University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: A Loss Beyond Words
March 24, 2016 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
You would like Lindsay McKinnon.
You would like her because the two of you would instantly understand what it's like to be a Tar Heel. She is the type who sees someone wearing a Carolina hat on the streets of her adopted hometown of Roanoke—mostly filled with Hokies and Cavaliers—and says, “Go Heels!” to the person wearing it who is no longer a stranger, because they are fellow Tar Heels.
She is the type who grew up going to Carolina basketball games with her grandfather, Herb Bodman, a longtime professor at UNC. When Dr. Bodman died in 2011, his obituary contained two major themes: family and Tar Heel basketball. The last paragraph of that obituary, just before the services and the flowers, read as follows:
“Wearing his 'Beat FSU' pin, he made sure of Carolina's win against Florida State before drawing his last breath. A great Tar Heel fan to the end. He had his priorities straight!”
So that's the kind of family we're talking about. You know the kind. When they watch games together, they change seats if a momentum switch is needed. They wear the lucky Tar Heel face tattoos. On a family trip to the Bahamas, they all packed UNC gear and sought out a place to watch the Carolina-Duke game.
This is the kind of family into which Tom McKinnon married. He did not particularly have a college basketball affinity, and he quickly came to understand that he did not have a choice. “The second he got involved with my sister, he understood he was going to have to be inducted into the clan,” says Trevor Hughes, Lindsay's brother. Tom watched the games with the crazy Tar Heels, cheered with them.
Many times, he was on the group texts that would fly across the cell phones when the family couldn't watch a game together. Tom and Lindsay had two boys, Logan and Patrick. They were indoctrinating their children as quickly as possible.
“The boys would go get on their Carolina shirts and hats and we'd all get into the games together,” Tom says. “It's one of those ties that bind. It's one of the main things we would all watch together.”
The games seemed so very important. It is NCAA Tournament time. The Tar Heels are still playing. Only 16 teams remain, and Carolina is one of them, and this seems critical to all of us who organize our lives around even the most absurd of tip-off times.
“UNC basketball has always been the one thing that keeps our family together through tough times,” Trevor says.
Maybe Tom and Lindsay McKinnon and the rest of the family will watch Friday night's game. But maybe they won't. Maybe it will be a welcome two-hour brief interlude of healing. Or maybe it will just be too much.
What they know is they had friends over to spend a couple days last weekend. Christy and Zak Montoya brought their two daughters to Roanoke to stay with the McKinnons. On Friday night, the adults watched a movie. The kids went to bed. Tom and Lindsay fell asleep on the couch. It was so completely, totally normal.
And then: horror. Sheer, unadulterated horror.
Lindsay woke up and saw flames outside a window. “There is a split second and you think, 'What is going on?'” says Tom McKinnon. “We ran outside and saw all the smoke and flames. We were trying to figure out where everybody was and get everyone out of the house.”
In that split second, Tom and Lindsay had one thought: the boys. Patrick was ten years old and was scheduled to play in his first lacrosse game this week. Logan was five years old, better known to his family as “The Loganator.” He was undoubtedly a future athlete, the type of kid you would leave alone in the bathroom and come back to find him hanging from the towel bar, swinging with a big grin on his face. He often touched his tongue to his nose when he was concentrating; the habit reminded his family, of course, of Michael Jordan.
What the boys' parents knew in that terrible moment early on Saturday morning was this: Patrick and Logan weren't outside. The Montoya family eventually made it out. Tom and Lindsay made it out. But the boys were still inside.
That is the moment when Tom McKinnon stood on his front lawn watching his house burn to the ground and realized he had to go back inside to try and save his children.
Imagine what you would do. No, don't. Just go hug your kids, right now. Call your parents--really call them, don't text them or email them or Snap them even though that is so much easier. Tell somebody who needs to know that you love them, and hey, there's a Carolina game tomorrow night, and you want to watch it together? Because you never know. You never, ever know.
“We tried to go back into the house two or three times,” Tom says. “I was trying to crawl up the stairs. But it was so hot, when you got to a certain level, it would literally start to burn you. When I went back in, it was black. It was so black I remember thinking I wouldn't be able to find my way out. Eventually, you realize that this situation is beyond action.”
The fire was so hot that the firefighters who arrived in less than ten minutes couldn't engage the blaze. Tom and Lindsay collapsed on a neighbor's yard, watching their house burn. They knew, intellectually, that their children were inside. But what sense did that make? None. So maybe they had snuck out the back or maybe they were safe somewhere else or…maybe. Just please, maybe.
Tom has smiled during this conversation, mostly when he talked about the boys. Now, he gets quiet.
“The firefighters were doing a great job of trying to tend to us,” he says. “We didn't want to go anywhere. They finally said we had to go to the hospital. They wanted us to go immediately. We wouldn't go. We had to have some indication of what was going on with our kids.”
The blaze was so hot that the ground 20 feet away from the house caught on fire, thick flames bellowing upward. Eventually, the entire house burned, as firefighters call it, “in the basement.” There was nothing left but a smoking crater where the house used to be. The boys died from “inhalation of products of combustion,” according to the medical examiner.
Tom, Lindsay and members of the Montoya family were first transported to the Roanoke hospital, then transferred to the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem because of that facility's more advanced burn unit. Christy Montoya remains hospitalized with multiple burns. Tom and Lindsay have both been released, but plan to stay in Winston-Salem for the foreseeable future. They want to be there for Christy, who suffered extensive burns and had more surgery on Wednesday. They know their friend needs their support.
And then there's also this stark reality: “There's nothing in Roanoke for us to go back to,” Tom says.
For decades since Herb Bodman first fell in love with Carolina basketball, his family has supported the Tar Heels. This week, as word of the tragedy in Roanoke reached Chapel Hill, the Tar Heels tried to return some of that support. Roy Williams regularly reminds his players how fortunate they are to have the opportunities they enjoy. Defending a screen on the ball doesn't seem so challenging in this context.
His team signed a basketball for the McKinnons and had it delivered to Winston-Salem last night. On Thursday morning, in a hotel meeting room in Philadelphia, they recorded a quick video message of support for the family that was sent directly to Tom McKinnon.
Five days later, the children gone and the house and all its belongings obliterated, it still seems alternately all too real and all too impossible.
“We are utterly heartbroken,” Tom said Wednesday afternoon. “Words just can't convey how we feel. The only saving grace is the tremendous amount of support from friends and family and the community. That's the only thing that makes this bearable at all.”
To support the McKinnons and Montoyas, please consider being part of their YouCaring page at https://www.youcaring.com/tom-and-lindsay-mckinnon-541685 and https://www.youcaring.com/christy-montoya-541733. Checks can also be sent directly to PO Box 3094, Roanoke, VA 24015.
