Latest / Haunted Horror Stories / He Came Back for Control: The Thanksgiving Massacre in Kansas

Transcript

He Came Back for Control: The Thanksgiving Massacre in Kansas · Haunted Horror Stories

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: A 10-year-old boy was cleaning coins at the kitchen table
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: with his mother when the front door opened. He dropped
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: under the table. He ran. He was the only one
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: who made it out. That detail, a child counting quarters,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: while his family was still alive, is the one that
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: stayed with me long after I finished reading every page
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: of this case. What happened inside that farmhouse in rural
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Kansas on November 28th 2009 took less than 10 minutes.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: It killed three people, instantly, and wounded a fourth, who
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: held on for three more days. The man responsible walked
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: away through a frozen field, slept in a drainage ditch,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: and surrendered the next morning holding a knife, a pistol,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: and hundreds of dollars in cash. He was the father.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: He was the husband. He had been the one who
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: planned everything. This is the story of the Seekert family.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: And of what a man will do and control is
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: the only thing he has ever understood. There is something
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: in this case that resists easy summary. Every time I
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: thought I had a clean line through it, another detail
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: pulled the ground out from under it. On the morning
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: of November 29th, 2009, a man was found walking in
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: a roadside ditch in rural Kansas. He was disheveled. disoriented
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: by appearances, and carrying a MAC-90 rifle in a long
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: white box inside the truck parked 800 meters away. When
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: deputies approached him, he didn't run. He said he was
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: the man they were looking for. His name was James Seckert.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: He was 46 years old, and the night before, inside
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: a farmhouse less than a mile from that ditch, Three
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: members of his family were dead, and one was dying.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: The farmhouse belonged to Dorothy Wright, 89 years old, the
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: great-grandmother on the maternal side. It sat outside a Kansas
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: town with fewer than 1,000 residents, flat land in every direction,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: the kind of place where you can see a vehicle
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: coming from half a mile away. and still not know
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: why it arrived. Dorothy had lived there long enough that
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: the house carried the specific weight of accumulated family time.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Photographs layered over photographs, furniture that no one moved because
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: it had always been there. Karen Seacat had driven there
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: for Thanksgiving with her three children. Karen was a fitness
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: instructor and a health sciences student at the University of Missouri.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: She was building a version of her life that didn't
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: include James anymore, and she was two states away from
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: the town where she'd last lived with him. The farmhouse
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: was safe. It was family. It was Thanksgiving. Emily was 18,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: and in her first year of pharmacy school, she played
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: drums in a local band and sang. Loren was 16,
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: the bass player in the same band, a junior in
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: high school. Shan was 10. He was the youngest. He
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: had been cleaning coins with his mother at the kitchen
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: table when the evening changed. Here is what the evidence reconstructed.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: James Seacat drove to that farmhouse in a red pickup truck.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Neighbors named Michelle and Trevor Gibson, living a block and
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: a half to the west, reported seeing the truck and
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: a man carrying a large object toward the house. James entered.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: He fired at Karen in the kitchen first. Shan dropped, crawled.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: and went out the back door. He watched his father pass.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: He pulled the front door, shut behind him, heard one
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: or two more shots, and ran to the neighbor's house barefoot. Inside,
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Emily was found behind the sofa. Loren was on the
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: second floor. Before she lost consciousness, she told the first
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: deputy on scene, Nathan Perling, that her father was the
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: one who had shot her, Dorothy, who had been in
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: the house was struck once and survived long enough to
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: be transported to a hospital in Topeka. During that transport,
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: she identified James to the emergency medical technician by name.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: Four people shot. One child who ran fast enough. James
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: had purchased the MAC-90 rifle in Texas, caliber 7.62. It
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: was chambered for the kind of round that doesn't leave
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: much ambiguity about intent. He had driven across state lines
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: with it, with a loaded magazine, with gloves, and a flashlight,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: and a hunting bag. He had anxiety medication in his
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: pack that, according to the defense, he had not taken.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: None of that explains... what led to a family gathered
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: for a holiday meal becoming four shooting victims before six
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: in the evening. For that, you have to go back
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: further to a marriage that had been fracturing for years,
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: to a man who experienced the end of his control
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: as something he could not survive. What James Seacott did
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: on Thanksgiving did not come from nowhere, and the path
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: that brought him to that farmhouse door is in some
