cwadmin“Forgiving and feeling seem deeply related, but the precise nature of the relationship is elusive. On the one hand, if I forgive you but continue to feel angry or bitter about what you did, you could reasonably ask what difference my forgiveness has made. Indeed, what was its point?” – Jeffrey Helmreich, philosopher and professor
David Balch remembers almost everything about the worst day of his life. More than nine years after it happened, on Aug. 9, 2009, he easily recalls the details.
He and his wife, family practice physician Christa Balch, had done the divide-and-conquer dance so many parents of young children employ when it comes to weekend commitments, and that weekend had been loaded with them. Christa’s parents were visiting, to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and her kids and her sister’s kids had spent that Saturday playing their hearts out in the backyard. David, a litigator by profession and a volunteer by avocation, had spent that Sunday at Sacred Heart Church in Salinas, where he talked to parents and kids coming out of masses about enrolling in catechism classes. Christa had spent the day with their 4-year-old son Sebastian and 2-year-old daughter Ava, first volunteering at the homeless outreach at First United Methodist Church and then making tamales at a friend’s house in Salinas.
He met her at the friend’s house about 7pm, and at 8:45, they loaded the kids into their 1998 Honda Accord and made their separate journeys home.
It should have been a short trip. Christa always took a longer route, so David wasn’t surprised he beat her back to their Las Palmas home. But then the minutes began to stretch and David began to get annoyed.
“I thought maybe she had stopped at the grocery store for milk or something, but I started calling her and she didn’t answer,” he says. “So I went out to look for her.”
He turned left out of the development and onto River Road, and off in the distance, near the traffic light at Las Palmas Road, he saw the flashing lights of multiple police cars and ambulances. He figured Christa was caught behind an accident.
He backtracked through the development, parking near the guard shack at Las Palmas Road, then got out of his car and walked up to view the scene. He saw the Accord wasn’t stuck behind the accident – it was the accident. The back half of the car, where their children were strapped into their car seats, was crumpled.
A California Highway Patrol officer walked up to him, maybe figuring he was there to gawk, and asked him what he wanted. Balch pointed to the Honda and said, “That’s my car.” The officer asked him to sit down on the curb, then walked away for a minute. When he returned, he told Balch that one of his children had been injured. He then walked away momentarily and came back with more news.
“He said, ‘One of your children is dead.’ And I knew which one because I knew where they were sitting,” Balch says.
Christa had a broken arm, a fractured wrist and was unconscious. Ava had been jostled by the collision, but didn’t have a scratch on her.
And Sebastian, the big-eyed, big-hearted boy the Balches had fostered since he was 3 months old and adopted at age 2, was dead. He had been sitting in the rear driver’s side seat, which was smashed in by the collision. He died upon impact.
David Balch thinks of his own childhood when asked about Sebastian. He grew up not knowing his father until well into adulthood, and he says it skewed the kind of father he thought he would be.
“Because of my experiences growing up, a piece of my heart was closed off. I was kind of defensive. But when I first saw Sebastian, my heart just opened up, and we bonded in a way I never thought possible,” Balch says. “Those four-and-a-half years with him were magical. I remember our first Mother’s Day, a year after we got him, looking at him and my wife and marveling, ‘Wow, we grew a family.’”
As the driver of the truck that hit Christa Balch’s car and killed Sebastian Balch was taken away, he asked a CHP officer who the man was crying on the side of the road. He was told, that’s the man whose son you killed, Balch says.
At the scene, Dion Gussner’s blood alcohol level was measured at 0.16, or twice the legal limit.
Later, at Natividad Medical Center, it was measured at 0.21.
Let’s do the work today, God’s work, Goddesses’ work, let’s do the work of love, clock in on time for the survival work, for the babies, all the babies… let’s align ourselves and ally ourselves, today.” -Tim Z. Hernandez, writer and professor
Christa Balch remembers almost nothing about the worst day of her life. The Dodge Ram pickup truck that slammed into the back of her car was going an estimated 55 miles per hour at the time of impact. In addition to the broken arm and nerve damage, Christa Balch also suffered a traumatic brain injury that played with her memory.
But she remembers Sebastian, from the first day they met.
David Balch says that after an infertility struggle, one that had him dragging his feet on what steps to take, Christa told him she wanted them to look at becoming foster parents. “I had never seen myself as one, but I think it makes sense. There’s so many kids in need,” David remembers thinking.
They went through the process of becoming licensed foster parents, and one day got the call about a baby boy who needed a home.
“I remember when they called us, and as we were on our way over, I said to David, ‘Don’t agree to anything, we’ll meet him and then talk it over,’ but I saw him and I was immediately in love,” Christa says. “They put him in my arms and I said, ‘I will take him.’”
