Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  Carol turned her attention to thinking about where Jack usually parked the car. She found the street, found the car (by some miracle), and picked up Zack. She remembered being numb and not exactly sure how she’d found the car. She did take some comfort from the reassuring words of a colleague at her law firm who told her that Jack would be fine. “He seemed so assured of that, and I knew intellectually I had no reason to be assured but somehow that assurance carried me out of the building,” she said of the colleague. She remembered having a premonition, a bad feeling “thinking this is it, Jack’s gone.” It was not only because she hadn’t heard from him earlier in the day but also because “Jack was a little bit too good to be true throughout the whole relationship.” She also remembered how the weekend before, when they were together at Costco, shopping for diapers, they had discussed how they wanted Zack to be raised were they both to die.

  She finally made it home with Zack around 6 p.m. She turned on all the radios in the house to different stations as well as all of the televisions, to glean whatever she could about what was going on at 101 California. “They were reporting that a number of people were dead and the count would change, and they weren’t sure how many were dead,” she said. “They knew that the killer was dead. They knew that a number of people were taken out and taken to the hospital. They were showing that on the news. There was [a man] in fact, and I know the man now, it wasn’t Jack, who was wheeled out with a resuscitator, air mask on his face. It’s kind of a classic picture but I remember seeing that on TV the first time that he was rolled out.” She thought at the time that the man in the wheelchair was Jack but soon enough realized it probably wasn’t. She was still having trouble getting information about what was going on. The Bronson lawyers did not seem to know, either. Her instinct was to try to go down to the building and be there with Jack no matter what the outcome turned out to be but she realized she could not leave Zack and, besides, it was very unlikely she would be allowed to get close enough to the building in the first place. She called their friends the Wassermans to come over to be with her and to take care of Zack if she suddenly needed to go out.

  At that point, she had not spoken with Misha and Bluma. “Bluma had a history of having what she thought were heart attacks or little heart things,” Carol said. “I didn’t want to upset them. They already had the news on, too, but they didn’t put any of the pieces together.” They just thought it was another terrible kind of American tragedy, different from the European kind they had suffered themselves. “I didn’t want to trigger bad stuff in them,” she said. “So I thought, That’s needless, I won’t say anything until we either know he’s in the hospital and we know what his condition is or whether he is just hiding someplace and unable to come out, or whether it is the worst, and if it’s the worst then I need to be in Walnut Creek and tell them in person. I’m not going to tell them over the telephone.”

  After speaking with Carol, at around 9 p.m., Rick Stratton, one of the managing partners at Bronson, called someone he knew at the police department and explained that he was a law partner of Jack Berman’s and wanted to know if Jack was on a casualty list. He would surely have had identification on him, Stratton explained to the police official. Had anyone with that name been killed or wounded in the attack? “She was going through a list and she said, ‘No, there is no Mr. Berman there. I don’t have that name.’” He called Carol and said, “Good news—not good news, of course there is no good news tonight—but it looks like Jack isn’t a casualty.” Of course, he did not know for sure because Jack still hadn’t called Carol to check in. “That’s not a good sign,” he continued, “but he’s not on the list.”

  Carol recalled she was somewhat comforted by what Stratton had told her. “I’m already expecting the worst at this point,” she said, “and I’m already kind of beginning in the kind of dry shaking that your body goes through with shock or something and I’m listening to this. I’m thinking, No, my bones are telling me otherwise, but of course you want to be hopeful.” In the middle of the conversation, the operator broke in—“like on TV,” she said—“and I knew then that he was dead.” She told Stratton she had to take the incoming call. “That’s when I got the news that he was identified,” she said. She couldn’t recall exactly who told her but thought it was probably someone from the morgue, since Jack had been dead for around six hours by that point.

