QUITMAN, Ga. – North Webster Street runs most unremarkably on the outskirts of this south Georgia town, one of a thousand little lanes that the traffic on I-75 gladly bypasses on the way to Disney World.
It is as straight as a church pew and almost as narrow. Bounded on either side by farmland and scraggly stands of hardwood, it has not seen a paving crew in a long while. Grass sprouts through fissured asphalt.
A street meant to be driven without a care.
The boys of the Brooks County High School football team traveled North Webster at least three mornings a week during this rainy summer, shuttling between workouts. They would lift weights at school early then stretch out on their practice field, just a short drive on a nothing road from the BCHS weight room.
Yet now that nondescript route warrants a landmark, a pecan tree transformed into a memorial. Balloons are tacked to the bark, artificial flowers laid at the base. Hanging from it is a red T-shirt celebrating Brooks County’s 2012 region championship. A cross inscribed “RIP BC3” marks the spot where on Tuesday morning three of the team’s players died in a wreck that has left Quitman, a town of 5,000, in mourning.
Some cars slow and look at the display. Some pause long enough to lower the window and snap a quick photo before the gnats can swarm through the opening. Tonia Moore and her daughter Indira Wisdom, a Brooks County student, pulled over as far as they could Wednesday, two tires in the weeds, two still on the road, and got out for a closer look.
“The whole town is sad,” Moore said.
It’s the small things that will change your life, one of the team chaplains, Clay Phillips, had constantly preached to the players.
“That small puddle of water and them going too fast changed everything,” said Phillips, also Quitman’s fire chief.
Three teammates hustled into Jicarre Watkins’ black Ford Explorer on Tuesday morning shortly after 9 for a ride from the school to the practice field. Shawn Waters and Johnie Parker took seats. De’Vron Whitfield, Waters brother, stretched out in the cargo area in back.
They were just coming down off a spirited weight lifting session that had left their coach smiling. Maurice Freeman gave Parker the honor of leading the team’s “1-2-3 Trojan Pride!” cheer at the end of weight training.
“He worked out like crazy,” Freeman remembered, “and said he was going to do it again on the field. He said, ‘Coach, I’m not going to let you down.’”
A lowly 10th grader tried to join the four rising seniors and juniors in the SUV for the ride to the practice field. They shooed away the youngster; told him to get back on the bus. “I could have lost one more,” Freeman muttered.
That morning had been so flush with promise. As coach at Brooks County, Freeman had experienced some lofty peaks. In 1994, he led the Trojans to a Class AA state championship. Just last season, the their unbeaten regular season included a first-ever victory over the big neighbor to the east, lordly Valdosta High. Yet Freeman remembered taking in the enthusiasm of his team early Tuesday and thinking this could be the best team he ever coached.
“Then in a few seconds…” he said, his voice trailing off.
The Georgia State Patrol’s Specialized Collision Reconstruction Team is still investigating the crash and will be for perhaps another week, said Sgt. Carl Taylor, commander of Valdosta’s Post 31.
This much they say for certain: Watkins lost control of the car after veering right, then over-compensated, sending the SUV into a roll before it hit a pecan tree. There is an area of the street at the accident site where water stubbornly puddles, which may have contributed. Speeding is another aspect the State Patrol is studying, Taylor said.
As the SUV began its roll, Whitfield was ejected into a nearby soybean field. He would be airlifted to a Florida hospital in critical condition, but return home one day later.
A few feet either way, the car would have rolled into the field and possibly spared the occupants. Instead, it wrapped grotesquely around the tree, and the BC3 (Brooks County three), as students have come to call them, died at the scene.
Freeman had warned all his players about speeding down that road, even gave one a month of extra running after finding out about his lead foot. But kids do not take a coach’s every utterance as gospel.
The coach came up on the scene just moments after the crash happened. So twisted was the wreckage that initially Freeman did not even recognize it as a vehicle. First, he went to Whitfield, injured in the field. Then to his horror, he processed the sight of twisted metal against the tree, and went looking for signs of life.
“Oh, Lord, it’s my boys,” he thought as he looked inside.
After that, it was a matter of trying to herd his other players away from the scene, “so they wouldn’t have to see what I saw.”
