The Dead Guy

Recently I saw a message in Classmates.com by the niece of someone I was friends with in high school, Tom 'Stretch' Williams. Stretch passed away the year before his niece was born and she is interested in finding out as much as she can about her family. I contacted her and we have exchanged a couple of emails. She asked me a lot of question, most of which I couldn't answer, but I did sent her some photos of her uncle from my yearbook. I also sent her a story about the dead guy a group of us found when we were in high school. I thought since you all seem to enjoy my stories (thank you for that), I'd let you read the one I sent her. So here's the story about finding 'The Dead Guy'.

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It was late afternoon, on a warm day in the mid 1960s. A few of the guys and I were walking back home from town after a tough day of hanging out doing nothing significant I'm sure. I don't remember everyone I was with, but I do remember being with my best friend Gary Kijik, Eddie Wilson my stepbrother and Tom 'Stretch' Williams. We all lived in the same neighborhood, Riviera Ridge, so we hung out a lot together.

We were walking west along 25A just west of the old Billy Blake's in Smithtown, New York. When we got near the bull, we saw a friend of ours running towards us yelling.

"There's a dead guy in the car! There's a dead guy in the car!"

"Where?"

"Over there!" He pointed towards a car park on the side of the road just up ahead. "Joe (I forgot his real name) went over the the bar," pointing across the street to the bar, "to call the police!"

I started running towards the car. "I'll go check it out." The rest of the guys followed right behind me. I got up the car and sure enough, there was a guy in the car sitting in the back seat. The top of his head was missing and there was blood all over the place. There was rifle or shotgun across his lap.

I turned to the guys and said, "The guy blew his head off! If you have a weak stomach you better not look!"

A couple of guys did look, but the rest didn't. The biggest guy Stretch didn't. Guess he had a weak stomach. Stretch was about 6'6" and was a good sized guy. Not huge by any means, but still a big guy.

About then Joe (?) ran from the direction of the bar over to where we were. "I told the bartender and he's calling the cops!"

We didn't really know what to do and just kind of stood there wondering what the cops would think. Would they we killed him? Things like that. Before we knew it, the cop cars started pulling up, marked and unmarked, one after the other. Eventually there must have been 10 or 12 of them.

"What happened?", one of the cops said.
We all started talking at once saying something like, "There's a dead guy in the car! Looks like he shot himself!"

The cops looked in the car and then started talking amongst themselves. One of the plain clothes cops told the patrolmen to separate us and put us in different cars. Then interview us and get our stories. Each of us was put in a different police car.

We all got the same kind of questions. What's your name? Where do you live? Who found him? Where were you coming from? What were you doing here? Questions like that. One by one the cops questioning us finished, told us to wait there and then got out to talk to who was obviously the guy in charge and then talked to him.

By now, the cops were swarming all over the car with the dead guy. They took the gun out of the car. I could see now that it was a shotgun.

"Ewwwwww, the guy blew his head off with a shot gun! No wonder there was blood all over the place."

One of the cops put the gun up to his shoulder as if he was aiming at a flock of ducks flying by. Then he passed it to another cop and they all took turns aiming it. That struck me as weird, because you'd think they should be getting finger prints off of it or something. Wasn't it evidence? What if the guy was murdered or something?

We were told we could get out of the cars, but we had to hang around for a while. We all hung out together talking and comparing note on what the cops asked us. Pretty much the same questions were asked of all of us.

By now the traffic on 25A was back up and bumper to bumper. A few cops were out in the road directing traffic and trying to keep traffic moving. Everyone in the cars were looking at us all probably wondering what "those juvenile delinquents" had done?

Stretch and I were leaning against the hood of one of the cop cars. I told Stretch, "Hey Stretch, let's put our hands behind our backs like we are handcuffed. Everyone will think were being arrested." LOL, so that's what we did. The people in the cars were pointing at us and we were laughing at being the center of attention. It was pretty cool actually.

Next thing you know, a car pulls to a stop in the lane on the other side of the road. It was Stretch's mother. She opens the car door and runs directly at Stretch screaming.

"What did you do? What did you do?" She started pummeling him with her fists. "I'll kick your ass! What did you do?"

Poor Stretch. He was scared to death of his mom, even though she was a lot shorter than him. He had his arms out in front of him trying to intercept his mom's blows.

"I didn't do anything! I didn't do anything!" All the while his mom is swinging away. This goes on back and forth for a moment until the cops come over and pulls her off of Stretch. She still trying to swing away, but can't so she starts kicking in his direction. "What did you do? I'll kick your ass!"

I'm laughing my ass off by now. It really was a sight to see. There is this little old lady (not really all that old, but old to a teenager) swinging away at this 6'6" man who is trying to block her blows. Funniest thing I'd ever seen.

A couple of cops are holding on to Stretch's mom and trying to calm her down. "Lady! Lady! What do you think your doing? Stop it right now!" She's still screaming, kicking and swinging in Stretch's direction. "Who are you and what do you think your doing?"

She stops her yelling and swinging and tells the cops who she is. She asks him what we did. They tell her that we didn't do anything and everything was okay. They told her to just get back in her car and move it to the side of the road and wait in the car. Remember, her car is blocking one lane of a major two lane road, 25A. Her son will be over in a few minutes and she can take him home.

Stretch's mom pulls the car over to the side of the road and stops. But she didn't stay in it, she got out and starts to walk back over to where we were. A patrolman stops her and makes her go back and get in her car. The cops tell Stretch he can leave and to get in the car with his mom and ask her to leave.

They tell all of us that they are done with us and we can leave now too. I tell one of the detectives that a couple of us live about a mile form there and that I'm very late for dinner. I tell him that my parents will kill me for being late and could they give my stepbrother Eddie and Gary a ride home? He tells one of the patrolman to take us home.

We get in the back seat of a patrol car and in a few minute he pulls up in front of my house. I ask him to come in and tell my parents why I'm late, but he says no that he has things to do. I walk into the front door and into the dining room, where everyone is eating dinner.

I'm sure they saw Eddie and me getting out of the cop car and were jumping to conclusions about what we had done.

"What did you do?"

"We didn't do anything. We found a dead guy in a car."

"What?"

"Yea, he blew his head off with a shotgun." I briefly told them what had happened and told them to call my friend Gary or Stretch if they didn't believe me. They said they believed us and to just get something to eat and sit down and eat dinner. As we ate, we told them all about it.

I cut out an article from the local paper, but can’t find it. If I remember correctly, the guy that killed himself was a professor at Stony Brook University. That’s about all I remember about him.