Part 1: A trail ride turns tragic for two teen boys

By TIM MADIGAN

It is a fine winter afternoon, Super Bowl Sunday 1981, warm enough that the two boys don't need jackets. Trey Shelton is 14, Kevin Curnutt a year younger, both eighth-graders at Arlington's Gunn Junior High School. They have been to church together, and now are loose on motorbikes, riding across the hilly, wooded acres in southwest Arlington that belong to the Shelton family.

Trey, the more experienced rider, is well ahead of Kevin on the trail. He crosses a shallow stream called Rush Creek and disappears over a hill headed east, but because of the engine noise Kevin doesn't know the terrible thing that happens next. Kevin motors through the creek, and disappears into the woods. That's the last thing that he remembers until he wakes up and looks at the world through a haze.

The exhausted faces of his parents and older brother peer down at him, along with those of doctors and nurses. He hears the hum and beep of equipment in an intensive care unit.

Kevin's questions tumble one after another through the fog. Where am I? Why does everyone look so sad? What happened? Why can't I move my arms and legs? Why can't I talk?

His mind works fine, but seemingly nothing else does. He feels trapped inside his head, inside a lifeless body and Kevin can tell from the talk around him that people think he is a vegetable. He desperately wants to say that he isn't, that whatever happened to him has not taken his mind. He wants to say, "I'm still in here."

People come and go from his bedside. His mother, Gail Curnutt, talks with a nurse. Pizza is mentioned, as is a recent trip to Chuck E. Cheese, where Kevin, a husky lineman on the junior high football team, got stuck in a cubicle meant for younger children.

"You must really have been a sight," the nurse says to Kevin on the chance that he might be able to hear. "Your rear end must have been a foot in the air."

Kevin laughs out loud, startling them. He had been in a coma for more than two weeks. His mother and the nurse hug him, and each other, and weep. Gail finds her husband, Jerry, to tell him the news, and the couple rush to Gunn Junior High where Kevin's brother, Kelly, is in the ninth grade. The three of them hurry back to Arlington Community Hospital and begin desperate attempts to communicate.

Kevin, can you squeeze my hand? He can't.

Kevin, blink once if you hear me. He blinks.

Kelly has an idea. He writes out the alphabet on a piece of paper and points to letters one by one. Kevin blinks when Kelly reaches the T. Blinks again when Kelly points to an H.

T-H-I-R-S-T-Y.

That brings more euphoria in the intensive care unit. They start a new word.

C-O-L-D.

It isn't long before Kevin blinks four more times to spell a name.

T-R-E-Y.

Riding the trails

The boy's full name was Ralph Baker Shelton III, the son of a former Arlington city councilman, developer and horseman. Trey was great in the saddle himself, one of the top cutting horse riders for his age in the nation. From the time Trey was 9, he and his father would drive across the Southwest, pulling a horse trailer behind their pickup. They listened to Willie Nelson and Richard Pryor, talked about everything, or just rode together in companionable silence.

Maybe that paternal adoration led Ralph Shelton Jr. to finally give in when Trey pestered him about a dirt bike. That and the fact that Ralph and his wife, Rosalin, were going through a divorce, and he thought a bike for Trey might help take away the sting. If only Ralph had not bought that bike. That would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Then again, the bikes were everywhere in that part of Arlington. Residential neighborhoods would eventually swallow up the rural area, but at the time, in the far southwest part of the city, there were probably more horses than houses, and the ying-ying of dirt bikes was a near constant sound after school, on weekends and in the summer.

Trey's oldest and closest friend, Nathan Moore, had one. Several other boys also brought their bikes to the Shelton place, 17 acres of trails up hills, through the trees and across the creek. Kevin Curnutt never owned one himself but took turns riding the bikes of others. The noise was an annoyance, the boys knew, but one that most neighbors came to accept.

One who didn't was the man who lived just east of Shelton. Richard Tiedemann, a 32-year-old aerospace engineer with a master's degree from Princeton University, lived alone in the small white house among the trees. No one else was ever seen coming or going, and Tiedemann kept his front gate closed. He was occasionally seen working in his yard, or on a sailboat, but he told neighbors in no uncertain terms to stay on their own side of the barbwire fence that surrounded his property.

"He moved into the house thinking that he was moving out into the country," said Trent Galloway, Tiedemann's neighbor to the north. "He didn't move far enough."

One day in the autumn of 1980, another Tiedemann neighbor, Kathy Strong, heard the familiar whine of the motorbikes. A narrow finger of the Shelton property extended east, running between her home and Tiedemann's, all the way out to Bowen Road. Teenage riders had made several passes back and forth to the road that day, noise that sometimes interfered with the afternoon nap of Strong's 5-year-old son, Cody. But Cody was awake and playing in the driveway. Strong was watering plants on her second-story deck when she looked toward the creek.