“I’m their coach, I don’t have a choice (but to hold up),” he said. “I’ve had my moments, though.”
As a long-time fireman, Phillips has responded to all manner of calamity. In his role of team chaplain, he liked to start his day visiting the Trojans during their summer workouts. He was headed that way when he heard the call. That put him on the scene before any of the other emergency responders, only now he knew all the victims by their first names.
“I’ve been dealing in counseling, death and incidents all my life,” he said. “Nothing comes easy, but I’ve learned over the years it’s not how heavy the load is, it’s how you carry the load – a little at a time.
“When I got there, I didn’t think about anything but doing my job. When I broke down was when I walked in my house that night and saw my wife and daughter. I sat on the sofa and it hit me real hard.”
The load is shared by nearly the entirety of Quitman.
It’s not necessarily that a small town feels a loss like this any more deeply than a big city.
“I just think we feel it a lot quicker,” said Calvin Williams, remembering how rapidly the news of the accident seemed to overwhelm everyone he knew. He is 60, a native of the town where he runs the press at Quitman Printing and Office Supply and counsels the football team, too. He can remember no tragedy in these parts more wrenching.
“Something like this does shake the core of a small town,” said Kasey Knight, who owns the drugstore on the main street through Quitman.
“We were as prepared as any town could be, because you can’t be prepared for something like this,” said Quitman’s 70-year-old mayor, Curtis Pickels.
“It is a loss that affects the whole community. It is pulling our citizens together.”
It’s not necessarily that the death of a young person is any more tragic just because he happens to play football. But remember this is the South, and this was a team that lit up Fall Friday nights.
When the Trojans won, which was often, it lent to an area of small acclaim — well, Brooks County is second in Georgia in milk production — a great measure of self-satisfaction. That made every player a community asset.
“That team is our heart,” said Terrell Kimbrough, Watkins’ step-father.
Instead of games, now there are three funerals to attend.
First, this afternoon, Waters, who would have been entering his senior season, will be memorialized. He was “the daddy of all the kids, the one who told everyone right from wrong,” said his coach.
Waters often spoke to Freeman about wanting to go on and work as a welder after getting out of high school. Why don’t you go to college and try to own the welding shop, his coach countered. A life plan had been hatched.
Sunday afternoon will be Parker’s funeral. At the doorstep to his junior year, he was growing into a strong presence on the team. He was proud of the way he had transformed his body, through sometimes unconventional methods. Still out back of his grandmother’s home were the water buckets he used to fill with sand and lift until his arms could lift no more.
With his dyed dreadlocks and his free spirit, he was the player who most vexed an old-school coach like Freeman. For all their jousting, it was Parker who went on a one-man hunt around town — alas, unsuccessful — for his coach’s stolen bass boat.
“I can still see him so happy, getting ready to go to practice (last Tuesday). I have to remember him that way,” said Parker’s grandmother, Warnell Parker.
Services are scheduled for the last of the BC3 the following Saturday. It would strike his coach as fitting that Watkins should have the last word, as the most boisterous of the lot. Nicknamed “Get ‘em-Got ‘em” Watkins, he was the player with a motor that revved almost too high, one Freeman would have to occasionally lift from a game when he got too worked up. He was intent upon playing football at Troy University in Alabama and getting a fall-back business degree — just in case the NFL never came calling, his mother, Agnes Kimbrough, said.
So much of the spirit of one football team was loaded into a single SUV Tuesday.
The coach can’t take bereavement leave. On the morning after the crash, Freeman gathered his team. There was no shortage of tears in the meeting. “Kids kept saying they felt like they lost brothers, because they are so much like family,” said Williams, who was there as a counselor.
As well consoling his players, Freeman opened up the gym to let them play a little basketball and laugh again.
He also left it to them to decide the course from there. The Trojans voted on whether to even play this season. The result was a unanimous yes. “This season will be for those three guys,” said senior lineman Bobby Christian.
Once that was decided, they voted again, on when to go back to work. Monday, the summer routine will resume, starting at the school weight room and ending at the practice field a mile or so away.
The coach said he will probably take a different, longer route to the field.
He doubts he can ever go on North Webster Street again.
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