Ten months and one week ago today, Andrew Detwiler shot his wife, Suzanne, through a dining room window as she and her 17-year-old son A.J. fled across the back deck. Corey, the youngest of three Detwiler children, was hiding inside the house, clinging to a second gun when Suzanne died in A.J.’s arms. When Andrew raised his gun to his two sons minutes later, 15-year-old Corey shot his father twice — once in the hip, once in the back.
All the while, Brittany Detwiler lay sleeping in her Ashford Street bed after a night of celebration, none-the-wiser that some 320 miles southwest of Boston University, the Detwiler trio had just become orphans.
Brittany’s birthday will never be the same again.
“You know, if you go to Oklahoma State I’m not gonna be able to see you play that much.”
The Detwiler children grew up on fields, diamonds and mats, and Brittany was no exception.
“I grew up watching my mom play,” she says. “My mom was a shortstop, and so that’s what I wanted to be, but she volunteered me to try pitching without me really wanting to, and it ending up working out.”
Before long, Brittany was toeing the rubber for a travel team in Virginia. Not long after that, colleges started calling the hurler with scholarship offers. The 5-foot, 8-inch pitching phenom had a choice to make.
“It really came between [Boston University] and Oklahoma State for me, which were two completely different ends of the spectrum,” Brittany says. “Oklahoma State — definitely more softball-wise, definitely a solid program, solid team.
“The one deciding factor was my mom saying to me, ‘You know, if you go to Oklahoma State I’m not gonna be able to see you play that much,'” she continues. “My mom has been at every one of my softball games growing up, so that definitely was a hard thing to be like, ‘She’s not gonna be there?’ I can’t do that.”
Brittany quickly became the Terriers’ stud, and her mother was there to see it. The Detwilers lived just outside Philadelphia, making it easier for them to see their daughter pitch on the road, when BU traveled to nearby New York or Maryland. But every once in a while, Suzanne would throw in a surprise visit.
“She came down to Florida for our one tournament,” Brittany recalls. “And then she surprised me and drove through the night to Georgia for spring break, and she showed up at the field that morning.
“And I pitched one of my best games. I had 15 strikeouts that game.”
“This is a joke.”
Brittany was waiting to begin her junior year at Boston University on June 18, 2005. She had decided to stay on campus to take summer classes and keep up on her training. And on that particular Saturday morning, Brittany woke up on with a tired smile on her face. Sure, she had to go to a one o’clock group meeting to work on Monday’s presentation, but that was OK, because when Brittany opened her eyes that morning she was one year older, one year wiser and one year closer to every college kid’s dream — turning 21. Yes, the 18th of June was supposed to be Brittany’s day.
But that smile was the last Brittany would have for a long time. Her life changed forever as she walked down Commonwealth Avenue toward the student union that day.
“I had received two weird messages — one being my cousin saying my other cousin wanted me to come home for some reason, which was weird because I hadn’t talked to her in a long time; and then another one was from one of my good friends, who was a close family friend, and it just said, ‘Hey Britt, it’s Leah, just wanted to make sure you got your flight home. If you need my credit card, gimme a call.'”
But none of this seemed that off to Brittany, who knew things were getting bad between her parents, especially after her dad’s suicide attempt six days prior. After her dad was found in the garage inside an idling car, he checked into a psychiatric facility for evaluation, but the 44-year-old checked out before doctors could diagnose him with what was believed to be bipolar disorder. Brittany was planning to get home as soon as she could, to support her mother and brothers, to help sort out the issues her family was having.
Then, her world collapsed on top of her.
“I returned [Leah’s] call as I was walking down Comm. Ave. and she was like, ‘Did you get your plane ticket?’ I was going through the whole, ‘Oh, I can’t come home till Tuesday because I have to give this presentation on Monday…’ and she was just like, ‘You don’t know what happened.’ At that point my heart just sunk,” Brittany recalls somberly.
Next thing she knew, Doug Geib, a close friend of Andrew and Suzanne, was on the other end of the line. “Britt, we need you to get on a plane and get home.”
Brittany peppered Geib with questions of what happened, to no avail.
“They’re not telling me,” she remembers, with a hint of panic left in her voice.