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: ways more disturbing than the night itself. The marriage had
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: been fracturing for years before Karen ever asked for a divorce.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: What looked like a stable household from the outside, the
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: engineer's salary, the suburban address, the three children in school,
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: was built on a system of control so precise it
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: had its own schedule. Karen's sister Lynn was the first
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: to understand the shape of it. James assigned times for sex.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: He assigned times for sleep. He assigned times for sleep.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Every purchase required a receipt, submitted for review. Lynn testified
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: later that Karen had been living inside a set of
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: rules she hadn't agreed to. Rules that tightened whenever she
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: moved toward. Something that was hers alone. The gym was
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: hers alone. Karen started going after the family moved to
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Wichita in 1919-1990. And somewhere in those hours of her
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: own choosing, she met Sonia, a fitness instructor. The friendship
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: became something more. James noticed his response was not to
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: address the marriage. It was to relocate the family to Columbia,
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: Missouri in June of 2008, putting distance between Karen and
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: the one place she felt free. The relationship continued anyway.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: Distance didn't work. Nothing James tried worked. Because the problem,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: from Karen's perspective, was James. Three months after Karen filed
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: for divorce, James was arrested for domestic assault. March of 2009,
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Karen reported injuries on her arms. James told investigators he
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: had only tried to hug her. The charge was third-degree
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: domestic battery, and it was the only criminal record he
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: had ever accumulated in 46 years. The courts processed it.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Life continued, but by September, James had lost his director
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: position at the multinational firm. He owed more than $ 3, 000
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: in child support. He moved back into his parents' house.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: The structure he had built, the title, The Income, The Authority,
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: was gone. Karen took the children to Dorothy Wright's farmhouse
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: for Thanksgiving, a grandmother's farm in a Kansas town of
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: fewer than 1,000 people. There was no reason to believe
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: the distance mattered anymore. James had no job to return to.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: He had a court date and a debt and a
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: room in his parents' home. The rational reading of that
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: moment was that the worst was over. The rational reading
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: was wrong. Forensic pathologist Eric Michel testified that each of
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: the three women shot inside the farmhouse received two bullets.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: Dorothy Wright received one. Every shot was lethal. The grouping
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: was not the work of panic or confusion. It was methodical.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: James had driven from Missouri to Kansas, entered through the kitchen,
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: and moved through the house room by room. Karen died
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: in the kitchen. Emily, 18 years old, her first semester
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: of pharmacy school behind her, was found behind the sofa
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: in the living room, as though she had tried to
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: make herself small enough to disappear. Lorraine, Sixteen was on
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: the second floor. Deputy Nathan Perling arrived to find Loren
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: still alive. She told him who had done it. She
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: named her father. Then she died. The defense would later
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: argue that the blood on the staircase could have come
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: from a previous visit. Investigators from the Kansas Bureau of
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: Investigation acknowledged it was technically possible. They also noted that
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: James carried anxiety medication in his pack. The night he
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: was arrested, the pills were untouched. His own defense team
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: psychiatric expert concluded James was mentally competent at the time
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: of the crime. Every path toward a softened explanation collapsed
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: under its own weight. Sean was 10 years old. He
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: had been sitting at the kitchen table with his mother,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: cleaning coins. When his father walked through the door, he
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: described it later. Two years afterward, via video link at
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: age 12, in a courtroom, he never had to enter
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: in person. James came in and started shooting. Shan dropped
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: to the floor. He crawled to the back door, pushed
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: through it, ran. He heard one or two more shots
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: as he moved across the dark yard. He did not
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: look back. He ran to the neighbor's house and told
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: them what had happened. That is the detail that does
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: not leave Not the weapon, not the planning, not the planning,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: not the eight-hour search that followed. It is the coins.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: A ten-year-old boy and his mother, cleaning coins together on
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: a holiday evening. And then the door opened. The ordinary
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: and the catastrophic exist in the same second, and there
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: is no transition between them. Shan got out. His mother
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: did not. His sisters did not. Dorothy Wright, 89 years old,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: survived the night but died three days later in a
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: Topeka hospital. And during the ambulance transport, she told the
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: emergency medical technician exactly what happened. headshot her. Two dying declarations,
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: from Lauren and from Dorothy, given in the minutes and
