Читать книгу Seeing Off the Johns - Rene S Perez II - Страница 11

John Robison’s Explorer blew a tire and rolled over when he took a curve too fast just outside of Beeville, TX. Why the boys ended up there was anyone’s guess. The quickest route to Austin from Greenton was to take 16 to San Antonio and 35 from there to Austin. It would have been a four-hour drive. As it was, they had either veered from that route after Benavides, going east to Highway 77 outside of Kingsville and taking that north. Or driven over to Corpus and taken the Harbor Bridge into Portland and up north. Whichever was the case, the Johns ended up on Highway 181. They filled the Explorer up in Papalote, which made the rollover crash they would get in some seventeen miles up the road that much more volatile. It was the cause of the Johns’ caskets being closed. Lawyers were already, just three days later, making their way to Greenton from Florida and from all over Texas too, where class-action lawsuits were being organized against Ford and Firestone. Ambulance chasers hoped they could talk either the Robisons or the Mejias into foregoing the potential years-long wait of such a suit and make quick money in a settlement.

Representatives from both Ford and Firestone were at the funeral, where it was assumed they were sympathetic mourners from somewhere in South Texas. When a Firestone business card was revealed, a sheriffs’s deputy unholstered his truncheon and an old man grabbed the hunting rifle that had been stowed in his truck. Neither said anything. They just held their weapons across their chests. The Firestone suits never even got to speak with the parents of either boy before they got in their cars and drove away, followed quickly by the Ford representatives who saw just how their presence would have been received had they had the chance to say who they were.