Michael Furey’s Death

There are conflicting accounts surrounding Furey’s death. This account is our best guess of events pulling from multiple sources:

Michael Furey first attended Burning Man around 1993. He had been friends with the members of Polkacide, and has been described as their self-appointed manager. Polkacide had performed at Burning Man in 1995, and played again in 1996. He had been in the band The Grateful Dead Kennedys. He was also a neon-glass bender, and friends, or at least social acquaintances, with John Law and others involved with the organization of the event. According to John Law: “He was, you know, hardcore punk, wonderful guy, really crazy, really excitable and a very Hunter Thompson-esque character. He was very well liked by many people and hated by others because he was pretty much out of control….”

The afternoon of the accident Furey and Tom Ray [a/k/a Pogo] were at the bar at Bruno’s Country Club in Gerlach, the closest town to the playa. Both were visibly intoxicated. They were chatting up two women at the bar, Lisa Galley, an artist from San Francisco, and friend of John Law, and another woman, a friend of Lisa’s from Chicago, who were also in town to attend Burning Man.

In the late afternoon, around 5 or 5:30 p.m.., John Law and Andy Petter entered the bar, and quickly grew concerned about the situation.

In 1996, the relationship with the citizens of Gerlach and the law enforcement community was tenuous, as the events quick growth was impacting the town. Moreover, the owner of Bruno’s had been helpful to the organization and John Law, by allowing them to store equipment without charge on his property. That night his daughter Skeeky was working the bar. Offending Skeeky, or having an encounter with law enforcement, could set back many years of hard work building a bridge between the event and the community.

Law confronted the drunk men, telling them to get back to the desert. However, Furey told him to fuck-off, and to leave them alone. Law describes the situation:

… I’m worried about [Furey and Ray] getting out of control and pissing off or freaking out Skeeky, who’s behind the bar. Lisa, who I knew, who was sitting at the bar and is a pretty level-headed gal, basically they were chatting each other up and … Michael and Tom were trying to get laid, basically. So I couldn’t really do anything about it, so I just forgot about it. I was with my friend Andy Petter, who was heavily involved in organizing at the time as well, and so we left. And that was the last time I saw Furey.

A few hours later, a little before 7:30 p.m., Lisa and her friend decided to leave the bar and head toward the playa. They had a large flat-bed trailer on the back of Lisa’s truck, which had been used to bring supplies from San Francisco. Lisa convinced Ray to load his motorcycle on the flatbed, and ride with them to the playa. But Furey insisted on driving himself.

At first, Furey drove along following Lisa’s pickup truck. But they caught up and then passed John Law’s van, which was pulling an 18 foot trailer, loaded with the Man’s legs. Law wasn’t in the van, which was being driven by Steven Bellaseals (aka “SteveCo”), with Mark Perez in the passenger seat. Both Steve and Mark were helping Law with logistics, and had spent several hours loading the trailer from supplies stored at Burnos.

SteveCo was driving the heavily loaded van around thirty miles-per-hour, well below the 55 mph speed limit for County Road 34, the road that lead to the exit for the Burning Man encampment. Around 7:40 p.m., shortly before sunset, Lisa passed the van near the 11-mile turnoff, where one would turn off County Rd. 34 and entered the playa.

At this point, Furey began to drive circles around the van, as well as the pickup. Lisa, in the faster moving pickup lost sight of the Van and Furey, although it’s likely the accident had occurred behind Lisa, without her knowledge. Regardless, Lisa nor the other occupants of the pickup witnessed the accident, and therefore the account of what happened from this point on is solely that of SteveCo, the driver of Law’s van and Tom Ray, the van’s passenger.

According to the van occupants is that Furey began to play chicken as they drove across the playa, driving straight at them and swerving at the last second. Steven reported finding this to be upsetting, driving a van with a long and heavily loaded trailer. He decided to just drive straight and his current speed.

John Law later described what he had been told about the event by Steven, the van’s driver:

This guy is on a motorcycle and whatever he’s going to do I can’t stop him,” and Michael made a last pass at the van. Steven said it looked like [Furey] was going to hit him and at the last second turned away to the right. Michael, instead of hitting the van dead-on in the center, doing seventy miles an hour, hit the side of the van and was decapitated by the driver’s side rearview mirror.

Note, some verbal accounts report that Furey had done several drive-bys prior to the accident with the van and Furey both swerving at the last minute, with the implication that Steveco’s failure to swerve the last approach contributed to Furey’s just barely failing to clear the van’s mirror. It is hard to believe that a van, pulling a long, loaded trailer, traveling at around 30 miles per hour, would be able to make any type of last minute swerve.

The Pershing County Sheriff made a point of noting that the tire marks of both vehicles were going straight ahead, in a straight line until the last forty feet when they swerved hard to the right. Law again notes:

There was an enormous amount of controversy over this. They were calling Steven a murderer. They were saying that they were doing this stupid thing, playing chicken, and that it was some kind of a challenge or something like that. I don’t believe any of that. I think that pretty much what [Steven] said happened was what happened…. It was just an ugly and horrifying incident. The police did the report. There were no charges filed. Steven and Mark were really upset, but they weren’t drunk and they weren’t on drugs, thank God, at the time. They could have been, but you know they were working, hauling stuff out, so they weren’t.

Vanessa Kuemmerle, who was running the day-to-day Black Rock Rangers operations, was soon at the scene, and set up a perimeter around it. Around 30 minutes later John Law arrived on the scene. Vanessa went to town and notified law enforcement, who arrived on the scene and conducted interviews and documented the accident.

Around 11 p.m., Larry Harvey arrived. Controversially, he repeated “There’s no blood on our hands.” Law and others have interpreted this as Harvey being more concerned with the reputation of the event than the death. Harvey explained that he was in utter shock at hearing about the death, and that his statements were not related to concern over the event, but driven by his own feelings of guilt about the death. He had learned there had been a death and on the way there was ruminating about whether he had, in effect, just killed someone.

John Law concluded:

Michael shouldn’t have died. He was a really fun guy, a great guy, but he was out of control. Steven, I don’t think he ever got over it. I don’t think he’s over it today. And that was only one incident. There were fourteen major accidents that year. It was completely horrifying. Larry and to a lesser degree Michael [Mikel] really didn’t have that much of an idea what was going on in the setup or what was required. I knew we didn’t have the infrastructure, the money, to be as responsible as we needed to be to do the fucking event. We just didn’t and these guys didn’t have a clue. Michael sort of did, but Michael’s not one to rock the boat. Larry had no idea, and when I tried to explain it to him, he didn’t care. He wanted the event to be successful, and he wanted people to be impressed by what we were doing. And it didn’t matter if people could get hurt, killed, whatever, as long as anybody didn’t know about it, it didn’t really matter that much. You can fuck the desert up as long as people don’t think we’re fucking the desert up. It didn’t matter that much.