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: hours before each of them was gone, both naming the
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: same man. The MAC90 rifle, caliber 7.62, was in a
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: long white box in James' truck. The truck was parked
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: approximately 800 meters from the ditch, where James was found
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: the next morning. He had gloves. He had a hunting bag.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: He had a flashlight. He had hundreds of dollars in cash.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: The preparation was not the preparation of someone who had
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: lost control of himself. It was the preparation of someone
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: who had made a decision and pecked for it. And
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: yet when Deputy Perling and the search teams found him
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: at 7 in the morning, walking in a ditch, confused
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: and disheveled, James Seacott said he was the man they
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: were looking for. He handed over the knife and the pistol.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: He did not run. He did not resist. He surrendered
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: with the same deliberateness with which the evidence suggested he
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: had done everything else. The defense argued diminished capacity. The
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: prosecution argued the opposite. At every item in that pack.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: At every item in that pack. Every mile of that drive,
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: every bullet placed into the MAC901. was the action of
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: a man who knew exactly what he was doing and
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: had chosen to do it. The jury deliberated for two hours.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: There is a version of this case that the defense
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: tried to build. and it deserves to be examined before
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: it is set aside. James Seacat had lost everything within
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: the span of 18 months. The career, the marriage, the household,
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: the daily proximity to his children, all of it gone
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: before he turned 47. His attorneys argued that the abolition
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: of the insanity defense in Kansas in 1995 had denied
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: him a meaningful legal protection that a man in the
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: grip of mental collapse should have access to a defense
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: that acknowledged that collapse. The Kansas Supreme Court disagreed in 2018.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: The United States Supreme Court agreed with Kansas in 2020,
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: ruling that states are constitutionally permitted to eliminate the insanity defense.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: James' argument reached the highest court in the country and
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: was turned back. What makes this harder to resolve is
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: not the legal questions. The legal question has been answered
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: at every level. What remains unresolved is the architecture of
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: the architecture of the act itself. Because planning and grief
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: are not mutually exclusive. A man can be genuinely destroyed
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: by loss and still pack a rifle in a long
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: white box. A man can be genuinely broken and still
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: drive across state lines, still load a weapon Still moved
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: through a house room by room, the defense asked the
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: jury to hold both things at once. The jury declined,
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: and the evidence gave them clear reason to decline. That
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: something in the picture still resists. Easy. James installed spyware
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: on the family computer during the separation, not in a
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: single impulsive moment, but as a sustained effort to monitor
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: a woman who had asked for distance. He proposed a
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: three-way arrangement when he first realized the nature of Karen's
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: relationship with Sonja. When that was rejected, he relocated the
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: family across state lines. When the divorce proceeded anyway, he
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: accumulated debt and and lost his job and still showed
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: up at a farmhouse in a Kansas town of fewer
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: than 1,000 people with a weapon he had purchased in Texas.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: At what point does obsession become something that the word
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: obsession no longer adequately describes? In January of 2023, attorney
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: Julia Schur filed a 27-page appeal 14 grounds for overturning
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: the conviction, 12 of them centered on ineffective legal representation
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: at trial. As of October of that year, the outcome
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: of that appeal was unknown. James Seacat remains on death row,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: one of nine people under capital sentence in Kansas. The
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: appeal is the last known legal action in a case
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: that has moved through every level of the American court system,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: and arrived each time at the same answer. Shan Seket
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: was 24 years old in 2023. He finished high school
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: with the support of his paternal grandparents, Wayne and Patricia Seket,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: the parents of the man who killed his mother. and
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: his sisters. He went to therapy. He built something after
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: the thing that happened to him in a farmhouse kitchen
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: on the evening of November 28th, 2009, when he was
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: ten years old and sitting with his mother, cleaning coins.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: The coins were still on the table when Deputy Perling arrived.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: The trial lasted one week. The jury took two hours.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: On August 25th, 2011, James Seacat was found guilty of
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: capital murder. He was 48 years old. The judge confirmed
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: the death sentence the same day. Two hours of deliberation
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: for four lives and a decade of calculated control. The
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: defense had spent years building toward that courtroom. They argued
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: James was mentally ill, that something had broken in him
