The Zen of Wa

This column initially appeared on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008.

(For those of you unfamiliar with the subject, Wawas are the Penn-Jersey-Del convenience store of choice. -MPR)

If you are keeping score, add these to the things I am most certain of in life.

If I come across “High Fidelity” starring John Cusack, on television, I will watch it.

If I bet on someone to win, they will lose.

If you are walking into a Wawa behind someone, they will open the door for you.

People here in the Delaware Valley tend to be a parochial lot, concerned with a sense of the value of hometown pride. And that may be a reason why we like our Wawas so much, above and beyond any national convenience store chain and their tempting frozen sugar ice drinks. Wawa is local: there really is a village called Wawa, although I don’t remember if there is a Wawa in Wawa. Wawa is not some soulless corporation; it is regularly ranked as one of he best places to work, and when 75 managerial spots opened up in 2006 more than 1,000 people applied for the chance to work for the Wizard of Wa.

And if you have spent more than a month living here, you have an opinion about what Wawa you prefer. A friend told me that the only lunch spot he ever ventures to is the Wawa on East Gay Street in West Chester, across from Pep Boys, and that he is not alone. Ahead of him are at least 30 people waiting for their daily Shortie.

My own personal favorite was the Wawa on Old Downingtown Pike, that little spur of road that connects Strasburg Road to Route 322 on the west side of West Chester. Of course, I chose it because it was right across the street from the Daily Local News’ offices, and it provided me with food and drink at reasonable prices in the days before I started being able to afford more than $2.85 for lunch.

We all have our Wawa memories as well. At my Wawa, I once ran into a West Chester police detective who told me that yes, indeed, they had found the missing hands of a murder victim down along the Brandywine. Thank for the tip, I exclaimed! I guess I won’t be eating lunch today after all!

Tom McKee, the well-liked albeit hirsute music director of the Paul Green School of Rock in Downingtown, tells me that some of the best times of his teenage life occurred at the Township Line Road Wawa in Drexel Hill, where he would meet his friends on Friday and Saturday nights and plot aimless “secret missions” and stupid teenage pranks to keep them occupied.

Natalie Smith, our paper’s features editor, positively salivated while recalling catching sight of Frank and Mary Jelenic at the Baltimore Pike Wawa in downtown Media back in the 1980s, when the couple used to do restaurant reviews on KYW radio. She said they were pushing a tiny shopping cart ahead of them and that her immediate reaction to the moment was not, “Wow! I’m seeing real radio celebrities in person!” but rather, “Wow! Wawa has shopping carts!”

A lot of those Wawas are gone now, morphed into the new, opulent Taj MaWawas that feature gas pumps and computer touch screens. But every time I pass an old Wawa building I remember what it used to be, and try to ignore what it is today.

So come on in. I’ll hold the door for you.

Bad Luck Streak

This story originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2008.

Lawyers have at times been known to overstate or exaggerate their clients’ situations when pleading their case.

But West Chester attorney Thomas Bellwoar might not be too far off the mark when discussing Sandra Peirson, whom he has represented in various legal actions for more than five years.

“Her poor life,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s like the life of Job.”

Peirson’s tribulations began at age 12, when she was shot in the face by a BB-gun accidentally fired by an uncle, leaving her blind in her left eye. They continued 30 years later, when she sat in a Kennett Square restaurant and was struck in her right eye by a bullet fired by a drunken patron. The ricochet plunged her into total darkness, completely without sight.

Most recently, moreover, Peirson lost her oldest son in a horrific accident in southern Chester County – again involving a bar patron who was visibly intoxicated but who continued to drink. Joseph Peirson was 24 when he died and had been his mother’s primary caregiver, living with her in Kennett Square, said Bellwoar.

Now, Peirson, along with her ex-husband Joseph E. Peirson, is suing the owners of the Applebee’s restaurant in East Marlborough, claiming they improperly served alcohol the driver of the car in which her son was a passenger when he was killed. The suit contends that bartenders and servers at the restaurant continued to give drinks to the driver, Shaun Collins, after he was clearly drunk, and even went so far as to help him to his car and get him behind the wheel of his pickup truck.

