Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009

Lives of a Minnesota family changed forever by a mistake made by a deer hunter

MINNEAPOLIS -- The call came about 10 that Sunday night. Kimberly Van Tassel, then 30, already had put her two kids, Janelle, 8, and Brandon, 4, to bed. This was on opening weekend of the 1989 Minnesota deer season.

She had married her husband, Kim, 10 years earlier, and when she did she knew only in the abstract what it meant to be a "hunter's widow." She hadn't grown up in a hunting family, and when she and Kim became high school sweethearts at a suburban Minneapolis high school, the notion that a boyfriend or husband would be gone for long periods during the fall was foreign to her.

No longer. During their decade-long marriage, Kim, 31, had ventured far and wide in autumn to chase deer and elk, pheasants, ducks and bear. "He had warned me," Kimberly said. "He said he was a hunter, and there were certain things he would do in fall, and that I should know that before I married him."

Still, Kimberly was upset when the phone rang so late that Sunday night. Her husband had promised to call early enough to say good night to the kids. But 7 o'clock came and went. Then 8, and 9.

Finally, Kimberly tucked the kids in.

Now, past 10 p.m., the phone rang.

"How are you doing?" a voice on the other end said. It wasn't Kim, but a cousin of his who was with Kim far up north, in Roseau County, hunting deer.

"What do you mean, how am I doing?" Kimberly responded. "Put Kim on the phone."

Just then the front door bell rang.

Kimberly didn't know it, but there had been a mixup. Her mother, father and brother were at the door. By now, they were supposed to have told Kimberly about the accident -- about how Kim had been killed a few hours earlier.

Mistaken for a deer by another hunter, perhaps after legal shooting hours, Kim had been riding his three-wheeler back to camp when shots rang out. One hit him under his right armpit.

Kimberly could tell immediately after she opened the door that her mom, dad and brother had been crying.

She said: "Just tell me. Is he dead?"

Flash forward 20 years

It's early November, and Kimberly Van Tassel -- now Kimberly Van Tassel Trapp -- sits in a coffee shop not far from the high school where she and Kim first met.

Remarried now, and happily so, she and her husband, Larry, have a daughter, Jordan, 16, in addition to Janelle, now 28, and Brandon, 24. So on the eve of Minnesota's 2009 deer hunting season, everything's different.

Time, they say, heals everything.

Not really, Kimberly says.

"It's all still vivid in my mind," she says. "I still remember the phone call that night. And I remember removing all the guns from my house for many, many years. Brandon was too young to remember a lot about his dad. Janelle was older and she remembers more. But she didn't understand everything. I remember having to tell her that her dad wouldn't be coming back. She didn't quite understand."

Now these many years later, Kimberly still knows nothing about hunting. But she knows this:

"If you're a deer hunter and you're going hunting next weekend, you better think before you shoot. A shot you take might be just one moment in time for you. But for me, a shot changed my life forever. And not just my life, but the lives of my kids, my parents and family, Kim's parents and family, everyone who was in that hunting party, everyone Kim knew.

"One shot and everything changes just like that. You never get over it."

Friends still feel the pain

Gerrald Sizer is 64 and lives in Florida. He was 44 in 1989, living in Minnesota, and one of a dozen hunters in Kim Van Tassel's party.

"I've never forgotten that day," he said. "Other than Vietnam, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It changed all of our lives forever."

Sizer had climbed down from his deer hunting stand just before 5 p.m. that Sunday, Nov. 6, 1989, and hiked back to the group's shack. The hunting day for him had ended, and he and a few others in the group were standing around, waiting for everyone to show up, and waiting also to see if anyone had killed a deer.

Darkness descended. The air took on a chill.

"If I recall, it was about 5:20 when we heard the shots," Sizer said. "Someone said, 'What the hell was that? It can't be Kim. He wouldn't shoot that late.'"

Kim was known to be a good hunter, and he had taken particular pride in a Pope and Young buck he had arrowed a few years earlier that had landed him on the cover of a hunting magazine.

Fifteen minutes passed. Then a neighboring hunter ran out of the woods, toward the group's shack.

"He was hysterical, saying he had shot Kim," Sizer said.

A search was begun. But the group's hunting area was large, there was no moon, and no one knew exactly where the shooting had occurred. "We looked and looked," Sizer said. "Then we went back to the camp and I physically grabbed the guy and said, 'You're going to show us where this happened.'"

Police were called. Some of the hunters convulsed in shock. Kim's body still couldn't be found.

"All of the fun of the hunting camp had been long forgotten," Sizer said, adding: "Finally we spread out with flashlights in the area where we were told Kim was. We found him. He was dead. The coroner came and I took him out there on my four-wheeler. The body was hard to handle. It took us quite some time in the dark to get him across a field and across a large ditch. Then we loaded him into a hearse."

Lives change

Seven hundred people attended Kim Van Tassel's funeral.

Sifting recently through the guest book that people signed that day, Kimberly Van Tassel Trapp realized how many people she knew then that she doesn't know now.

"You look at those names and you realize how much your life did change," she said. "When something like this happens, you lose so much more than one person. You try to keep it together, but everything changes.

"There were four couples of us back then that hung together. The wives in particular were close because in fall we were all hunters' widows. After Kim died, the dynamics of that changed. Everything changed.

"If you're a hunter and you're looking through your scope and you're not sure what it is you see, why would you shoot? Every moment in our life since that time has been shadowed in sadness."

There's no going back

Gerald Sizer and some of the hunters who were with Kim Van Tassel on opening weekend 1989 tried a couple years later to return to the same shack during whitetail season. By then, the man who had shot Kim had been convicted of second-degree manslaughter, a felony, and jailed.

But returning to their old hunting grounds proved a bad idea, and wasn't repeated.

Sizer has since purchased 80 acres not far from Lake Mille Lacs, and he and his son and now grandsons hunt deer there, along with a few others.

Sizer's routine this week won't differ much from previous years. He'll fly back from Florida, get the camp ready and have dinner prepared when the hunters arrive Friday evening. Then he'll hand out the camp's written safety rules.

"Deer hunting is a great sport," he said. "I love it. But we take it seriously. If someone's in camp who we think isn't a safe hunter, we don't invite him back. I love hunting with my son and now my grandsons. But if the year Kim was killed hadn't been my son's first year of hunting, it would have been my last year of hunting. I wouldn't have come back.

"I literally do jump now every time I hear a round go off."

Following in dad's footsteps

Kimberly Van Tassel Trapp sips from her coffee cup and opens a file a few inches thick. In it are mementoes of her former husband's life, and the long trail of paperwork that followed his death.

Paging through it, she tears up, apologizes, and wipes her eyes.

"Brandon is 24 now, and has just started hunting this year," she says. "He's grown a beard and looks like his dad. He's hunted only birds so far. He doesn't really have anyone to go deer hunting with, and that's not something you just pick up on your own. So maybe he'll do it in the future, and maybe he won't. I don't know.

"I know I will never stop Brandon from hunting. He was 4 when his dad died, and never really knew him. But now he wants to do the same things his dad did. I guess if it's in your blood, it's in your blood."