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: beyond his own understanding. The jury heard that argument. They
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: also heard Shant. a 12-year-old boy, testifying by video link,
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: describing the moment his mother was shot in the kitchen
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: while they cleaned coins together. No cross-examination dissolved that image.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: No psychiatric theory made it smaller. There is something that
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: still hasn't settled about how this case moved through the
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: legal system after that verdict. Not because the outcome was wrong,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: but because of what came after. The Kansas Supreme Court
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: upheld the sentence in 2018. The United States Supreme Court
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: upheld it in 2020. Specifically rejecting the argument that Kansas'
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: abolition of the insanity defense in 1995 was unconstitutional, the
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: highest court in the country looked at what James Seacat
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: had done and found no procedural exit, no legal architecture
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: that could undo what the evidence showed. Then, in January
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: of 2023, attorney Julia Shaw filed a 27-page appeal. 14
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: grounds for overturning the conviction. 12 of those 14 were
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: about ineffective legal representation, not new evidence, not a different
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: reading of the facts. The argument was that James had
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: not been defended well enough the first time. As of
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: October of that year, no ruling had been issued. James
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: Seacat remains on death row. He is one of nine
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: people currently sentenced to capital punishment in Kansas. There is
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: one more thing that matters here, not a legal detail,
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: a human one. Sean Seacat was 10 years old on
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: the day his father walked through that farmhouse door. By
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: the time he sat before a video camera to testify,
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: he was 12. He described what he saw with the
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: kind of precision that only comes from a memory that
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: will not let go. His father's face. The sound of
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: the first shot. The back door. The cold ground under
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: his feet as he ran. By October of 2023, Shan
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: was 24 years old. He had finished high school. He
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: had done it with the support of his paternal grandparents,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: Wayne and Patricia Seacat, the parents of the man who
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: killed his families. That detail carries a weight that courtroom
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: language cannot hold. The people who raised James were also
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: the people who helped raise what James left behind. Shan
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: had therapy. He had time. What he did not have,
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: and will not have, is the thing that was taken
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: on a Saturday afternoon in November when his mother asked
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: him to help sort through a jar of coins. There
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: are cases that close cleanly. Evidence. Verdict. Sentence. line drawn
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: at the end. This is not one of those cases.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: Karen Seacart wanted to be a health sciences professional. She
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: was enrolled at the University of Missouri when she died.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Emily was in her first year of pharmacy school, playing
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: drums in a band with her sister. Lorraine played bass.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Dorothy Wright was 89 years old, and owned the farmhouse
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: where she had lived long enough to watch her family
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: grow around her. She died four days after the shooting,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: in a hospital in Topeka, never having returned to the
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: home she had offered her great-grandchildren for a holiday. None
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: of them were incidental. They were the center of something.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: What James C. could not tolerate was not the affair,
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: not the divorce, not the humiliation of losing his job
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: or falling behind on child support. What he could not
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: tolerate was that Karen had chosen a life that did
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: not include him, that she had found her own shape.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: Separate from his, he had tracked that shape through spyware
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: on a family computer. He had followed it through a
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: relocation that moved his entire family to another state, and
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: when none of it worked, When she still would not
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: return to the version of herself he had designed, he
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: drove to a farmhouse in rural Kansas on the day
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: after Thanksgiving with a MAC90 rifle in a long white box.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: Lorraine named him before she tied. Dorothy named him from
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: a stretcher in a moving ambulance, and Sean, barefoot in
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: the November dark, ran to the nearest house and told
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: them everything. The coins were still on the kitchen table
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: when the first officer arrived. James had sorted them with
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: his son that morning. In what might have been the
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: last ordinary moment, any of them would ever have. And
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: then he had driven to that farmhouse and made sure
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: there would be no more ordinary moments. The coins stayed
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: where they were. Everything else was taken. What remains is
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: a man on death row. An appeal with no ruling,
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: and a young man named Shan, who finished high school.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: While living with the parents of the person who destroyed
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: his world, the jar was still on the table. Shan
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: was already gone. And somewhere between those two facts is
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: everything this story has to say. This show is made
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: by Opa Media.