"Mr. Tiedemann was on Ralph Shelton's property, standing behind a tree with a long handled shovel over his shoulder," she remembered. "I said to myself, 'You idiot.' He stood there waiting for those boys to come back over the creek, probably with the intention of knocking them off their bikes with the shovel. He was crouched a little bit like he was lying in wait."

Strong hurried downstairs and took her son inside. That day, the boys on their bikes never returned to the piece of trail where Tiedemann hid. He eventually got tired of waiting, climbed back over the fence and returned to his home.

A typical Sunday

Kevin Curnutt and Trey Shelton met the previous autumn on the eighth-grade football team of Gunn Junior High. They were both starters on the offensive line, and Kevin's sense of humor and thirst for adventure made him a good fit with the boys who regularly congregated at the Shelton place. Kevin began to consider Trey his best friend.

Saturday night, Jan. 24, was one of the first that Trey had spent at Kevin's place. Kevin's dad came in late to quiet the boys, reminding them that they needed to be up for church the next day. The families were members of Rush Creek Christian Church, a congregation that met just across Bowen Road from the Shelton property.

After services Sunday morning, Jerry and Gail Curnutt dropped off Kevin at Trey's house, and the couple returned to the church to teach country-Western dance lessons to a youth group. They planned to be finished in time for everyone to get home for the 5 p.m. kickoff of the Super Bowl pitting the Oakland Raiders against the Philadelphia Eagles.

For Trey and Kevin, though, football was the last thing on their minds. The sun was shining and the afternoon temperature was expected to climb into the 70s, perfect weather for being outside on Trey's place, perfect weather for riding.

"I got a call from Trey that Sunday," Nathan Moore remembered nearly three decades later. "I can still remember the room, the phone. I was in our game room. I picked up the phone. 'Me and Kevin are going to go riding. You want to come over and ride?' Riding bikes at that time was one of my passions."

But that Sunday, Nathan and his family had plans for dinner at his grandparents' home in Arlington. Nathan's motor bike, left at Trey's, was one that his two friends would be riding that afternoon.

"I was supposed to be there," Nathan said.

Shots and screams

Just after three that afternoon, Kathy Strong heard the whine of the motorbikes, then another sound. Two shots seemed to come from right outside her door. She dropped her laundry and rushed to find young Cody, who was riding his Big Wheel tricycle in the driveway.

In the trees on the other side of her fence, she saw a dirt bike toppled onto its side, wheels still turning. Trey was sprawled on the ground a few feet away, motionless.

Strong first thought that he had been accidentally thrown.

"That's when I looked and saw Tiedemann, in a trance, just staring at him and staring at him," Strong said.

Her neighbor, dressed in a red plaid shirt and blue jeans, held a shotgun in both hands, like he was hunting and getting ready to fire again. Cody ran up to his mother.

"Mommy, Mommy. That man just shot that boy."

"You idiot," Strong screamed at the man with the gun.

She shoved Cody by the shoulders toward the garage of her sister's home next door, worried that she or her son would be shot in the back as they fled. Her 7-year-old niece, Kadee, came out of her garage and Strong screamed at her to get back inside. She could hear another bike approaching from across the creek.

"I knew he was going to shoot the other boy, so I came out the door and down the steps between my sister's garage and my house," Strong said. "I was just screaming. I knew nothing else to do but just scream, because I wanted Kevin to hear me. It dawned on me, 'He can't hear me because of the noise.' There was no way. He was already on his way."

Tiedemann fired again. Kevin's bike toppled on top of him.

"He was so calm about it," Strong said. "He pulled the gun down and watched them for a few minutes. He turned himself around and hiked over the fence and walked into his home. He didn't run. It was like 'I did what I was wanting to do. It's done.'"

'Sniper situation in progress'

Mike Yantis was 23, a rookie patrolman working the 3-11 p.m. shift for the Arlington Police Department. The afternoon was predictably slow, with Super Bowl parties across the city. Yantis expected things to pick up when the game was over.

Minutes after his shift began, the broadcast went out as "shots fired" at a Bowen Road address not far from Yantis' location. Just before he rolled up, the dispatcher came on with a more ominous message: "Possible sniper situation in progress." Yantis parked on Bowen, near Kathy Strong's house. She was waiting in front and pointed across the fence to the place in the woods where the two boys and their motorbikes were lying. She also pointed at the white house visible through the trees.

The shooter, Richard Tiedemann, was probably still inside, she told him.

