Alvin Jones called The Denver Post this week, politely asking for a correction to a story we ran.
This was not so unusual in itself, though we work hard to keep such calls to a minimum.
But here’s the thing: The story ran more than 40 years ago. June 3, 1968, to be exact. For a little perspective, that was two days before Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
I heard Jones out and agreed to meet him at a pancake house in northeast Denver.
“I’m just trying to set the record straight,” Jones told me after squeezing his big frame into a booth. “This has bugged me all these years, weighed heavy on my mind. Which is why I want a correction to what the newspaper said.”
The story was about a wreck at East 29th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard. At 12:35 a.m. Sunday, June 2, a pickup sped through a red light and broadsided a Ford Falcon. The crash killed the Falcon’s driver, Norman Randell, and a passenger, Gregory Berry. Both were 17.
“Norman was a football and nationally ranked track star at Manual High School,” Jones said. “The crash broke every bone in his body. Gregory? He was like Bill Cosby, always with a joke.”
Jones was the other passenger in the Falcon, which was hit so hard it went airborne and landed in a yard. He was knocked into the car’s trunk, bleeding from cuts to his head and neck that required 80 stitches.
What has eaten at Jones all these years is that in the confusion, police and newspaper reports mistakenly listed him as a passenger in the truck, whose driver was a joy-riding teen. He is racked by the idea that anyone who picked up that day’s Post put him in the cab of the truck that did the killing.
“Norman, Gregory and me were good friends from the Park Hill neighborhood,” said Jones, who was an athlete at East High School. “We were actually square dudes. It was just before graduation, and we were elated, out on a Saturday night talking about our plans — going to college and all that. They died, and I lived.
“Now why is that?”
The 17-year-old Jones awoke in Fitzsim ons Army Hospital. He was taken there because 15 years earlier, his dad had died in an auto accident during his Army hitch. Jones had survivor benefits.
He had no memory of the wreck. His mom and doctors tried to keep the news about Randell and Berry from him, but he found out.
Jones stayed in intensive care for three days. He missed his graduation. Seven months were spent in therapy for nerve damage to his arms. He was treated alongside maimed soldiers, many of them Vietnam vets wounded in the Tet offensive. “Man, I saw some things I shouldn’t have seen,” he said.
Today, Jones has limited use of his arms. He’s a strapping 6-feet-1 but moves stiffly and is on disability. Pain is a constant. His work history is hit-or-miss, though he graduated from Metropolitan State College of Denver in 2002 with a sociology degree.
He has three grown children from a marriage that’s over.
“I guess what I had was survivor guilt,” Jones said. “Why me? Why did I get to live? I decided the best thing for me to do was take whatever was left and do the best with it.”
Still, that old newspaper story gnawed at him. He wants people to know he was in the car with Randell and Berry.
“I’ve wrestled with this in my head for so many years, and I finally got the strength to pick up the phone and call for a correction,” Jones said.
The record is now set straight.
William Porter’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com.
