Dottie Crump has “always known things.” She recalls flashes of strong emotions and images as far back as grammar school that signaled impending events. In February 2000, she began collecting angels and crosses for no particular reason. In early August, she saw images of the American flag and heard taps being played. On Aug. 17, she made the connection: Her brother, Robert Crump, a Denver firefighter, drowned in a drainage culvert while trying to rescue a woman after a severe rainstorm. “If I had one wish,” Crump says, “I wish it didn’t rain that day.”
Meet: After the funeral, throngs of firefighters and other well-wishers lined Denver streets for miles. Crump, who came to Denver from her home in Illinois, felt compelled to thank fellow mourners, some 4,000 of them, eye to eye. “When I rolled down the window, my mother was aghast,” she recalls. “But these people were taking the time to pay their respects to Bob, and I wanted to thank them if I could.”
At some point, Crump locked eyes with Gene Motnyk.
“I saw Dottie, and something strange happened,” said Motnyk, who had worked as a volunteer firefighter but at the time hadn’t yet achieved his goal of making it a career. “It’s really hard to describe, there was just some connection there. I read the paper and watched the news to try to find out who she was, but it wasn’t like ‘Ooh, that girl’s hot, I want to meet her.’ There was just that connection.”
For many months, Dottie put her grief on hold but continued to visit Colorado to help her nieces cope with the loss. One night, she went with some friends from her brother’s fire station to the Grizzly Rose in Denver. Motnyk was there too. He recognized her right away, but had no “intention of talking about that day.”
Later in the evening, Crump asked him to dance and began talking about her brother and the funeral. Motnyk started to tell her he had been there, and “She stopped me midsentence,” he says, “and recited exactly where I was standing, what I was wearing.”
“Out of all the people I saw that day,” Crump says, “I remembered him.”
Motnyk called to make sure Crump and her friends made it home OK from the bar. When she invited him over, he agreed. “It’s just like I was following something that had to be done,” Motnyk says.
They talked into the early morning, and when Motnyk left, both welled up. Crump says, “It’s hard to explain, but it was like we were meant to meet.”
Match: The next day Motnyk ended up being the only guest at a party that fizzled out. On his way to see Crump, he heard “What if Once in a Lifetime Doesn’t Come Twice,” by Clay Walker on the radio. He stopped to buy her a copper angel and that song. “This whole thing just baffles me,” he says. “I wasn’t that kind of guy before, the kind of guy who noticed songs on the radio.”
“We spoke every single day from then on,” Motnyk adds.
Crump returned to Illinois, but her friendship with Motnyk continued on the phone, sometimes eight hours at a time. Yet, romance came slowly.
At one point in early 2001, Crump crumbled in her grief, so Motnyk flew to Illinois to surprise her. “To open the door and see the one person who is your rock standing there, that was pretty awesome,” she says.
That moment solidified the relationship. “We like to believe it was divine intervention,” she says. “Since my brother couldn’t be here physically, he placed someone here for me.”
Marry: Crump moved to Colorado to be with Motnyk. In early 2004, however, he says, “I kind of lost my mind, and I ended the relationship.” On his first date with another woman, Motnyk realized his mistake. He told the date about Crump and why they broke up, and she asked him, “Don’t you think you’re being petty?”
Two months of groveling and rebuilding got the relationship back on track. “I have to give him latitude for that,” Crump says. “What other person would come into my life at the worst time of my life and walk that road with me?”
Family and friends packed Foothills Chapel in Golden, to see Crump and Motnyk exchange vows. Before the couple lit a unity candle for themselves and a spiritual candle in honor her brother, the Rev. Chris Mohr promised that “he and others that have come before us continue to live in this love.”
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