  Sharon Wasserman came over and stayed with Zack while her husband, Steve, drove Carol to Walnut Creek to see Jack’s parents. She wanted to make sure they made it out there before the late news because she was certain her in-laws always watched it and she did not want them to get the information from the news. She had made the same trip hundreds of times with Jack, but she got lost. “My brain was on freeze,” she recalled. “It’s like, What exit to take?” They eventually made it to Walnut Creek and to Jack’s parents’ house, through the maze of the subdivision. Understandably, she wasn’t sure how to communicate the information about Jack. There was no good way. “How do I tell these people that have survived the Holocaust … how do I tell them that their younger son who is a lawyer working in a safe downtown building, that he was shot to death?” she said. She realized she just had to do it. “I thought there’s no way other than just tell them,” she continued. “You walk in there and just tell them. Don’t say anything else or don’t build it up or whatever. I remember being that cognizant of I just need to walk in there, and mind you I was not crying. I was just in a different state. I was like a zombie walking.”

  Her in-laws were surprised to see her. She hadn’t called ahead. She had been worried that if she had told them in advance, one or both of them might have a heart attack and she needed to be there, in their presence, if that were to happen. She asked them to sit down. She told them Jack had been murdered. She remembered falling to her knees for about two minutes. She wasn’t crying or anything. They were in shock. Carol recalled, “One of the things that Bluma did keep on saying [was] ‘We just saw him this morning. We just hugged him. I just said goodbye to him this morning.’”

  She told them to pack up some things so that they could all be together back in San Francisco. “It was better for us to be together and there would be things to talk about,” she remembered. “Instinctively I knew they had to come with us. I wasn’t going to leave them there. It’s a small little family and it’s an hour and fifteen minutes away and we needed to all cuddle and be together. We just needed to be together.

  “Bluma [did] a remarkable thing,” she went on. “She is really an incredible woman.” Bluma decided at that moment that she wanted to bring two grapefruits with them. Would that be okay with Carol? “They loved grapefruit,” Carol said, “and I remember … I was just dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to make of the question and I don’t even remember, I probably said, ‘It doesn’t matter, Bluma,’ or something. ‘It doesn’t matter, just whatever you want, or forget it’ or something like that, just kind of dismissed it in some way. But in my brain it wasn’t dismissed at all because it was like talk about doing a survival thing. Isn’t that survival? Isn’t that falling back on what you need to do to put one foot in front of the other? When you don’t know what else to do and you need to keep going forward.”

  Norman and his family were asleep when Carol called them in Boston. It was the start of the July 4 weekend and their car was packed for an early-morning departure for a week’s vacation in Nantucket. He knew about Jack’s case against EDS and that Jack was doing some depositions for it. But he had not been watching the news that day. And of course, there was no internet, no Facebook, and no Twitter. “I think it was one in the morning, two in the morning our time, and it was Carol,” he recalled. “I picked it up, I was in a sound, sound sleep, and she said ‘Hello it’s Carol.’ I said ‘Hi, what’s going on?’ and she said ‘Jack’s been shot.’ You know, it just fully didn’t register, Jack’s been shot? And so I said ‘What?’ and she repeated it, and then I remember saying ‘Well is he okay?’ Because I figured, Ok
ay he’s been wounded or something, so she said, ‘No, he’s dead.’”

  After Norm got off the phone with Carol, he spoke with his parents. “They were stunned, they were just stunned,” he remembered. His mother was not inconsolable. Rather, she was incredulous. “It was almost like, After all we’ve been through, this is what I get,” he said. “There was this almost resignation, I don’t know. My sense was here’s a woman who’s had so much tragedy and seen it, and that I think she just saw it as like the ultimate test: If we haven’t managed to do you in, let’s see if we get your son—maybe that will do it. It was almost, it wasn’t humor but there was just this sense of Dammit, they’ve really done it now. She made an immediate association with the Holocaust, an immediate association with what she had lived through and the horror and everything that had happened to her. It was like, Fine, we’re right back there and then it’s just one more, just one more kick in the gut.”

  Misha reacted differently. “My dad just sat down,” his son recalled. “He was already a quiet and reserved man. He was very close to Jack. I identified more with my mother and I think Jack identified more with my dad. He just shut down.… He was operating at 50 percent energy and involvement but he dropped back to like 10 percent. He was often quiet. He often seemed detached. After this he was largely checked out.”

