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Donovan Webster wrote about his 21-month prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter and the enduring guilt he felt after his release.
Kevin Cooley
Editor’s note: Donovan Webster, who wrote this poignant piece for the February/March issue of AARP The Magazine, died in Charlottesville, Va., on July 4. He was 59. A professor, author, editor, husband and father, Webster traveled the world as a journalist, contributing to other national magazines and writing best-selling books.
Every evening since I got out, I’ve taken a walk, just to see the stars and the moon and to listen to the night. Where I live now, there’s a little more than 70 acres of Virginia farmland to kick around on, patrolled by an owl that, on some nights, I hear glide from the woods to hunt rodents scratching for grain near an empty horse shed.
It’s not my farm. Good friends have lent me a guest apartment at their place, to stay in for as long as I need it. Which is generous of them, because for 21 months I never got to see the stars and the moon.
Because I was in prison.
Late on the afternoon of Aug. 14, 2014, in the mood to celebrate a potential two-book publishing deal, I decided to take myself fly-fishing. I went over the mountain from where I lived then, in central Virginia, to the Shenandoah Valley and an easily accessible trout stream. I put four beers into the car, thinking, Why not?
When I got over to the stream, the afternoon sun shone hard on the water, and the fish had yet to start moving in the river’s shadows. I scouted the location a bit and finished two beers as I listened to the car radio. Then I went down the street to the local fly-fishing shop and talked to the guys who run it for an hour or so.
Back at the river, there was still nothing going on, so I pulled out a third beer and knocked it back. Then I took out the fourth one, popped it and began thinking, You’re probably getting close .... I decided to scout a shaded stream on the other side of the mountain. Driving back down the mountain, on a blind turn, I glanced down from the road to check my speed, and at once everything changed. Because when I looked up, a blue car appeared suddenly from behind the curve and was now right in front of me.
The man in the blue car was named Wayne T. White.
He was a husband and father and grandfather, a farmer and churchgoer. He was said to be an exemplary human being.
"Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Wayne T. White and the White family."
Up until that day, I’d had a pretty good career: traveling the world as a war correspondent, author and sometime filmmaker. I could get pretty much anyone on the telephone or to answer an email. I felt myself at the center of things. And while the descent from that lofty place to a state prison might have felt sudden, the sky didn’t fall all at once. I had spent the previous two decades being paid to look directly at things that made most people avert their eyes. I’d witnessed bloody rebellions in Africa, covered war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I volunteered to cover these situations — the bombings, the torture, the beheadings, all of it. Then I’d go home to Virginia to sit in a lonely room by myself, sort it out and write it up — and, well, I’d loosen the screws at night with a couple of beers and a glass of wine at dinner. Reporting was my passion, but as I got older, the stuff I had seen began to collect in my mind, and it was increasingly difficult to get away from it.
Then came the Southeast Asian tsunami of December 2004. I was sent all across the Indian Ocean basin by the United Nations as part of a team to write a report on the aftermath. This assignment was different. Everything inside the tsunami zone was gone. There were no houses. No trees. Nothing but bloated corpses, mostly naked — the violence of the tsunami had stripped away the clothes of the victims. Thousands of them, rotting in the sun.
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