Yantis rushed to the boys with his weapon drawn, also paying attention to Tiedemann's place. He came up on Trey first. The husky teen-ager in a short-sleeve blue shirt was lying on his back in the grass and brown leaves, not breathing. A few feet away, Kevin was still lying under his bike, bleeding from a head wound and convulsing. Yantis pulled the bike off the boy.

An ambulance screeched up on Bowen. Detectives Tommy Ingram and Ruben Puente, who had been investigating a homicide that afternoon, arrived about the same time.

"Hang in there. I'll be right back with you," Yantis said to Kevin. "I'm going to get some help."

Yantis ran back to the road and brought the detectives and paramedics to the boys. It was immediately determined that Trey was gone. Kevin's pulse was faltering, but he clung to life.

The detectives wondered how they could get Kevin to the ambulance without risking more bloodshed. The gunman's home was 50 yards away and he was clearly a good shot. Did Tiedemann have a shotgun or a high-powered rifle with better range?

Ingram had an idea. He ran back to his car, drove it through the gate and onto the path between the trees. Paramedics pulled an empty gurney beside the detective's car so they were shielded from the killer.

"'He probably won't last until we get him to the hospital,'" Ingram remembered one EMT telling him. "I said, 'Well, you've got to get him there anyway.'"

Shots in the dark

Yantis never left his post by the outbuilding close to Tiedemann's home. Just before dark, members of the tactical team began to move in his direction to relieve him. Before they did, the front door opened. Tiedemann stepped onto the porch in plain view, walked down the steps and moved slowly through the dusk.

"He didn't appear to be concerned," Yantis said. "He was walking at a leisurely pace with his head down. He might have been talking to himself."

Yantis thought Tiedemann was headed to his car. But he merely walked to his garage and briefly poked around inside. He re-emerged into the twilight, circled the garage and slowly headed back toward his house. The man seemed oblivious to the officers surrounding him. As Tiedemann returned to his house, Yantis saw the shotgun that he carried alongside one leg.

Back at his porch, Tiedemann suddenly looked up, leveled his weapon and fired two shots.

"Green light" came over the radio.

Police snipers unleashed a fusillade. Tiedemann fell and began to scream. He crawled toward the door of his home, leaving a broad trail of blood across his porch. He managed to get back inside but ignored police attempts to contact him. A few minutes later, tear gas was sent crashing through his windows and the home caught fire.

"After a couple of minutes, I saw the front door open and the subject stood in the doorway," Yantis said. "It was pretty dark by now. He was backlit by the fire I could see in the house. Then he stepped away from the doorway. He either laid or fell down."

In the dark, Yantis saw muzzle flashes from the porch. Police responded with another flurry of gunfire. Tiedemann rose up and slumped again on the steps of his porch. He was dead by the time officers got to him, lying next to his 12-gauge shotgun.

Inside Tiedemann's home, detectives searched for some explanation for the horrific attack, but found none. But at Arlington Community Hospital, as Kevin Curnutt survived minute to minute, his family scarcely thought about the man who had shot him.

In the emergency room, Jerry and Gail Curnutt watched a policeman tell Trey's mother that her son was dead. Just a few minutes later, a doctor came out to say that Kevin was not expected to live and that it was best that his parents not see him. Gail Curnutt bent to wipe her son's blood from the doctor's shoes with a tear-stained handkerchief.

"I knew it was Kevin's blood, and I didn't want it on the doctor's shoes," she remembered. "I said, 'Yes, we are going in.' We did. It was very strange because there were bandages all around his head, and his face was swollen. He was wearing blue jeans and a down vest. They had cut the vest off and the feathers were in a few places around the room."

A shotgun pellet had gone in one side of Kevin's skull and out the other, obliterating a part of his brain. For him to have a chance of survival, Dr. Carlos Acosta, an Arlington brain surgeon, needed to stop the bleeding and clean out bone fragments that might cause infection.

Acosta -- whose practice eventually would span four decades -- says he never saw another injury quite like it. The surgeon also would never forget the viciousness of the attack.

"It was like [Tiedemann] had been practicing for this," Acosta said. "These kids were going fast on these bikes. It took a good marksman to do that. That was an unbelievably horrible thing to do to a child."

In the unlikely event that he lived, Acosta knew, Kevin was almost sure to spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state. The surgeon had a son Kevin's age. That Sunday at the hospital, after he had done what he could for his young patient, the doctor went off by himself and wept.

But a few days later, doctors removed Kevin from a ventilator and were surprised to find that he could breathe on his own.

"I knew then that survival was almost guaranteed," Acosta said. "Now, what would the quality of survival be?"

Two weeks later, Kevin laughed.

TIM MADIGAN, 817-390-7544

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