  Ilyse Levine-Kanji, Jack’s legal associate working with him on the Sposato case, happened to be out of town at the start of the holiday weekend for a family reunion, at Lake Tahoe. She recalled how on the night of the murders, her father had watched the local news and seen the story about the shooting and asked her if she had heard of the Pettit & Martin law firm. She said that of course she had but didn’t give the matter much more thought before turning in for the night. Early the next morning, her assistant, Val Evans, called her and woke her. Evans was very upset. Levine-Kanji asked her what was wrong. At first, Ilyse thought maybe she had somehow forgotten to get Jack the papers he needed for the deposition he had planned to take in Los Angeles, later on the afternoon of July 1. Levine-Kanji knew she had done the work for Jack. But perhaps there had been a snafu? “Val just started to cry,” she remembered. Then Evans let out a loud shriek. “I knew immediately that what my dad had said about Pettit & Martin, I just had a thought that Jack must have been over at Pettit and so I realized that was what happened,” she said. Understandably, she does not like to think about what might have happened if she had been at the deposition, instead of at Lake Tahoe. But she knows that it could easily have been her along with Jack and Jody. “My grandfather was also murdered when I was twelve so I have two losses from guns,” she said. “It’s just awful. Obviously I’m glad I wasn’t there but I just wish Jack and Jody hadn’t been there, and especially Jack.”

  * * *

  STEVE WASSERMAN DROVE CAROL AND HER in-laws back to San Francisco in silence. Nobody said a word. Carol put her in-laws in the guest bedroom and stayed up all night, making phone calls. “I was trying to grapple with it myself,” she said. Her instinct was to go down to the morgue to see Jack that night. But Steve and Sharon dissuaded her. “They were saying, ‘Oh you can’t,’ because they were hoping I’d sleep on it and that I wouldn’t.” The Wassermans wanted Carol to remember Jack as he was, but Carol insisted on going to see his lifeless body. One fortunate thing—if there ever could be one in such a tragic situation—was that Zack was really too young then to realize what had happened.

  The next morning Carol was driven to the morgue. “I remember being escorted back [to see Jack],” she said. “And, you know, Jack didn’t look so bad other than he was dead … His face looked peaceful. His face looked very peaceful. His eyes were covered by then so you couldn’t see his eyes. The eyelids were down. But he wasn’t blue or purple or anything.” She then asked the coroner to pull down the sheet and yellow vinyl covering his body. His body had been washed so there was little blood on it, which surprised her. “I remember I wanted to see exactly where the bullets went in and went out,” she said. “I wanted to see that. I knew that there were six at that time. I believed I was going to be looking for six. He pulled the sheet down on Jack’s chest and so I only could see three bullet holes … if I’m remembering correctly. I could only see a few and I knew that he had taken more.” She insisted that his body be turned over. “I wanted to see him completely … I counted and looked at the bullet holes myself and knew where they were and got a sense of that, and just could see him and that was it.”

  * * *

  GIVEN THE LONG HOLIDAY WEEKEND and the number of people who needed to travel from the East to get to San Francisco, Carol decided that Jack would be buried on July 6, at the Oakmont Memorial Park cemetery in Lafayette, California.

  It was Carol’s decision. Obviously, he had died before his parents and so while it would have been nice for him to be buried alongside them, it was not clear how much longer they would stay in Walnut Creek now that Jack was gone. (In the end, they stayed another ten years before moving to Boston in 2003; Misha died in 2005 and Bluma died four years later.) Carol bought additional space at the cemetery for herself and for Zack.

  At the funeral, in her remembrance of her husband, Carol referenced a card Jack had written her about a year earlier on her birthday, her first as a mother. “This year, we invented Zack, barely having completed ourselves, our own ending still to be worked out,” he wrote. “We imagined Zack and did it within our schedule. He cries without provocation. He is no follower of stage directions. We can only hope he will be a gentle critic of our unfinished scripts. Happy birthday, love, Jack.” Somehow she remained collected as she spoke. She wanted Zack to know that his father’s influence during his sixteen-month life would nurture him forever. “Jack has left Zachary and me a wonderful legacy: his love, example, and precious memories,” she concluded. “His love and memories cannot be taken away from us. Jack’s love, example, and happy memories will always be with Zachary and me. Goodness in the world cannot be snuffed out.”

