Highlands Ranch – Patrick Sims stood in a lonely corner of the recreation-center meeting room as members of a local bicycle club shuffled into the rows of metal chairs.
They must hate me, he thought, as he shifted his weight from one blue sneaker to the other. He clutched a white sheet of paper, a letter he would read to explain how he killed a cyclist whom other cyclists knew and admired.
Nervous? “A little,” he said.
This is Patrick’s sentence – 300 hours of community service telling audiences what he did and how it has changed him. Along with four years’ probation, he will spend his spring break in jail and remain under house arrest until he graduates from Mountain Vista High School in May.
Patrick could have gone to prison for driving into 63-year-old cyclist Jim Price while answering a text message on his cellphone.
The way he sees it, he will serve a life sentence of guilt.
The court’s punishment puts his most painful memory on stage. Each time he tells the story, he replays the accident in his mind.
The cyclists there had seen too often how careless and cavalier drivers can be, a cellphone usually at their ear.
Patrick held his letter in both hands and began to read.
“My name is Patrick Sims.”
The 17-year-old would go on to explain how the accident happened, how his phone buzzed, how he flipped it open without giving it a thought.
“This is where I made the biggest mistake of my life,” he said in a hurried clip, just trying to get through it, the way a teenager reads a book report.
Would he ride a bicycle now that he no longer has a license? asked Judy Siel, the club’s chairwoman.
“I don’t know,” he said in a soft voice. “Maybe.”
Picking up “Crash” DVD
It was the day before Thanksgiving. Patrick and his girlfriend, Ashley Calhoun, made a stop to pick up a DVD, “Crash.”
As they cruised in his red Chevy Cobalt along Wildcat Mountain Reserve Parkway, the foothills stretched out before them like a blanket.
His cellphone buzzed. It was a buddy, forwarding a joke.
Just as Patrick began to type a reply, Ashley screamed. He looked up to see Price on his bike, just before the man’s body slammed into the windshield.
The Chevy screeched to a stop, and Patrick ran to where the man lay crumpled on the pavement. He felt for a pulse with one hand as he fumbled to dial 911 with the other.
“It was just disbelief,” he said. “When I got out of the car, I expected him to be getting up, holding his head. I know that doesn’t make sense.”
There was no doubt what caused the accident. “Carelessness,” said Douglas County sheriff’s Deputy Adam Cataffo, the accident’s chief investigator.
But it wasn’t that simple.
It was a bright, sunny day on a curvy hillside, with signs, homes, trees, a high school on the hill and other visual clutter to camouflage the cyclist.
There was little room for error. Only a ribbon of white paint ran between the busy street and the bike lane. Patrick’s car drifted across the line as the road curved gently to the left in front of his high school.
Any driver would’ve needed to pay close attention.
The witness in the next lane never saw Price on his bicycle, only the aftermath.
“It was very difficult, at best, to see where Mr. Price would have been,” Cataffo said.
“All the difference”
Deputy chief prosecutor Dan May recalled the first time he met Patrick and his family.
“Deer in the headlights,” he said.
The family’s lawyer didn’t show up that day, so May told them where to stand and what to expect.
After the hearing, he turned to leave and saw Patrick in a tearful embrace with Price’s wife, Shirley.
They were whispering to each other, words Shirley Price would never share with the prosecutor.
Patrick said later he just wanted to tell her how sorry he was. “I didn’t know if she would accept it,” he said.
The Price family never wanted jail time for Patrick, and convincing a jury otherwise without their blessing would have been nearly impossible, May said.
“If his lawyer had been there, that (encounter between Patrick and Shirley Price) probably wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have allowed it,” May said. “And I think that moment made all the difference in the world.”
Both of Price’s daughters told the judge they preferred that Patrick become a spokesman for safe driving. He should “be an instrument to his peers,” said daughter Kimberly Stevens.
Patrick never asked for a plea deal before he pleaded guilty to Douglas County Judge Michelle Marker on Feb. 6.
“I did what I did,” Patrick said. “I should face the consequences.”
Marker said she would oversee his sentence, an unusual offer, and she will decide when he can have a cellphone and a driver’s license again.
Patrick will spend the morning of his high school graduation, May 25, with Marker to discuss his progress. She told him Thursday that he could go to his prom May 6 if he stays on course with his community service.
Shirley Price has been spending time with her children and grandchildren in Texas. She did not return calls for this story.
Learning about cyclists
After the accident, Patrick started reading cyclist websites to learn more about Jim Price. “He was a genius when it came to bicycles,” Patrick said, enthusiasm welling in his voice.
Others remember Price, a retired geologist, as the first to help others. He had a gentle smile and offered encouragement and advice to cyclists, said his riding mate, Ralph Goodman.
When Price broke an ankle in an earlier collision with a car, he refused to be angry at the driver. It was just an accident, he told his friends.
Other cyclists do not forgive careless drivers as easily.
“What are we saying here? That if you’re sorry and willing to give a few speeches, then it’s OK to kill people? That doesn’t cut it,” said James Shankles, an advocate for mandatory jail time for careless drivers.
Patrick now sees all the thoughtless things others do behind the wheel. “That used to be me,” he says.
Bruce Hall, a teacher at Columbine High, thinks cellphones are out of control. He and his wife, Jean Downing, a teacher at Chaparral High, hear phones jingle and buzz all day long. Despite school codes against it, students text-message in class with reckless abandon.
“What happened to this boy is a tragedy,” Hall said. “What happened to that man is a tragedy. But what about the rest of us? Every time you have a cellphone to your ear while you’re driving down the road, do you ever ask yourself, ‘Am I doing the same thing?”‘
Don’t be discouraged
There is a paradox Patrick hasn’t sorted out.
If he could go back in time, he would say “be careful” to the kid he used to be. “But I wouldn’t have listened,” he says. “That’s just the way I was back then. I thought I was invincible in my car.”
At his sentencing, the judge warned him not to be discouraged if others didn’t seem to listen to his warnings.
“I thought, ‘How can you say that?”‘ he said, thinking of the devastation two families have been through. “How can they not listen?”
On Feb. 20, he gave his second speech, this time to his drivers-education class at ThunderRidge High. He got only one question.
“They asked how long I would lose my license,” he said, with an abbreviated sigh.
Patrick has given a lot of thought to the little things people find important and the choices that follow.
“That day, that text message seemed important to me,” he said at his kitchen table, a house-arrest monitor strapped to his ankle. “Now I couldn’t even tell you what it said.”
Judy Sims, Patrick’s mother, thought long about how the crash affected so many people.
“It was difficult to imagine ever getting back to a normal life,” she said.
His family wonders how Patrick, a thoughtful, sensitive kid, would live with the guilt of killing another person, even if by accident.
They get by on prayer.
“We were all praying for the Price family,” she said, “as well as for Patrick.”
“An excellent person”
Patrick wasn’t looking for forgiveness when he went to the Feb. 13 meeting with the cyclists.
Price’s widow and daughters gave him that, he said, and their grace is why he no longer sees a killer in his bathroom mirror every morning.
He wondered whether the cyclists saw only a nervous boy whose silly choice led to their friend’s death.
Frank Watkins said Patrick did one thing right – he took responsibility for what he did. “It indicates to me that you must be an excellent person, and your family raised you in an excellent fashion,” he told Sims.
Patrick kept his eyes on his letter; the men and women just stared.
“Thank you for listening to my story,” Patrick said, ending his talk.
A long pause followed, one colder than even Patrick had expected.
Someone near the front clapped twice. Nobody joined in.
Patrick folded his paper and slipped out of a silent room.
Staff writer Joey Bunch can be reached at 303-820-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com.
