A drink-fuelled night ends in the worst kind of tragedy
The incident that was going to kill Francis Daniel Brohm was going to be a devastating shock to his family and friends, a blow that was going to be hard for them to recover from, so sudden was the loss.
But it was going to be more of a shock to his best friend, John Kemper Hutcherson, his killer.
At the time of the incident in August 2004, they were both young men, Francis 23 and John 21, and had been lifelong friends since high school, some would say as close as brothers.
The night they went out for a drink together was nothing special, nothing they hadn’t done hundreds of times before on a Saturday night. Their usual plan was to start early and finish late, drink as much as possible, and have a great time.
This time they may have overdone it. Sometime in the early hours of Sunday morning, Francis Daniel Brohm complained of feeling unwell and the young men, both incredibly drunk, decided to call it a night.
Hutcherson was behind the wheel, following the same path home he had driven countless times, while both drunk and sober, but this time Brohm unusually emptying the contents of his stomach out of the passenger window after every twist and turn the car made.
The following Sunday morning, the police were called to arrest Hutcherson for the murder of Brohm.
They found him still fast asleep in his bed, still drop-down drunk from the night before, his memory still soaked in the beers from the night before, his clothes still splattered with the blood of his best friend.
He had no memory initially of what had happened mere hours earlier, but when the police question him about his recollection of the night before, he vaguely recalled swerving to avoid another vehicle, clipping something then waking up to find himself under arrest.
They then explained to him fully what had happened and the blood drained from his face to be replaced by sheer anguish and disbelief.
The swerve off the road had forced Hutcherson’s truck towards a telephone pole. Amazingly, he had avoided a head-on impact, just the support wire from the pole sheering off the mirror. Minor damage that could have resulted in a major accident.
Unfortunately, his best friend was still hanging out of the window at the time and the same wire sliced completely through his neck, decapitating him.
Too drunk to notice what had just happened, Hutcherson continued to drive the remaining miles to his home, parked in his driveway, stumbled up to bed, and left the headless body of his best friend still hanging out of the window.
The grisly scene was discovered by a neighbor out for a walk with his daughter, and the police were called.
John Kemper Hutcherson, at 21 years old, was charged with a DUI, failure to stop even though he had been completely unaware of the accident at the time, and first-degree vehicle homicide.
The Brohm family asked for leniency when the case came to trial the following year in 2005, understanding that no one was to blame, that it was a one-in-a-million accident. Perhaps because of this the judge only sentenced him to five years in prison.
Maybe also because he understood that in one night one man had tragically lost his life in a horrific fashion, while the other would have to live with the memory of a life-ending and life-changing incident for a lifetime.