The Day They Died

Who wakes up on a Wednesday morning and thinks, “This is the day that I die”? Unless we’re committing suicide or work in a coal mine, we get out of bed with all manner of preoccupations and concerns, but likely don’t give serious thought to, or think about at all, our chances of surviving the next twelve hours. We didn’t, at any rate, until August 1.

When he woke that warm summer morning, Peter Hausmann, a forty-seven-year-old husband and father of four, quite possibly thought about dinner that evening and the long, looping drive that would precede it. His wife, Helen, would be preparing a traditional meal for an acquaintance visiting from her native Kenya, and it would be Peter’s job, when he left work in New Brighton late that afternoon, to pick up their guest in St. Louis Park and bring him to the Hausmanns’ home in Rosemount—a slow, roundabout trip under the best of circumstances and definitely a slog at rush hour.

Distant Kenya could not have been far from Peter Hausmann’s mind that morning, if it ever was. Kenya, after all, was where he had gone twenty years earlier to “find himself,” as he’d told friends and family back home in South Dakota. One of his older brothers was a Catholic missionary in the East African nation, and, after he graduated from college, Peter, though trained for a career in computer technology, had gone there too. Peter wound up teaching at a Kenyan mission school, where he met and fell in love with Helen, another school employee. After they married, in 1990, they moved to the United States and eventually settled in the Twin Cities, but the couple returned to Africa as often as they could. Two days before he died, Peter and Helen had called her parents and tearfully told them that the Hausmann clan—all six of them—would not be visiting this year as they had hoped. There wasn’t enough money in the household budget. Maybe they could make the trip next year.

When Sherry Engebretsen left for work that morning from the Shoreview home she shared with her husband, Ron, their daughters, Anne and Jessica, and a golden retriever named Lady, it’s likely that one or more of the series of meetings that typically filled her work day would have been on her mind. Engebretsen, who was sixty, worked at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, where she was a “distribution strategies leader.” She had worked in the insurance industry her entire career—insurance was, her husband said later, “her passion” and something “she knew like the back of her hand.” In fact, she had many passions, including her family, her church, and her sleek, black Mercedes 280 SLK. She inherited a love of cars from her father, Ron would explain, and after years of driving the kind of practical cars you drive when you have small kids, she bought the two-door hardtop convertible—“her dream car,” in Ron’s words—a year and a half ago.

Perhaps the sheer pleasure Engebretsen took driving that car made the twenty-five- to forty-minute rush-hour commute from the northeast metro to downtown Minneapolis and back somewhat less of a stressful experience. Maybe it took her mind off the day’s inevitable meetings.

Patrick Holmes may have been thinking about the pain patients he’d be dealing with that day as an exercise therapist at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington. Maybe, while he was getting ready for work, he was concerned about his own left shoulder, which he’d separated playing baseball earlier in the year and which had required immobilizing his arm in a sling for much of the summer. Holmes was thirty-six years old. A baseball standout at Hill–Murray high school and Winona State University, he still loved the game and played, until this year, in a local men’s league. He also coached his son’s team and religiously followed the Twins, who that evening would be hosting Kansas City at the Metrodome not long after he passed it on his drive home to Mounds View.

According to his wife, Jennifer, a special education teacher in St. Paul, Patrick liked his work, colleagues, and patients, but hated the thirty- to forty-minute commute down and back along the metro’s twisted spine. He worked Monday through Thursday, ten hours a day. He would usually leave home at 6 a.m. in order to be at work by 7. August 1 would likely be a tedious, tiring commute like any other. He kissed Jennifer goodbye—the children, six-year-old Gavin and four-year-old Rena, were still sleeping—climbed into his twelve-year-old Saturn, and made his way toward the stream of southbound traffic.