When Brittany got to the GSU and couldn’t connect to the internet, she called her teammate and roommate Brandi Shields.
“I called Brandi and I’m freaking out, I’m shaking,” Brittany says.
“Brandi, you have to get online, you have to get me a plane ticket.”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know — something happened.”
Five minutes later, Brittany found out.
“Did you get your plane ticket?” Doug’s wife Louise asked. But Brandi’s search came up empty; the next flights didn’t leave till six that evening.
“Brittany, I have to tell you something,” Louise said. “Both your parents have passed away.”
“At that point, I just got up and went into the bathroom and collapsed,” says Brittany. “I was just like, ‘This is a joke.’
“I don’t really know what I did. I think I just started freaking out.”
“In my head, they weren’t dead yet.”
Without a flight, Brittany, Brandi and BU athletic trainer Lisa Murray sped down the Mass Pike en route to Bucks County, Penn.
“The worst nightmare of my life” is how Brittany described that six-hour ride. “I was throwing up,” she says. “We were just on a highway, we were going so fast. I was just so nauseous. In my head, they weren’t dead yet. I was going to the hospital. It was like, ‘OK gun shot wound’ — it was just very hard to grasp what I was told.
“In my head I was making up all these stories as to what we were doing,” she continues. “I remember, cause I was exhausted, actually falling asleep for a little bit and waking up and thinking that I had just dreamed this whole thing. And then I woke up and we were still driving.”
Brittany stayed home all of summer 2005 coping with not only the death of her parents, but her new responsibilities. As the only legal adult, she was the head of the house — and that meant going from Big Sis to co-guardian of her two younger brothers, a role she shared with cousins Mike and Linda Pulli.
“Me and my brothers were always close, so at first it was really weird cause we were all living together in the house and it was just us three,” Brittany says. “So it was really hard cause I had to actually implement rules. I was usually the big sister that was like, ‘Go have fun!’ and now I was like ‘Where are you?'”
But Brittany says A.J. and Corey don’t look at her as their guardian. The three have the utmost respect for each other. Now they have a partnership, bound by love and pain.
“I am the same person I was before it happened.”
Just like that, Brittany was forced to trade in red cups and sleeping in for groceries and alarm clocks. Just two days prior, she was 19 and carefree. Suddenly, Brittany was 40.
“I completely had to grow up and take care of all of this stuff that kids that are 20 don’t take care of,” she says. “And so I think at first I was ready to get back because it was like ‘OK, I can finally be a 20 year old for once.'”
But Brittany’s return to Boston University wasn’t without complications.
“When I got back here it was very awkward,” she says. “It was just something that nobody wanted to bring it up, but at the same time you know that they wanted to say that they were sorry. Everyone was very hesitant in how they interacted with me. People still are, and it makes it hard. You want to be like, ‘Yeah, this did happen, but I am the same person I was before it happened, too, maybe just a lot more responsible now.'”
Even though Brittany was back on campus, her responsibilities at home were close behind, keeping college life just out of reach.
“I think everything I have to do has taken away a lot of my free time,” she says. “Going to those parties or going to hang out — that’s been taken away because I have so much responsibility.”
A.J., Corey and the Pullis helped Brittany move back into her Boston home.
“Saying goodbye to them was really hard,” Brittany recalls. “It was never gonna be the same for us. When I returned home, it was never gonna be home again. It was gonna be me and the boys, but it wasn’t our house or our parents or anything.”
“I lose it when I see them start to lose it.”
But that was all then. This is Brittany now: Back at college, she is still coach Shawn Rychcik’s go-to girl on the mound; she is still big sister and guardian; and most importantly, she is still the pillar of strength for the Detwiler clan.
“I feel like we all feel we have to be strong for each other,” Brittany says. “You can definitely see that in how we act around each other, how we talk about everything. We’re very hesitant when we talk about it. Not in the fact that we’re nervous, we just don’t want to upset somebody else if they’re not upset about it at that time.
“We all go through our highs and lows at different times, so when somebody’s on a high you don’t wanna bring them down cause you’re on a low.”