The suit also contends that Applebee’s did not have trained personnel at the restaurant that night who were familiar with the standards of serving patrons alcohol.

Filed in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, the suit is tentatively scheduled to go to trial in April. The Peirson’s are asking for more than $50,000 in damages, the minimum threshold for such actions, charging negligence on behalf of Applebee’s local subsidiaries – Rose Management Services of Newtown and Delaware Valley Rose of Kennett Square.

Under what are commonly called “dram shop laws,” Pennsylvania is among those states that allow motorists, or others who have been injured, to seek monetary damages against bar owners who serve visibly intoxicated persons who later are involved in a drunk driving or other accidents.

These laws make bar owners and alcohol servers financially liable if their customers become obviously intoxicated on their premises and subsequently injure someone or cause property damage, typically by driving drunk.

Thus, if a person has several drinks at a bar and is visibly intoxicated then gets in a car and kills someone on the way home, the owner of the serving establishment can be sued for damages.

Such suits are not always successful. One question that must be answered in the cases is just how visibly drunk the patron was before leaving the bar and getting behind the wheel of a car, and whether a reasonable person would be able to determine their level of sobriety.

Jerry Marks, whose Philadelphia law firm of Marks, O’Neill, O’Brien & Courtney is representing Applebee’s in the case, declined to speak to a reporter about his client’s position in the case when contacted Friday. “It’s coming up for trial, and I just can’t comment,” he said.

The accident which claimed Joseph Peirson’s life occurred on Oct. 15, 2005. According to the lawsuit and police reports, Collins, a friend of Joseph Peirson’s, was driving north on Route 41 in Londonderry about 3 a.m., when he lost control of the 2001 Chevrolet Silverado.

In his suit, Bellwoar says that Collins, who had a blood alcohol level of .125 when he was tested after the crash, was arguing with other people in the car, taking his eyes off the road, when he lost control.

Driving at speeds estimated later by police to be close to 100 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone, the truck drove onto the northbound shoulder of Route 41, struck a mailbox, and then crossed over into the southbound lanes and struck a guardrail. The truck traveled about 50 feet along the rail, and then became airbourne.

The truck went 82 feet in the air before it hit the ground, rolled over and collided with a house at 2200 Gap-Newport Pike.

Of the four people in the vehicle, two were thrown from the cab – Joseph Peirson and Tashia A. Gambill, 21, of Cochranville, Collin’s girlfriend. Both were killed instantly, Gambill being thrown completely over the roof of the house into which the truck crashed.

A fourth person, Nichole Stahis of Kennett Square, was severely injured.

Gambill’s family, as well as Stahis, is also suing Applebee’s for its alleged negligence in serving Collins.

Collins was charged with homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence, involuntary manslaughter and related charges. He pleaded no contest to two counts of homicide and one of aggravated assaulted while DUI, and as sentenced by Judge William H. Mahon in February 2007 to nine and a half to 18 years in prison. He is currently housed at the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon.

“It’s a DUI case that should be shown and taught to kids everywhere,” said Assistant District Attorney Carlos Barraza, who prosecuted Collins. “It was, for me, the worst accident scene I have ever seen.”

The case resonated with Mahon as well, but for a different reason. It was Mahon who in January 2003 sentenced Cesar Arreola-Solis to 11 ½ to 23 months in prison and 1,000 hours of community service for the shooting that left Sandra Peirson blind.

Barraza said that Mahon remembered the case and Sandra Peirson.

Sandra Peirson, then 43, was at the Birch Inn in Kennett Square the night of Nov. 11, 2001, sitting at a table enjoying a drink with the bar manager when Solis, who was drunk and who had brought a loaded handgun into the bar undetected, began waving the gun around. At some point, he accidentally fired the weapon, hitting himself in the hand, his brother, sitting next to him, in the ear and Peirson in the eye "due to an unforeseeable ricochet," according to records.

