Page 76

Mount Vernon, Washington

M ore than a thousand kids, friends, and family pile into Skagit Valley College’s McIntyre Hall. There are too many to fit in the auditorium. Stacy had no idea there’d be this many. She and her family rolled in the night before and congregated at the Bertelsen Winery.

She’s so grateful to her cousin Stuart and his wife, Kathleen.

They swept into town and booked a hotel and a vast house to hold everyone and they’d taken care of all the logistics.

Kathleen introduced Stacy to a friend who was a PR executive in Boston and who stepped in to act as the gatekeeper between the Chapins and the swarm of media people seeking their attention.

It’s been a whirlwind few days for Stacy, and the kindness of people has been as overwhelming as her grief.

She was dreading putting Maizie and Hunter in sleeping bags on the living-room floor of the condo. She longed to be able to tuck her two surviving children in at night in a proper bed, to reassure them in the way only a mother knows how.

Her best friend, Susie DeVries, had intuited this ahead of time. The Chapins arrived to find Susie had bought out the linen department at Bed Bath and Beyond and purchased a pair of inflatable mattresses as well.

That wasn’t all. Also intuiting that in the window between now and Ethan’s memorial, the Chapins would not have the bandwidth for chats with random people, Susie banned visitors. She also brought a carload of food and organized a meal train.

Kirk Duffy, the director of Hawthorne Funeral Home and Memorial Park, had brought Ethan’s body back from Spokane, as he promised.

He’d also persuaded Stacy and the others to view Ethan in the casket.

The Chapins had been reluctant. Stacy knew from the coroner that the stab wounds that had killed Ethan were below his collar line. But even so… she was afraid of what she’d see.

Duffy had been firm, however. He told Stacy: “I’ve done this for a very long time and you need to see him.”

In hindsight, Stacy knows the funeral director was right. She’s grateful.

Stacy tucked a dry sock and, out of habit, a Taco Bell card into Ethan’s coffin. “God forbid the guy would go hungry,” she later said. She watched, surprised and touched, as Jim added a golf tee.

In front of the massive crowd of mourners at the memorial service, she says that, during the viewing, while she was gazing at her son and the mustache he’d grown and that she hadn’t been such a fan of, Hunter had nudged her and said, “You guys know the real reason he has the mustache, right? He watched the new Top Gun movie and he wanted to look just like those guys on the sand volleyball court.”

Stacy had not known that!

She and Jim spent hours working on their respective eulogies.

Jim was adamant that they tell the college kids that they must get on with their lives, that they cannot be derailed by this.

Jim has always been a glass-half-full kind of person. He’s viewed his life as a blessing, with Stacy and the triplets being the greatest blessings of all. He’d gotten a second chance in the wake of an unhappy first marriage, and he wants to make the most of every moment.

He’s the husband and dad who keeps them all going. “It’s all good,” he tells them whenever they are tired or cross.

If he’s ever had a mean thought, Stacy doesn’t know about it. She can feel how proud he is of her almost every hour. It has always buoyed her.

So when it’s Jim’s turn to speak, he puts on his Vandals cap and gives the young people in the audience a directive to follow, for Ethan’s sake.

His son, he says, “would love for all you kids to get back to school as safely and quickly as you can, to carry on what he was carrying on there. It’s very important… that you kids get back after you’ve healed… We all have a lot of that going on, but I want you to go back.”

When Stacy speaks, she says that it’s essential that, in addition to celebrating Ethan’s personality and life, she needs to clarify how he died and debunk the nefarious rumors swirling around, not just for her own family but to ease the suffering of everyone in the room.

“So we want to speak about what has happened to our son, not about the investigation, but we want you to know a couple of things that make us feel better about what happened that day,” she says. “There were no drugs involved; the autopsy cleared that. There were no love—weird love triangles.

“Ethan Chapin was where he wanted to be,” she continues.

“He’d had a wonderful day and in the end he was staying at his girlfriend’s house.

I mean, what a great thing, right?… So I mean, that’s supposed to make you feel better.

I mean, none of us could have changed the outcome of that day.

Ethan was asleep when this really tragic event occurred, and we want you to know that no phone call would’ve saved him.

He did not suffer. It went very quickly. ”

And when Stacy gets to the subject of Ethan’s mustache, she uses the levity it causes to make a serious point to the parents in the room.

“I do want to remind you that in the end, those battles don’t matter. Hair, mustache—those aren’t the battles you pick with your kids. It just doesn’t matter. Pick the hard ones.”

Stacy mentions that Ethan’s and Xana’s best friends, Hunter Johnson and Emily Alandt, are watching the service via live stream.

She doesn’t mention that they aren’t there in person partly because they are afraid Ethan’s murderer is coming for them next.

Stacy also doesn’t mention the starkly obvious fact that the other three victims’ families are not holding public services for their kids out of fear that whoever did this might attend.

“My wife’s biggest fear,” Steve Goncalves later told ABC News, “part of the reason we didn’t have a funeral, is because she couldn’t be guaranteed that that monster was going to not be there.”

Unlike the other families, the Chapins are not fearful.

Chris Cammock, the local police chief, is a friend.

There’s a small police presence outside Ethan’s service, but that’s to cope with the crowd.

The question of who the perpetrator was and what he might do next is just not something they think about.

“Nothing can bring Ethan back,” Stacy says. Her focus now is exclusively on her living kids.

She concludes her eulogy: “Ethan was an amazing human and we’re so lucky to get to call him son and friend.

So thank you, all of you. I am not sure what tomorrow looks like in our family.

I do know that the four of us will make it.

It is going to change the look of what we’ve had for twenty years, but we’ll do it.

Ethan would want that for us. He would want that for all of you.

He wants that for you kids. He wants that for his brother and sister.

And that is what we, if there’s anything to take away from this, it’s to know that Ethan Chapin would want the very best for all of you no matter what it is. …

“It’s incredible that a man so young has touched so many of us.

May we continue to carry his kindness and his smile through all of our years, and when night skies are clear, wherever you are, look to the brightest star in the sky and send him your love.

Certain people feel it. We love him. May he be your guiding light. ”

Nearly two years later, Stacy watched the video of the service and said, “I wouldn’t change one thing.”