May 17 – May 19, 2006
Morning didn’t arrive in a sunrise. It arrived in a sliver of light from the hallway—thin but insistent, like a blade cutting through the night’s remains. When the nurses opened the door with their bright “Good morning!” the glow followed them into the room as if the world itself were gently nudging me forward.
The peace from the night before still held me. After all the wrestling with God—after the internal storm that had broken open and settled again—I felt like someone who had finally reached calm water after thrashing in deep waves. I had not solved everything. I had not received every answer I wanted. But the turmoil had quieted. The world had stopped spinning. What remained was steady.
The hospital room was gray and white, a place without color or personality, almost like a sketch of a room rather than a room itself. The black-and-white tile reminded me of winter fields back home—patches of snow clinging stubbornly to dark soil, the in-between season where nothing had yet bloomed but everything quietly prepared to. Machines hummed like distant cicadas.
My head still throbbed. The morphine had done nothing except make me nauseous, and when I told them, the nurse nodded knowingly. She stepped out and returned with two small white pills, removed the morphine IV, and told me to take them.
Relief came in stages. First my hands tingled. Within minutes my face went numb. Twenty minutes later, the pain finally released its grip. I remembered being given the same medication years earlier after breaking my wrist in a car accident. It had helped then. I hoped it would help now.
For something meant to fog the mind, it did the opposite. I felt strangely alert. Clearer than I had in hours.
And clarity, painful as it was, meant remembering.
Mom and Dad.
Gone.
The awareness never left. It existed beneath everything else—beneath the medication, the visitors, the swelling. A constant truth.
Every morning followed the same ritual. A wheelchair arrived, and an orderly wheeled me down the hall and onto another floor for examinations. The motion itself didn’t hurt, but the bright hospital lights overhead felt like mid-July sun—too intense, too unforgiving—and sudden noises landed like hammer strikes. I blamed the pills.
After checking my head, back, reflexes, and whatever vision remained, they took me to the optical wing.
It looked nothing like a hospital. Soft carpeting. Tan walls. It felt more like a hotel lobby or the waiting room of some quiet retreat. Only the exam rooms reminded me where I truly was. My eye had filled up with blood so they had a hard time seeing what type of damage was in there. The doctors wanted to wait a few days and see if the blood would leave my eye naturally. If not then they would have to schedule surgery.
By lunchtime, the hospital allowed visitors. Word had spread faster than anyone wanted, and I was told the lobby was crowded. So much for secrecy. Still, the steady stream of friends and family made me feel deeply loved.
People arrived in waves. Friends from church. Family. The Chisholms drove in from Pittsburgh, which surprised me—I hadn’t even known they’d heard yet. Their reactions varied. Some looked relieved I was alive. Some froze in shock. Some broke down the moment they saw me. Many cried all at once—relief, grief, and disbelief tangled together.
I learned quickly that my role had changed. I wasn’t just a survivor anymore. I had become the voice of my parents. I was their son, standing in the gap.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. It happened instinctively, the way familiar roles always do. Like my dad steadying a fence post while I hammered. Like my mom offering comfort without raising her voice. I found myself saying the things they would have said if they could have been standing there:
You were loved.
You mattered to them.
They appreciated you.
They’re with the Lord now.
Some visitors struggled to understand why God would allow this. I told them gently that we would have that conversation later.
Many of the visits ended with me comforting them instead. The night before, God had done His work in me, and I was somehow able to say what needed to be said. When exhaustion finally set in, the nurses stepped in and cleared the room.
The person I wanted to see most finally appeared in the doorway that afternoon—my brother, Chris. He and his wife had flown immediately from Boise to West Virginia to be with me. The moment I saw him, a wave of relief washed over me. For the first time since the shooting, I felt anchored again, connected to what remained of our family.
He hugged me gently, and for once, nothing hurt.
Chris quickly took charge of everything beyond my hospital room. He managed the flow of visitors and handled whatever needed attention outside those walls. He told me that John had moved the alpacas and the other animals from the farm, and the worry I’d been carrying about them finally lifted.
