An interview with Michelle Theer: 'Night falls–and death beckons'
Q. Was it dark?
A. It was dark, but there's a streetlight. . . . I go up there [up the outside stairway to the second-floor back entrance], I open the door, I go in. The office doors are locked. I turn on the hall light. I open the door to my office, I go in, turn on the lights. One of the little booklet things that I need [is] in my file folder. They are there in the office–I get those. And then I go over to the other side of the suites–sort of like U-shaped, with the stairs in the middle–go around to the other side, open that door, and one of the books–the book that I was getting was actually one of Tom's [Harbin's] books–so I have to look for it a minute, it's in his bookshelves. I get that book. . . go into my office, and I'm sort of standing there for a minute. . . [and] thinking to myself, is there anything else that I need to finish these two reports while I'm here? And I'm pausing just for a few seconds. I have been in there, I don't know, maybe two minutes. You know, it's hard to judge time when it's a brief period of time like that. And I heard a noise. And the way I remembered hearing it was hearing one noise and then a pause, and then a series of noises, that's the way I remembered hearing it. And in the police notes, that's the way one of the witnesses says that he heard it was one, and then a series.
Q. That's how Ramsey Lewis describes it, deliberate shots. What did you think it was, a gun, or a car backfiring?
A. It didn't sound like to me what I thought a gun sounds like. . . . To me, it sounded more like a popping sound. And the first thing, really, that I thought of was those little popper things, those little snappers that you throw on the ground. That's actually what it sounded like to me, which I really felt more at a subconscious level than a conscious level, but I heard a noise, you know you have these thoughts, a hundred things in one second, and I remember kind of thinking, what was that? That wasn't a car backfiring, that doesn't sound right, sort of this thought process that happened in an instant. And I walked to the back door, and I pushed the door open, and I looked out, and I didn't see anything that way, and I looked downstairs and I saw Marty laying at the bottom of the stairs, and I ran down. . . the stairs, and really I remember seeing at first. . . the blood on his forehead. And I thought, Marty fell down the stairs and hit [his] head. And, he was breathing, and his breathing was very ragged sounding. He had a lot of phlegm or something in his throat. And I remember wiping the blood off the front of his forehead and saying, "Marty, Marty, Marty, are you OK?" His eyes were open, but he wasn't looking at me. He was just looking straight ahead. . . . He was breathing, but it sounded very ragged. . . it sounded like he had a lot of phlegm in his throat.
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