At about noon on April 6, 1999, Melissa Lynn Marvin, twenty-nine, a waitress living in Kill Devil Hills on North Carolina's Outer Banks, went into a bar in Nags Head and drank two margaritas without eating. At about one o'clock she moved to a restaurant and drank three shots of Rumple Minze, a hundred-proof schnapps, still without eating. The bartender warned her not to try to drive to Williamsburg, Virginia, where she was going to a concert. She drove anyway.
Shortly before three, witnesses saw her Mitsubishi Montero weaving through traffic on Highway 158 in Kill Devil Hills at fifty to sixty miles an hour in a fifty zone, with her left foot up on the dashboard. At the intersection with the 158 bypass she ran a red light and broadsided a Chevrolet Cavalier that was turning left on the green. Five seventeen-year-olds were in the car. Shana Lawler's family had recently moved to Colington, on the Outer Banks, and her four friends had come down from New Jersey by bus for spring break. There were no skid marks; the Kill Devil Hills police chief, Ray Davis, said she never tried to brake. The Cavalier, a 1988 that belonged to Shana's parents, Paul and Brenda, bent so hard in the middle that a cashier at the Amoco station across the road thought it had nearly cracked in half, and rescuers had to cut the teenagers out. Angela McGrady and Amanda Geiger, in the back seat, were dead at the scene. Megan Blong, at the wheel and wearing her seat belt, died a short time later at the Outer Banks Medical Center; some later accounts put all three deaths at the scene. Shana Lawler, flown to Sentara Hospital in Norfolk in critical condition, died on April 12. Michael Horner, in the front passenger seat, survived: surgeons at Albemarle Hospital in Elizabeth City removed his spleen, and he lay in intensive care with a collapsed lung. Marvin had minor injuries. The cashier watched police handcuff her and lead her, shaking and in tears, to a patrol car.
They were juniors from Burlington County, New Jersey, and their lives were the crowded, ordinary lives of seventeen. Megan Blong, of Shamong, born in Atlanta, sat on the executive and yearbook committees at Shawnee High School and had just taken up kickboxing. She walked with a limp from cerebral palsy she had suffered as a baby, and she had run cross-country as a sophomore, usually finishing last to her teammates' cheers. "She was always smiling," one of them said. She was going to the junior prom with a classmate, Mark Medvetz, who remembered the hug she gave him when he asked. Angela McGrady, of Medford, another Shawnee junior, worked part-time at the ShopRite on Route 70 and was going to the prom with Michael Horner. "She was very special," her father, Michael, said. Amanda Geiger, of Medford, had left Lenape High School that year; her father flew to Michigan to tell her sister Kelly, a student at Michigan State, in person, while her mother lay in a hospital recovering from hip surgery. Shana Lawler had been a Shawnee student until her family moved to Colington the year before.
She had been here before. She was charged with driving while impaired in 1991 and again in 1996, and both times was convicted of the lesser offense of careless and reckless driving. A state trooper, Shelton Smith, later told the jury about the 1996 stop: at a quarter past ten on the night of June 28 he pulled her over after she cut off another car at speed, smelled alcohol, and saw her bloodshot eyes and red face. When she realized she was under arrest she began to cry and told him she had fought with her boyfriend, who was angry that she had been surfing all day and drinking since two in the afternoon. North Carolina courts had begun treating that kind of history as proof of the malice needed for murder. She was first charged with felony death by vehicle, driving while impaired and three traffic offenses, and stayed in jail when she could not post $31,000 bail; the Dare County grand jury then indicted her on four counts of second-degree murder and one of assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury. Her lawyer, Michael Sanders of Elizabeth City, later said the court clerk's office had called him pleading with him to take the case. "No lawyer in Dare County would touch it," he said.
The trial in Manteo, in January 2000, lasted a week and drew national coverage. Horner testified that Megan had waited for the green before she pulled into the intersection. The judge let the state put the conduct behind both earlier charges before the jury, for the single purpose of showing her state of mind, and instructed the jurors that they could use it only to decide malice. He kept out the testimony of a reserve deputy, Ted Kearns, who said he had come across her surfing a week before the crash smelling of alcohol, as inadmissible character evidence. The bartender at the Nags Head bar testified that he had bought her one of the margaritas because she was a friend and a regular; a surf shop owner said that just before the crash she had stopped by to borrow surfing videos to show a middle-school surf club. The prosecutor, Amber Davis, reminded the jury of the foot on the dashboard, and in closing she drew the line herself: "It's one thing to surf drunk at the First Street Beach Access... But 158 is not the Atlantic Ocean and a Montero is not a surfboard. Context, behavior and attitude. That is malice. And that is why she's guilty of murder." The jury deliberated for about four and a half hours and found her guilty on every count. Marvin, who had sobbed through much of the testimony, did not react. At sentencing she spoke in court for the first time, facing the victims' families. "I'm so sorry for everything that happened," she said. "I never intended to hurt anyone. There's not a malicious bone in my body."
Superior Court Judge Jerry Tillett heard about two hours of testimony from the families and from Marvin, then ran the sentences consecutively: 174 to 218 months for each of the four murders and 24 to 29 months for the assault, a minimum of about sixty years. "I don't know how I could have said to one parent your child's life didn't matter," he said. Her appeal, argued by the Raleigh lawyer Joseph Cheshire V, attacked the admission of the old charges and the surfing argument. On March 19, 2002, in an unpublished opinion by Judge Wanda Bryant, the North Carolina Court of Appeals found no error: the prior conduct went to malice, not propensity, the 1991 and 1996 incidents were not too remote, and the surfing remark rested on other evidence the jury had properly heard, including the trooper's account and the arresting officer's testimony that he knew her from the First Street beach access. The families also brought dram-shop suits in 2000 against the businesses that had served her.
The Baltimore Sun, reporting on the case from Kitty Hawk, saw in it a state grafting murder law onto drunk-driving cases, and quoted a state appellate defender who warned that people could be tried for murder in North Carolina for having a few beers and accidentally killing someone. At the crash site, four white crosses went up, marked Megan, Angie, Amanda and Shana, beside a sign that read "Drinking + Driving Can Cost You a Precious Gem." Ten years on, the families still refused to call it an accident. "Accidents are not preventable. This crash was easily preventable," said Shana's sister, Erin Lawler, by then a substance-abuse counselor at a New Jersey high school. Megan's mother, Maggie Blong, would not hear the word closure. "We consider this a homicide," she said. The families had formed a nonprofit, Precious Gems Memorial, after the name the girls had come to be known by. Twenty years later a retired Kill Devil Hills police captain, Mark Evans, the second officer at the scene, said the case had changed how drunk-driving cases were prosecuted there, with fewer charges reduced and fewer light sentences.
1991: Melissa Marvin is charged with driving while impaired and convicted of the lesser offense of careless and reckless driving.
June 28, 1996: a state trooper stops her after she cuts off another car at speed; that year's impaired-driving charge also ends in a conviction for careless and reckless driving.
April 6, 1999: Marvin runs a red light in Kill Devil Hills and broadsides a car carrying five seventeen-year-olds; Angela McGrady, Amanda Geiger and Megan Blong die.
April 12, 1999: Shana Lawler dies of her injuries.
January 2000: after a week-long trial in Manteo, the jury finds her guilty of four counts of second-degree murder and one of assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury.
2000: the families bring dram-shop suits against the businesses that served her.
March 19, 2002: the North Carolina Court of Appeals finds no error in her trial.