He kept me informed about the funeral arrangements for Mom and Dad. He even went out and bought me new clothes—a pair of pants and a light blue long-sleeved shirt with snap buttons—since the ones I’d arrived in were ruined and bloodied.
My little brother was taking care of his big brother.
Uncle Rusty came as soon as he could. After hearing my voicemail, my brother called him directly. “He did it,” Chris said. “He finally did it.” Chris and others had already voiced concern for our safety, but we had brushed it aside, believing we would be fine. My brother’s worry, it turned out, was justified.
Rusty didn’t understand at first. He asked what Chris meant, and then the words landed: Dale Eagle had killed my mom and dad. After the call ended, Uncle Rusty contacted the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, hoping for confirmation, but they wouldn’t release any information. He then called the Morgantown television news station, which shared what they could. That was when the truth settled in. His sister and brother-in-law had been murdered.
He and my cousin Rochelle drove an hour and forty-five minutes to Spartanburg. They arrived at my grandparents house. With my Memaw on one side of him and my Pepaw on the other, he held their hands on their couch and told them what happened. My cousin Rochelle took my Aunt Theresa outside to the driveway to tell her.
Uncle Rusty told my grandparents to stay in Spartanburg until he had news on my condition. Then he would send for them. So he and my cousin drove up to Morgantown to be with me.
When they arrived, Uncle Rusty held himself together the way people do when someone else needs them. Almost immediately, he began joking—his instinctive defense against the weight in the room. The humor came fast and nonstop, not because anything was funny, but because pressure needs an escape. I don’t remember his exact words; the pain medication blurred the details. What I remember is the cadence of his voice, the way it filled the space, becoming a kind of rhythm—offbeat, weary, but persistent.
A few times I had to ask him to slow down so I could rest. He slept on a cot beside me that night, his presence a strange mix of comfort and concern.
Seeing all of them brought peace. It felt like the first glimpse of familiar mountains after a long drive away from home. I wasn’t alone—not spiritually, not physically, not emotionally.
The nurses scheduled blocks of time with no visitors so I could rest. I wanted to watch television, but they were advised against it. The shooting was everywhere—on every channel, in every crawl. Reporters were interviewing people who sympathized with my parents and me, and others who didn’t. They were trying to protect me from all of it.
It didn’t entirely work.
I overheard enough to know that Dale’s brother had gone on television and said we deserved what we got. That we had it coming. The words forced their way into the room anyway, and when they did, my blood boiled. I wanted to defend my parents. I wanted to fight for them the way they had always fought for me. The idea that anyone could believe we deserved to die filled me with anger.
At one point, a nurse tried to distract me by turning on the television and landing on SpongeBob. I snapped and told her to turn it off. I can’t stand SpongeBob.
My appearance startled people. In the twenty-four hours since the shooting, the right side of my face had swollen until it felt heavy. My hair was still matted with dried blood. My right eye was blood red. Bruises and small puncture wounds dotted my neck and right side of my face.
Some friends and family gasped when they saw me. I told them it wasn’t as bad as it looked, that I hadn’t been cleared to clean up yet. Still, seeing their reactions made me self-conscious. I could read the truth in their faces even as they tried to hide it.
And yet, no one looked away. No one avoided my eyes. They saw me—all of me—even the parts that didn’t look like me anymore.
By the second day, the swelling began to ease. As it did, the right side of my face started to leak—plasma seeping from the small holes left by the scattershot. It smelled like warm salt and iron. It wasn’t painful, just gross. I kept a towel pressed to my head, and the nurses had to change it several times because the drainage was constant.
The good news was that my head slowly returned to its original shape. I no longer looked like Sloth from The Goonies. Humor became a strange kind of medicine. Around the right people, I leaned into it.
“Hey, you guyyys!”
“Sloth like Chunk! Rocky Road!”
I saved the jokes for those who would get the reference and laugh. Laughter, even brief, lifted the heaviness in the room and reminded me I was still myself.
Once the swelling went down and the leaking stopped, the nurses finally cleared me to shower. The warm water was the first real comfort I’d felt since the shooting. As it hit me, the water turned auburn—days of dried blood dissolving and washing away. I hadn’t realized how much was still clinging to me until I watched it run down the drain.
Then I heard small clinks against the shower floor.
Metal.
Tiny scattershot pellets, about the size of BBs, falling from my hair. I bent down and picked them up, one by one, and asked for a bag to put them in. My brother thought it was gross. The nurse kept a straight face, though I’m sure she thought it was strange. I’ve kept that bag ever since. Over the years, when another piece of metal works its way out of me, it joins the others.
When I finished and looked in the mirror, the glass was clear—but what stared back at me was hard to take in. Extensive bruising spread across my neck, face, and chest, dark and deep. Dozens of small wounds marked where the scattershot had entered. I was alive, but visibly altered, my body telling the story before I was ready to put words to it.
I still couldn’t open my mouth all the way, but I managed to work the toothbrush in. My mouth was dry, coated with a metallic taste. As I brushed and spit into the sink, I heard the faint clatter of more metal hitting porcelain. I scrubbed carefully, pulling out as many fragments as I could.
When I finished, my jaw opened a little wider than before. The relief was small but real. Each piece of metal removed felt like reclaiming something of myself—one quiet step back toward being human again.
On the third day, my brother surprised me with my glasses. The police had found them and returned them. They were bent and cracked, the right plastic arm shattered so it pinched behind my ear, but they still worked.
When I put them on, the first thing that came into focus was my brother and his wife standing together. After days of blur and distortion, seeing them clearly felt like clarity itself returning. I normally wore contacts, but that day I’d been wearing my glasses, and having them back mattered more than I expected.
Being able to see again brought everything into focus—literally and emotionally. It was a quiet reminder that vision isn’t only physical, and that some things come into focus slowly, through pain, patience, and prayer.
I continued to pray each day. Not in desperation anymore, but in steady conversation—like walking the fence line, checking posts, making sure everything still held.
I never forgot that my parents were gone. The awareness rested beneath everything like bedrock. It never lifted. But neither did the peace God had given me the night before. It stayed with me—quiet, steady—like a lantern that refused to go out no matter how dark the room became.
Healing didn’t arrive dramatically. It came the way sunrise does in the mountains, light creeping in inch by inch, revealing what had survived, what was scarred, and what still had life ahead. The hospital staff treated me well. I felt cared for. Police protection remained in place, a reminder that danger hadn’t fully passed.
I slept very little the first night—too much pain, too much shock, too much spiritual weight. Over the next two nights, the medication finally pulled me into deeper rest. Through all of it, I kept praying. I kept listening. I kept speaking life into the people who came to see me.
It felt as though God had entrusted me with more than survival. I had been asked to stand in for my parents—to comfort those who mourned them, to say the words they would have spoken, to remind others that darkness does not get the final word.
Looking back now, I can see that those first days in the hospital were more than a blur of procedures, visitors, and slow physical recovery. They were the hinge between two eras of my life—the dividing line between who I had been on the farm with Mom and Dad and who I would have to become without them. The peace God gave me that first night didn’t erase the loss, but it steadied me for the road ahead, the same way my parents had steadied me on mountain trails and muddy farm paths growing up.
In that hospital room—wrapped in towels, bruises, prayers, and the quiet hum of machines—I felt the faint beginning of something I didn’t yet have words for. Not healing exactly. Not closure. But a slow turning toward the life still waiting for me. I didn’t yet know how I would carry the weight of what had happened or how I would honor the faith and resilience my parents had passed down. I only knew that I would carry it.
And each morning, as light filtered patiently through the hospital curtains, I sensed that the same God who had held me through the night would walk with me into whatever came next.
And what came next would not be easy. The first step in this new life would be the hardest one yet—the funeral. Standing beside my family. Saying goodbye to my parents.