Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 17, 1994 TAG: 9407130041
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MELISSA DeVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ELLISTON LENGTH: Medium
\ Claude Garlick walked along the median of Interstate 81, looking for a sign or a detail - anything to help answer the question "why?"
He wanted to know why his cousin Chucky Taylor had flipped his truck. He wanted to know why the 18-year-old was in that particular place at that particular time. He wanted to know why Taylor had to die.
As he walked along the median, Garlick, called "Coco" by his friends, found a lighter he had given Taylor last Christmas. It was small and silver, with a miniature deer's head carved on the side. Taylor always carried it in his pocket.
It was at that moment that Garlick, 21, thought of the cross.
"I wanted people to know who Chucky was," Garlick said. "I wanted people to know where he was. That lighter was sitting there face up at my feet, and that's the spot where I put the cross."
The cross is made of two pieces of 2-by-4 lumber, notched at the center and attached with roofing nails. Garlick's cousin Tina Stanger stenciled in the letters "In Loving Memory" down the vertical board, and "Chucky" across the horizontal one. Garlick used a wood burner to fill in the letters, and his fiancee, Amy Bolt, painted the letters yellow.
Taylor's mother draped purple flowers and a lavender ribbon on the cross. A friend placed a flower from Taylor's casket bouquet at the base of the cross.
Then they hammered the cross into the median of the busy interstate highway a week after Taylor died.
"It was really hard losing Chucky, because you could be doing something and - bang - he'd be there," Garlick said. "I miss him showing up like that all the time. And he had so much energy. At school, he didn't sit in a desk, but more like around it. He had long arms and legs, and he didn't like to sit still much."
It was like a sad sort of deja vu in late March when Garlick received the call that his cousin had crashed his pickup truck. The Elliston youth was on his way to work at a grocery store in Salem - not drinking or fooling around, but just trying to get to work.
Eleven years ago, Garlick's brother, Lewis "Bunkey" Garlick, also 18 years old, crashed his truck and died on a winding secondary road in Elliston, only a few miles from where Taylor died.
"When my brother died, he had been heading down a hard road," Garlick said. "For him, [the car crash] sort of got him out of something bad. But with Chucky, it was different. He made straight A's except for English, and he was a whiz in math."
Taylor was wearing his seat belt when the accident occurred.
Stanger, Taylor's 18-year-old cousin, said Taylor was planning to enter the Navy after graduation.
"He was the only one in our family who knew what in the world was going on," she said. "When they said he was dead, I thought it should've been me. I had my chance at graduation. I had my shot at college."
The cross on the interstate, there to remind passers-by of the energetic youth who loved people, will come down Saturday, a day after Taylor was to have graduated. His parents, Charles and Debra Taylor, will accept the young man's diploma tonight at Shawsville High School's graduation.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB