enough accidents to see that sometimes the responsible parties try to blame the victims in order to cover their own asses. Hoss now understood that the best way to get the truth out would be to commit it to paper.
It was late when Lorraine heard her front door opening. She’d been upstairs in her bedroom for hours, but she knew she’d have no hope of falling asleep until she saw DJ cross her threshold.
He came into her bedroom and leaned against the wall. Clearly, he was struggling to keep himself together. Then he simply dissolved, letting his body slide slowly down the wall and to the floor. In giving out, his legs seemed to be speaking for his heart. He lowered his head and started to sob. “Why did it happen?” he cried, smacking his fist against the floor. “Why did this awful thing happen, Mom?”
Lorraine rushed to comfort him, to reassure him that he’d be okay. In her mind, though, she was struggling to reconcile how the son who had been such a source of strength for her all these years could suddenly seem so broken.
244 (Chapter 12, note 4)
the Associated Press had moved a story: “Two Workers Contracted by MWRA Die in Sewage Tunnel,” Associated Press, July 21, 1999, 6:16 p.m. At my request, Boston Bureau chief Bill Kole searched AP archives of alerts and determined that this was the first story about the accident that the wire service transmitted. Even in the next day’s papers, coverage of the accident was extremely limited. I believe there are two reasons for that. First, the media’s focus remained squarely on JFK Jr., a story that was drawing international attention. The next day’s
245 (Chapter 12, note 5)
They started with DJ: Trooper John O’Leary, “Interview with Donald J. Gillis,” Massachusetts State Police, Suffolk County Detectives, July 28, 1999; DJ and Riggs, interviews by author.
246 (Chapter 12, note 6)
the state police agreed to interview them together: McCauley, “Sudden Death/Deer Island,” 5-7.
247 (Chapter 12, note 7)
frozen as an ice sculpture: Ibid., 6; Riggs, interviews by author.