Left blind, Sandra Peirson could not work any longer and moved in with her mother. She sued the bar owners and settled the case out of court in 2003, a settlement that Bellwoar said allowed her to buy a home in Oxford, where she and her son Joseph lived until late summer 2005, when she sold the house and the pair moved back to an apartment in Kennett Square.

A month after moving, Joseph Peirson went out to Applebee’s with Collins, his friend, and the two women. He never came home. Sandra Peirson moved away from Pennsylvania, and now lives in Virginia, where she is cared for by a friend, Bellwoar said.

A Table, Some Chairs, a Bitter Memory

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008


There are no rules to the way we react to trauma. Some people become obsessed by their misfortune and it grips them whole. Some shake the evil off their coats like a drenched dog drying himself.

Years spent sitting in court rooms has shown me that the victims of crime approach their lives differently after the harm that befell them was inflicted. There are no longer any walks after dark. Strangers are greeted with distrust. Children become more clinging, or less approachable. A proud stride is reduced to a painful shuffle. But until last week, I never thought of that trauma having an impact on a room, and a piece of furniture.

Two years ago, a Honey Brook man argued with his girlfriend about the course of their relationship. During the fight, he took their 30-day-old son and held him up, dropped him to the floor and kicked him twice, in the head.

The assault took place in the kitchen of the woman’s home on Horseshoe Pike as the family ate dinner. In a letter she wrote to the judge who was set to sentence her former boyfriend for the assault, the woman remembered that location particularly.

Here is what she wrote:

“He did all of this in the kitchen where my children and I used to share so many laughs, sit down as a family for dinner and have family game night. Now we are unable to sit around the table; it’s become a useless piece of furniture. The chairs are now in the children’s room, where they sit to eat their dinner, while the table grows cobwebs.

“It’s too painful to enter the kitchen where the assault took place. Even after I tried to re-arrange it to make it less painful, we can still see the image of (her ex) holding (her child) in the air by the back of his pajamas, then being thrown to the floor.”

Her description struck me as profound, and poetic. The trauma suffered that night had an impact not only on the physical and mental well being of those involved, but on their relationship to their own environment. And the picture is immediately recognizable: what family doesn’t use the kitchen table, or counter, or island, as a place to gather and laugh and talk and play and perhaps shout a bit. It is the central place for where the business of being a family gets conducted.

And what more poison could there be than to bring violence into that space, and how could you not feel a chill every time you went back to that place?

The idea of the table itself being shunned, being cast aside, growing dust and cobwebs, drew me in. Inanimate objects do have lives, I thought. We give cars names and they grow personalities. We find a rock in the cool shade and it becomes a friend. Violence enters our homes and the furniture itself become witnesses and victims.

At the end of her letter, the women pleaded for a sentence that would bring her family justice. Here’s how she put it.

“Please let us get that phone call, knowing maybe we’ll go to sleep tonight and actually wake up tomorrow and be able to live again, start on the process of moving the chairs back into the kitchen, sitting around the dinner table as a family … and just finally get back some happiness.”

Enveloped By The Modern World

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008

It remains for me a striking image: Five Old Order Amish men sitting in a sterile, modern, community hearing room inside West Chester Borough Hall, listening to a family describe how one of their number’s perceived racism had damaged them.

Here were people — who, because of their religious faith and practice, work in varying degrees to separate themselves from the outside “English” world — being brought kicking and shouting, figuratively, into that sad feature of the modern world — the racial dispute.

To recap, a black family from Valley had been looking for a new home to rent that would take them out of the urban setting where they lived. Responding to an advertisement, the wife went to look at a home for rent in Little Britain, just across the Lancaster County line from Oxford. She fell in love with the picturesque, rural property and eagerly told the landlord, an Amish carpenter, that her family would like to rent it.

But later that night, the landlord called and left a phone message that another tenant had complained about her race and had threatened to leave the property if they moved in. “I’m sorry,” the Amish man told her. Shocked and angry that the color of their skin would be reason for rejection, the family filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.