As he grew in size, he grew in personality – an expansive and generous one, Christa says.
“He had a lot of zest for life. He’d run up to the other kids at the park and play, and if he saw someone playing alone, he’d go up to them and say, ‘C’mon buddy, let’s play together,’” she says. “He was really the sweetest.”
After the crash, Christa Balch was flown by air ambulance to Valley Medical Center, then the closest trauma center, in San Jose. Ava was also taken there as a precaution, and when David arrived, he could hear her in the emergency room, screaming.
“I went in and picked her up and was holding her and she was crying, ‘I’m so scared, daddy, I’m so scared,’ over and over,” Balch says. “I talked to some of the first responders and they said the car crumpled around her in such a way that she didn’t have a scratch on her.”
What Christa awoke to was far more complex. She asked David where Sebastian was, again and again, and had to be told, again and again, that the boy with the big brown eyes she fell in love with at first sight when he was an infant in temporary foster care, was dead. Yet, David says, she doesn’t remember learning that Sebastian had died; even today, her memory of that night is that she always knew he was gone.
“I never remember being told what happened. I just kind of knew it already. They told me so many times, but I never consciously processed it,” she says. “That aspect has always been hard. David was grieving and very emotional, and I think I was a little more internalized with it. You just kind of move on.”
She spent three weeks in the hospital, leaving just once to attend Sebastian’s funeral. From there, she took six months off work to heal. She had surgery on her hand, which restored function that was lost when a nerve was severed; she can now write and work, although she can’t feel anything with three fingers on her injured hand. She went back to volunteering at First United Methodist, and when the mobile health clinic that provides services to the homeless and poor there lacked a physician, she began stepping in to fill that role as well.
And she and her husband went to court, where the case of People of the State of California vs. Dion Gussner was making its way through the system.
But they went to court in a most unexpected way.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” -Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Dion Gussner was 31 years old at the time of the crash. He had parents who loved him, and a sister who loved him. He had friends. He had an education and a career in the agriculture industry.
Maybe more important than all those things, he also had a conscience.
Less than two months after Sebastian Balch’s death, Gussner pleaded guilty to a count of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, with enhancements of causing great bodily injury to Christa Balch.
Deputy District Attorney Steve Somers had been considering charging Gussner with murder, which carried a sentence of 25 years-to-life. Gussner, he says, had two “priorish” circumstances – driving a boat while intoxicated, and a vehicle case that involved drinking, but was ultimately dismissed because it was a bad stop on the part of the police.
“We had a good case. We found the bar that served him and had the receipts and we could tell what he had been drinking almost to the minute,” Somers says. And those receipts showed Gussner had consumed five shots of whisky and two 22-ounce beers in three hours at the Lalla Lounge in South Salinas.
“Then we got the text message from him to his sister saying he was gonna come over and party some more,” Somers says.
Gussner’s phone was found in his truck, and the text message to his sister was sent at almost the exact second of the impact.
“We think he was texting and looked up and saw the green light and kept going and plowed into the back of the car,” Somers said.
Ultimately, Gussner pleaded guilty almost immediately not because he feared a murder charge, but because he wanted to spare the Balches and his own family more pain. At his sentencing hearing, less than two months after the crash, before Judge Terrance Duncan, David Balch told the judge he and his wife opposed incarceration for the sake of incarceration, and advocated for Gussner to be placed in the lowest level of custody as possible.
That kind of advocacy is rare, and even more so because it happened so quickly after the collision that changed all their lives. But it happened not only because the Balches wanted it to, but also because Gussner himself was deeply remorseful. It’s a key component in a process known as restorative justice, in which the offender comes to understand the impact their crime had on the victim and the victim’s family, and the victim and their family are able to meet with the offender and talk in-depth about the incident, and the fallout resulting from the crime, leading to reconciliation.
In Monterey County, Resortative Justice Partners has traditionally worked with juvenile offenders in a process that helps them understand and empathize with the people they’ve wronged. The Marina-based nonprofit recently expanded their scope of services to include adult offenders, running a pilot program in the Monterey County Jail to educate inmates on the nature of being a victim.
“An offender has an incentive to do this, and they have time to get prepared to go through the process, but the victim is the hard part,” says Tom Lee, a retired meteorologist who now coordinates the Victim Impact Program for Restorative Justice Partners. “They may think, ‘Why do I want to talk to the offender? I’m the victim, why do I have to deal with this?’
“But they may find that it may be helpful to mediate and put things as right as possible,” Lee says.
For the Balches and Gussner, no process was needed. At sentencing, Christa Balch also told Gussner she and her husband forgave him. “We want you to know that we all make mistakes. We’re all sinners. We all fall short of the glory of God,” she said. “We forgive you and we’re praying for you.”
