Parents' nightmare mars Olympic feeling

They were fans of the Olympic Games, and you should know that. Big fans. Mike and Devon Slinger took their two sons to Salt Lake City two years back, and they loved the atmosphere, the mingling with the athletes, the chance to watch a cross-country race or three.

Now they run from the Olympics, run as fast as Justin Gatlin. A family of four that couldn't get enough of Salt Lake is now a family of three trying to escape Athens in the sanctuary of their California home. Mike and Devon and son Kyle do not care to open a newspaper or turn on the TV.

They do not want to be reminded that Tammy Crow, American Olympian, is chasing the gold eight months after being convicted of vehicular manslaughter in the deaths of her boyfriend, Cody Tatro, and the Slingers' 12-year-old son, Brett.

"I always thought Olympic athletes were the best of the best," Devon Slinger said by phone. "I'm not sure (Crow) fits the bill."

Crow will compete Friday in the synchronized swimming team event final, just days after her appeal of the misdemeanor conviction was rejected. She won't serve her 90-day jail sentence until October, this after a judge agreed in January to postpone her prison term until the Athens Games were complete.

That postponement only widened the gulf between the Slingers and the 27-year-old woman they believe hasn't accepted enough responsibility for the Feb. 16, 2003 crash that snuffed out their son's own athletic dreams, Brett's vision of playing baseball for Stanford and then for a big-league team.

"She should've served her time right away, just like anybody else," Mike Slinger said. "She got nine months to train and compete in the Olympics, and we're waking up every single day to a parents' worst nightmare. It still feels like Brett is lost, and we have to find him."

A California highway patrolman found Brett in the back of a black Nissan Pathfinder, dead inside his seatbelt. Tammy had been asked by Tatro to drive them to a ski lodge in the Sierra Nevada to meet the Slingers, who had gone ahead of Brett after he'd insisted on staying behind to play a baseball game. The Slingers had recruited Brett's favorite gym teacher, Tatro, to drive their son to the lodge. Tatro in turn recruited Crow, whom the Slingers had never met.

The night before the drive, the Olympic hopeful and the gym teacher drank and danced. She slept a little; he didn't sleep at all. They picked up Brett around 5:30 a.m.

Two hours later, Tatro and Brett were dead, and Crow was left with a shattered arm and, according to the responding patrolman, alcohol on her breath. Crow said she was only going 30 mph when she lost control of the SUV on the snow-kissed road, crashing through a "slippery when wet" sign and into two pine trees.

The patrolman, Rick Thoma, wrote in his police report that Crow was traveling "substantially greater than the stated 30 mph (she) claimed." Thoma wrote that Crow admitted to having "three gin and tonics earlier in the morning," though Crow would later say she had a shot of tequila, a glass of wine and a martini. The patrolman couldn't test Crow's blood-alcohol level on the scene because of her injuries, but a test taken at the hospital more than three hours later found no alcohol in her bloodstream.

"What have I done? ... What did I do?" Crow asked Thoma at the scene.

Enough to go to jail. Enough to express her contrition by removing herself from the Olympic team.

A request to speak to Crow was denied by a synchronized swimming spokeswoman. But Darryl Seibel, U.S. Olympic Committee spokesman, said Crow was allowed to compete in Athens because her sport's governing body approved her, and because her crime didn't violate the USOC code of conduct. A felony removes an athlete from consideration, a misdemeanor does not.

The USOC needs to rewrite its manual and allow for common-sense judgments in an unprecedented case like this one. If Crow wasn't going to bench herself as a self-imposed method of reparation, the USOC should've done it for her. If a prison sentence stemming from two deaths isn't enough to remove one from good Olympic standing, what, exactly, is?

Meanwhile, the Slingers are hurting in a way only parents of buried children can fathom. "(Crow) constantly says she's guilty of an accident," Mike Slinger said. "But this wasn't just a car crash. It's a crash that killed two people. She's shown absolutely no remorse."

So the Slingers will keep staying clear of the Athens Games. They will keep grieving their lost honor student, their lost baseball and soccer star. While Tammy Crow chases Olympic gold, a family of four will stay busy learning how to be a family of three.

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Ian O'Connor also writes for The (Westchester County, N.Y. ) Journal News