Attempts at reconciliation with the parties failed, leading to Thursday’s hearing.

The black family was accompanied by a lawyer from Philadelphia; the Amish landlord was accompanied by four men from his church district and a non-Amish fellow who drove them from their homes 35 miles away.

The rejected family spoke eloquently about the pain, humiliation and anger they endured because of the denial. With his head bowed, his traditional black brimmed hat laid on a chair next to him, the landlord sat silently alone at the defense table that had been set up for him.

Factually, the case against the man seemed strong. His voice could be heard on a tape saying how his other tenants didn’t want a “colored” family living next door. His argument that the lease application started by the wife hadn’t been fully completed and was thus still not formally “rejected” seemed forced. But there was no hateful monster sitting there to despise, just a man seemingly caught up by something he had not anticipated.

I am not one who looks at the Amish through the misty-eyed romanticism of “Witness,” or the Lancaster County Tourist Bureau, viewing them as plain, uncorrupted folk who just want to be left alone to live their simple life. The Amish have bad apples and good ones, just like any community, and can be just as wrong in their decisions as you or I.

But as used to seeing the courtroom dynamics of practiced attorneys and judges and litigants as I am, I will long remember the response of the landlord when asked by the commission’s hearing examiner if he had any more evidence to provide.

Sitting quietly for as long as 20 seconds, scratching his beard and fiddling with his hands, the man finally spoke.

“I can’t understand what any of this is about,” he said.

My Next Job

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Jan. 6, 2008

The matter of my retirement occurred to me the other day when I sat looking at the line up of Chester County Common Pleas Court judges during a swearing in ceremony in stately Courtroom One at the courthouse for their newest member, David Bortner.

One of these days, I say to myself, I am going to be forced to give up this newspaper dodge I’ve been engaged in since the late days of the Carter Administration and find something useful to do. One of these days either Chelsea Clinton or Jenna Bush is going to be President of the United States, and the sublime will have sunk to the ridiculous so far so that reporting the news won’t be half as stimulating as just making it up, and I’m going to have to find another way to occupy my time and/or mental capabilities.

What better job, I thought, than Court Tipstaff.

All those folks sitting in Courtroom One wearing their black robes would be hard pressed to admit it, since they’re constantly having people stand up for them when they do nothing more than enter a room, but in general I’d say the Court Tipstaff is the central figure in any courtroom in Chester County. They may not look like it sometimes, but the power and influence they hold is incalculable.

Take a for instance.

I’m sitting in Courtroom Seven a few days ago waiting for something to happen. That’s what we do at the courthouse, mostly: wait. There’s me, a court clerk, a court stenographer, a deputy sheriff or two, and Al the Tipstaff. Otherwise, it’s an empty courtroom.

So who walks out from his chambers but Judge Anthony Sarcione, who by my estimation is the only currently sitting jurist in Chester County who has ever ridden a surfboard, unless there’s a side to Judge Robert Shenkin that I haven’t been exposed to. Anyway, Judge Sarcione walks out of his chambers, strides purposefully to his bench, and looks out on the courtroom to see…

“What? No attorneys?” he says, disappointedly, to no one in particular.

Now, a judge on a bench without any attorneys in the room is a lost cause. It’s a boat without a sail, a gun without bullets, a pitcher without a batter. There’s no one to squint at in confusion, there’s no one to argue with in derision, there’s no one to overrule, for heavens sake. So there stood Judge Sarcione, ready to hang ten on the Big Kahuna Wave of res judica, so to speak, and the only one looking back at him from the audience is me. And I’m nowhere near qualified for him to hold in contempt, at least in a legal way.

Al the Tipstaff to the rescue.

Minutes later, there are not one but two attorneys in the courtroom, just aching to tell Judge Sarcione about this or that aspect of their case, meet with him at sidebar, call him “Your Honor,” use words like “colloquy” without chuckling, and ask to be excused when they leave the courtroom. All was right, God was in his Heaven, and we owe it all to Al the Tipstaff.

That’s what I want, real power. And the chance to say, “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” in public.