Gussner, meanwhile, said while he didn’t deserve the Balches forgiveness, he was grateful to have it. He had taken their son’s life by being selfish, he said, and he hoped they could recover something that looked like a normal life. He also asked for the community to have mercy on his family.
“They were not the ones who made the mistake… they’re wonderful people,” he said.
And then Dion Gussner was sentenced to 16 years in prison, and sent to Ironwood State Prison in Blythe to begin serving out his term.
“Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” -Mark Twain
As Dion Gussner served his sentence, David and Christa Balch continued building a family. They took in more children, including one who was later reunified with his birth parents, and now have four children they’ve adopted or are in the process of adopting: Ava, now 11; Josh, 6; Christopher, 4; and Anna, 9 months. On a recent Sunday, the house is a storm of activity: Ava and a friend are decorating Christmas cookies, the boys are running in and out of the house to jump on the trampoline and ride bikes in the yard; and Anna sleeps. Koko the pudgy little dog – “He just hopped in our car one day,” David says, “and we never found his owner” – barks relentlessly at visitors until Christa asks for a hug, which she says alleviates the dog’s need to be on guard.
While the Balches built their family, Gussner was trying to build a new life on the inside, one where his movements were restricted and his actions monitored. He joined an inmate firefighting crew and worked his way up to captain, earning housing that was less restrictive.
Not long after he went to prison, though, he appealed that sentence. It was a technically complicated maneuver that involved arguing his attorney, Tom Worthington, had provided inadequate counsel. In essence, before he pleaded guilty, Gussner believed he would earn credits that would make him eligible for parole after eight years. Instead, he learned after sentencing that he would have to serve 13 years before being eligible for parole. Gussner’s appeal was denied, appealed again and denied again.
In the background, David Balch would communicate with Gussner’s father, Tom, a few times a year. He’d get updates on Dion, and how the family was doing. Tom Gussner told David he went to visit his son almost every weekend.
In May this year, Gussner submitted a petition to the governor’s office for clemency, and the Monterey County District Attorney’s office asked the Balches to weigh in. They wrote a letter of support to Gov. Jerry Brown.
“We said we would support it,” David Balch says. “My view is forgiveness can’t be words, it has to be actions. It’s ultimately about reconciliation and if we say we forgive someone and then we have a chance to help and say no, that’s not genuine forgiveness. The Gussner family deserves the right to begin rebuilding.”
“Let us forgive each other. Only then will we live in peace.” -Leo Tolstoy
On about Sept. 27 – the date is somewhat in question, Balch says – officers from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation removed Gussner from his cell and loaded him into a van. A day later, on Sept. 28, he was brought to court in Salinas, still in his prison uniform, to appear before Monterey County Superior Court Judge Timothy Roberts.
The purpose of the hearing was to give Gussner his freedom. He was allowed to withdraw his plea and the prosecutors struck the great bodily injury enhancement that led to his extended sentence. That day, he was resentenced to a total of 12 years.
Given that he had already served nine years, and that he would be given additional credits for that time, he would be released within weeks.
During the hearing, Somers told Roberts that Gussner had progressed from the highest level prison, owing to the time he was given for a violent felony, to the lowest level prison, working as an inmate firefighter: “That can only be accomplished by someone who has done the right things,” Somers said.
From the bench, Roberts told Gussner that seeing the family of a victim and the DA’s office band together to seek early release for someone convicted of a crime was “beyond a doubt probably the most surprising thing that’s happened in the roughly 12 years that I’ve been on the bench.”
And then he gave a short speech that called to mind Tom Hanks’ final scene in the film Saving Private Ryan. He told Gussner to earn the gift he was being given.
“I’m hoping and I’m urging you to not let this go to waste. Do not throw this away. You’re never going to get another chance like this,” Roberts said. “The things that happened were horrible. They will haunt you forever, I imagine. You cannot fix them.
“What you can do is you can move forward and you can live a life that pays homage… to the difficulty and the trauma that these people have gone through,” he said. “Don’t mess this up, Mr. Gussner.”
And then Roberts, who had teared up, excused himself from the bench for a minute to regain his composure.
Dion Gussner was released from custody at the end of October. Gussner’s attorney, Charles Carbone, did not return several messages requesting comment. In response to an email request for an interview, Tom Gussner writes that on Carbone’s advice, neither Dion or his family would participate in an interview.
Ultimately, David and Christa Balch say, the story is now Dion Gussner’s to tell.
“For better or worse, in August 2009, I knew how our story ended and so we could begin grieving,” David Balch says. “His family has been in suspended animation for nine years. When you have a person in prison you don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. He has to be allowed to rebuild.”