The next morning, they learned King had died. “Mom, I killed a guy,” Boulton recalled her son saying when he called with the news. “I’ll never forget that.”
A week after the crash, Wellert was charged with vehicular homicide and learned he could face six months in jail. Because he had been driving a company truck at the time, Wellert also lost his job.
Boulton feared King’s family would be angry with her son and want to see him punished severely for the accident. A friend of hers had lost a daughter in a car crash, and she recalled how angry she felt at the driver at fault.
“I wanted that guy to pay,” she said. “That’s just our nature.”
The two families were told by their lawyers and law enforcement officials to stay away from each other while the case made its way through the court. Still, at one hearing, some of King’s family spoke to Wellert’s lawyer. They wanted the lawyer to pass on that they were praying for him.
Boulton also began to follow King’s family on social media, hoping to get a sense of how they might respond. The more she learned about King, the worse she felt.
“I was grieving for him,” she said. “And I was scared for my son. It was a weird place.”
In the months following the crash, King’s family began processing their grief. Rick King spends most of his time these days at his late brother’s house, sorting things out.
“His old work tennis shoes are in the same spot he left them,” Rick King said. “He kicked them off when he walked in the back door. And I just kind of walk around them — that’s just me processing and dealing with things. I’ll get there one day.”
Rick King ended up being the primary contact with law enforcement after the accident and advocated against Wellert going to prison.
“I couldn’t do anything for Tom, he was already gone,” Rick King said. “I felt, why put that young man in jail? Most people in this world have run a stop sign.”
A Navy veteran who spent 40 years working for the Coca-Cola Company with a short stint running a restaurant in Florida, Tom King marched to the beat of his own drummer, said Tim King, his twin brother. He’d been hard-working and ornery as a younger man but mellowed in later life.