  Ray Rickman flew from Providence to San Francisco to say goodbye to Jack. He remembered that even though he was around nine years older than Jack, Jack was his teacher, his mentor, and his guide through life. “I’ve come across America to say goodbye to Jack,” he said, “and I hoped very much to grow old with him, but it isn’t going to happen.… Many people stand for something when they’re twenty-one and when they’re twenty-five. If they don’t stand for it anymore when they’re thirty-one, they forget they knew you. But with Jack, you knew for a lifetime that that honor and that integrity would be there. And since there’s so few people like that, I hung on to that. When I flew over the mountains this morning coming into California, they reminded me of Jack, so solid, so calm, so strong, and reaching for the sky. I did so very much hope to grow old with you, but I must admit, the time that we have spent together was full of brilliance, full of life, full of intellectual back-and-forth, full of charm and wit.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS SOME DISCUSSION ABOUT what garment Jack should wear for eternity. His parents suggested he be buried with the silk tallit he had worn at his bar mitzvah. But they deferred to Carol, who thought that one should be given to Zack, for him to use at his own bar mitzvah. She decided that Jack should be buried in a simple pine box wearing the expensive Italian silk suit that he bought soon after he and Carol were married. He adored it. “Clothing was always very important to Jack … he liked to dress well,” she said. “So I wanted him to be buried well.” She and Zack (with Jack’s mother’s help) also tossed roses on top of his casket.

  On July 9, more than two thousand people gathered in front of 101 California to remember the victims of the shooting. By then, the calls to ban assault weapons had already started to be heard.

  * * *

  SOME GOOD DID COME FROM JACK’S MURDER. After an exchange of letters between Jody Sposato’s widower Steve Sposato and President Clinton, Senator Dianne Feinstein arranged for Sposato, a Republican, to testify on August 3, 1993, before the Senate Judiciary Committee
, then chaired by Senator Joe Biden, that was considering legislation banning the kind of semi-automatic weapons that Gian Luigi Ferri had used to kill Jack, Jody, and his other victims at 101 California. “She said there are two types of people in this world,” Sposato recalled of Senator Feinstein’s advice. “Those that take a tragedy like this and want to be left alone and those that want to make the world a better place, those who want to make change. So I said, ‘Sign me up for the latter and tell me how I can help.’”

  Sposato, tall and handsome, arrived at the hearing with his daughter Meghan in a BabyBjörn carrier on his back. His heart-wrenching testimony, which he had worked on with Jody’s father, was devastating. “My wife’s last words were ‘I’m having trouble breathing’ and then she died on the floor of a conference room, alone,” he said. “The sight of our 10-month old daughter placing dirt on her mother’s grave is a sight and pain I pray no other person must experience in their life. Can any of you advise me how to tell a 10-month old that Mommy is dead? Perhaps the manufacturer of the IntraTEC DC-9 assault weapon should publish this information in the instruction manual for its murderous product.” Sposato was told that Senator Biden was “speechless” after his testimony and that “Joe Biden was never speechless.”

  After a year of political wrangling—including intense opposition from the National Rifle Association—Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Federal Assault Weapons Ban on September 13, 1994. Sposato was at Clinton’s side for the signing in Washington; the president dedicated the law to Jody Sposato’s memory. Sposato credits Dianne Feinstein with making it happen. “She is a true hero and champion,” he said. The NRA managed to get into the bill a sunset provision, which ended the ban after ten years, on September 13, 2004. In 1999, California passed the most sweeping assault weapons ban in the nation, restricting their manufacture and sale. The law also prevented someone from buying more than one handgun a month, as well as mandating that guns sold meet basic safety standards and have child-safety locks on them. Since 2004, when the federal assault weapons ban lapsed, there have been any number of mass killings in America—Newtown, Connecticut, and Las Vegas, Nevada, to name but two—that might well have been prevented if there were still a ban on assault weapons. There are eighty-eight gun deaths in America each day and a total of 117,000 shootings each year.