“Stop, Courtney. He’s going to shoot you. ” Stanley’s warning came too late. Courtney had only stopped by the Ogden Hi-Fi Shop to pick up his car.
He had left it there earlier that day, with Stanley’s permission, while he ran errands after a triumphant solo flight—he was just sixteen, nearly a licensed pilot. He opened the door, said a quick thanks, and then there was a gun in his face. He was thrown down the basement stairs. Carol knew something was wrong.
She was recovering from jet lag at home with her husband, Byron, and their eldest son, Gary, when Courtney failed to come home. The men told her not to worry. “Boys lose track of time,” they said. She dismissed them.
“I know something’s wrong,” she insisted, and drove out into the evening alone to find her youngest son. She searched the college campus. She called his friends. Nothing.
When she returned home, her husband and son still shrugged it off. Carol cried for a few minutes. Then she snapped. “Aren’t you concerned at all?
Something has happened to Courtney. I know it, and you won’t even try to help me find him. ” She stormed back to her car and raced into the night. She would never speak to them again.
At the Hi-Fi Shop, the robbery had gone terribly wrong. Dale Selby Pierre, a twenty-one-year-old airman with a violent past, and his accomplice William Andrews had planned this for weeks. They wanted the merchandise and they wanted no witnesses. They had brought three other men and a getaway driver, Keith Roberts.
But when Stanley recognized his own father, Orin, who had come looking for him, they didn’t just tie him up. They forced everyone to drink a cup of what they claimed was a sleeping mixture. It was liquid Drano. Carol found the shop.
She almost kicked down the back door. A gun was pointed at her from the basement stairs. She was forced down and bound with electrical wires. Then they made her drink the poison first.
Then Courtney. The Drano burned their mouths, their throats, from the inside. They screamed and convulsed. The burglars tried to tape their mouths shut, but the chemical burns made it impossible.
The plan had failed. Furious, Dale ordered William out of the basement. “Give me about thirty minutes,” he said. He paced.
He stopped in front of Carol and Courtney. He shot them both in the back of the head. He shot Stanley. He shot Orin, but missed, grazing his skull.
Orin played dead, holding his breath and closing his eyes. Then Dale untied Michelle, the eighteen-year-old cashier who had only worked at the shop for a week and was getting married in August. For nearly half an hour, he assaulted her. Then he made her lie down between the others, shot her, and shot Stanley again, fatally this time.
Orin wouldn’t die. Dale straddled him and tried to strangle him with a wire. When that took too long, he found a pen. He jammed it into Orin’s ear, stomping on his head until the tip pierced through his throat.
Only then was he satisfied. Hours later, Orin’s wife and younger son found the scene. Lynn broke down the basement door. His father was barely alive, his brother Stanley was dead.
Carol and Courtney were rushed to the hospital. Carol was already gone. Courtney survived the bullet, but the brain damage was severe. He couldn’t remember the night at all.
He would have to relearn how to walk, speak, and hold a pencil. He would never be a pilot. He would never remember his mother’s face. Orin remembered everything.
His testimony sent Dale and William to death row. Keith, who stayed outside, was paroled in 1987 but took his own life in 1992. Dale was executed by lethal injection in 1987. William Andrews was executed five years later.
Before he died, Carol’s husband Byron served as a witness to his own family’s destruction in court. He identified his wife by the jade ring he had bought her in Hawaii, still on her finger. Carol is buried in her temple clothes. Courtney eventually graduated with his class, against all odds, and built a life in computers.
He died in 2002 at forty-four years old, his story never fully behind him. Byron survived until 2020. When he finally passed, he was buried beside Carol in the Washington Heights Memorial Park.
Side by side, the way they had started.
