Edward Forsner sat in a room at the Loyola University Medical Center and talked about his critically injured wife, his badly injured teenage son, his dead baby, and Daniel Carpenter.
”I`ve never seen him,” Forsner said of Carpenter. ”I wouldn`t know what he looks like, so I don`t know what to hate. . . . What`s done is done. I just care about my family. . . . I don`t allow myself to have those thoughts. He`ll have to answer to God.”
Carpenter was the driver of the car that crashed into Forsner`s auto while it was parked May 27 on the shoulder of the Stevenson Expressway near Central Avenue. Police said Carpenter was drunk and was driving-again-on a suspended license. Uninjured, Carpenter was released last week on a cash bond of $1,500 while facing charges of driving under the influence, reckless homicide and driving on a suspended license.
It was at least the third time that Carpenter has faced a suspended license charge. The last time, he pleaded guilty, was placed on five weeks of court supervision and was fined $90.
Secretary of State Jim Edgar said it was ”incredible” that Carpenter had been given a short period of court supervision the second time around.
”The key is for the courts not just to give a person supervision, especially the second time. I might not agree but could understand the first time, but the second time the guy was stopped on that offense maybe they should have had him spend some time in jail.”
Edgar said that statistics in his office indicate that 8 percent of suspended drivers get convicted for driving during the suspension.
In the first five months of 1989, the Chicago Police Department`s Major Accidents Section investigated 173 accidents involving fatalities or serious personal injuries. In 12 of those cases, the motorists were driving with revoked or suspended licenses, said Lt. James Carroll, the unit`s commander.
That figure does not include the accident involving Carpenter because it fell under the jurisdiction of the Illinois State Police.
It is a crash whose every second is embedded in the memory of Edward Forsner, and he talked about it one night late last week during a break from his vigil that alternates between the bedsides of his wife, Sheila, 25, who was in a coma, and his son Brian, 16, who was able to speak to him for the first time on Wednesday, four days after the crash. Killed was Alex, 3 1/2 months.
”Brian`s still in some shock,” Forsner said that night. ”He`s still confused, hasn`t got what happened straight in his head, asking me questions: `Dad, who was in the car?`
”And I`ve had to tell him a few times that his little brother was dead”-Forsner`s voice trailed off.
”I don`t want to, but I remember every second,” he said after the pause.
Forsner, of Elmhurst, had been driving to his mother-in-law`s house with his wife beside him and two youngest sons in back. Brian was on the left, tiny Alex on the right. The eldest son, Eric, 21, drove in a separate car with his girlfriend. Eric and Brian are Forsner`s sons from a previous marriage; Edward and Sheila Forsner have been married for two years.
Forsner was driving a rental car that early evening because his car had been stolen the weekend before from his mother-in-law`s driveway near 58th Street and California Avenue. As he drove, Forsner thought he saw his missing `85 Riviera parked on the left-side shoulder of the northbound lanes of the Stevenson.
He pulled off at the Cicero Avenue exit, entered the southbound lanes, pulled off on the left shoulder just west of Central Avenue, and walked across the grassy median strip to the abandoned car. It was not his.
”I had just put on my seatbelt again-our family always wears seatbelts. I was telling the family that I had looked inside the car and saw it was different, had a different interior-and that was the last thing I said,”
Forsner said.
State police said that at that moment, Carpenter, 22, of Midlothian, veered off the road and rammed into the Forsners` parked car at more than 70 m.p.h.
The Forsner car flipped twice, coming to rest right side up. The crash had pushed the trunk all the way into the front seat. The passenger-side back seat-where the infant had sat, strapped into his car seat-had disappeared into a field of mashed metal.
”It just crushed the car,” Forsner recalled.
Forsner was the only one still conscious. ”I was just yelling everyone`s name. They were all knocked out. I couldn`t see the baby because of all the metal. I was trying to pull the doors open.”
His wife was slumped in the seat beside him, held up by her seatbelt. But paramedics reassured Forsner that his wife had a pulse. ”I looked at `em, I saw `em. And I don`t see how anybody could live through what they went through.”
Within minutes, two helicopters landed in the grass and police shut down traffic in both directions. The first copter took Sheila Forsner; the second carried Brian, who had to be pried out of the vehicle by the ”jaws of life,” hydraulic-powered tools.
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Forsner never saw Alex again.
”I knew he was in there somewhere, underneath. I`m glad I couldn`t see him,” he said, adding: ”I kept asking the doctors. . . . I remember I told them, `Look, I know the baby`s dead. Just tell me.` ”
Now Forsner is waiting for his 16-year-old to heal, for his wife to awaken. Forsner said he`s seem some vitally promising signs.
”I`ve felt her hand and seen her nod a little bit when I touch. I can feel her getting better.” She hasn`t spoken yet, though, he concedes.
Brian, a sophomore at York High School in Elmhurst, is doing well in the hospital`s pediatrics unit, on the same floor as his stepmother. ”He`s moving around pretty good now,” the father said. ”He`s a big kid, my size already, and he`s only 16. He`s not a jock; he`s not a straight-A student. He`s just a great kid.”
Forsner himself has substantial bruises on both forearms and under his fingernails, ”and all over, too,” but he said he feels pretty good. He sat rigidly, the result of possible whiplash. ”My neck is extremely stiff and sore, but no broken bones.”
Then there is the pain of losing Alex, the baby.
Forsner, 45, an engineer at Commonwealth Edison`s Crawford generating plant, met his wife, then Sheila Heelan, through work; she is a secretary in Edison`s downtown office. She gave birth to Alex on Feb. 2.
”You can`t describe the feeling of being a father; you have to experience it yourself. It`s just so great,” he said. Sheila, the fourth of six sisters, is the only one so far to have given her parents a grandchild.
”The first baby always gets extra-special attention,” Forsner noted wistfully.
At home is the baby`s toy-strewn room.
”It`s going to be hard to go home and see that,” he said. ”Our plans have always been to have two kids; it`s always nice to have a boy and a girl. Hopefully, she`ll be able to have a family again.
”I worry about when Sheila wakes up, and having to tell her she lost her baby. What I`ll say, I don`t know. . . . I`ll tell her that we were lucky enough to have had a baby for as long as we did.”
As for Carpenter, Forsner said, ”We all do stupid things in our life. The thing is, some people do things once and learn from it; some people do things over and over, and never learn.”
Carpenter, a gasoline station worker, said in a telephone interview that he was driving on a suspended license, ”and I don`t like to do that.”