In the fall, Brittany frequented her new home — the Pullis added a wing onto their home for the trio — nearly every weekend. But with the BU softball season in full swing, Brittany has found it harder to make her way south — in terms of both time and emotion.
“It’s really hard [to go home],” she says. “It just reminds you of what you don’t have, and it reminds you that those two people aren’t there.”
And when birthdays, graduations and Christmas roll around, for Brittany and her boys it’s any place but home for the holidays.
“Corey’s birthday was in December … and me and A.J. got him a snowboard and boots and stuff that he wanted. I lose it when I see them start to lose it, and I just remember him opening up his snowboard boots — he was so happy — and then all of a sudden his eyes, you could see that he was starting to suck back the tears, and I just completely lost it.
“There’s random moments that happen like that,” she adds. “It’s more like the random things that you see or hear and all of a sudden you’re crying and you can’t stop.”
“If I didn’t have those two that I knew that I had to take care of … had I not had that I don’t know what would have happened.”
“A.J. graduates in June and it happens to be on my mom’s birthday, and I know that that is gonna be a hard thing,” Brittany says. “It’s four days before everything happened, so it’s gonna be difficult getting through all that.”
When A.J.’s wrestling success took him all the way to a States medal in grappler-rich Pennsylvania, he struggled with just that, says his big sis.
“You just don’t know how to act when you’re doing these good things and getting rewarded from it, because the two people that were the most important in your life that were the ones that were like, ‘We’re proud of you,’ aren’t there to say that anymore,” she says. “So it kinda gives you a feeling of ‘what was this all for?’ at the same time.”
There will be more tough times ahead. Brittany doesn’t kid herself about that. But above all else, she is thankful for one thing.
“I was so fortunate nothing happened to [A.J. and Corey],” she says. “If I didn’t have those two that I knew that I had to take care of … had I not had that I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Am I really doing this?”
Softball is something that has bound Brittany and her mother together all their lives. And wherever Brittany goes from here, count on Suzanne living on through her daughter’s success in the game they both love.
“Just to play, and play a game that was such a big impact on my mom’s life, is huge to me,” Brittany says. “And then just to know how supportive of me playing she was and how much she loved to watch me play and loved to be at the games — that’s honestly what keeps me playing and keeps me going.”
With her mom’s death came a degree of guilt for Brittany — a feeling that hit home in the junior hurler’s first softball game without Suzanne.
“I think I just stood at the fence and cried,” Brittany says, pausing before she continues. “I mean, I still randomly will. I can remember we were warming up hitting and I can remember being by the outfield fence and being in a daze. You’re like, ‘Am I really doing this?'”
And with such a young team behind her this 2006 season, Brittany has taken it upon herself to put everyone else at ease about the situation.
“Brittany put people at a comfort — she was able to talk about things — and it kinda put the rest of the team at ease,” says BU coach Shawn Rychcik. “It made it easier on them to deal with it, cause you don’t want to ever say anything that might upset her.”
“I think it’s something that people don’t want to bring up or talk about, so we just don’t really talk about it,” says Brittany. “We do all wear wristbands that have my mom’s initials on it, and that’s our unspoken respect for what happened to my mom.”
The lesser happenings in life don’t seem to matter as much to Brittany anymore either, thanks to a drastically changed outlook. March 30, Brittany sustained what was thought at first to be a season-ending ankle sprain, an injury that would have been devastating before June 18, 2005.
“It was like, ‘Oh, well that’s not the worst thing that’s happened in my life this year,'” she says. “The way I think me and the boys look at each day has completely changed; what’s important to me now isn’t so much the stupid things in life that you find people get caught up in — that doesn’t matter anymore.”
Brittany toed the rubber once again April 12.
“Life’s too short — that’s what me and the boys keep saying — and you look past certain things and try to make the best out of every day and every second you get.”
From this, Rychcik knows he’s gotten a pitcher, and more importantly a person, who is stronger and tougher than ever before.
“Coming back to school was gonna be tough for her,” the coach says, “but I thought that we’d probably end up eventually getting just a stronger mental athlete. Things on the field aren’t gonna bother her, because she’s been through so much. So whatever situation is presented to her down the road, she’s been through a lot worse.”
But one of the most important goals for Brittany nowadays is living out her mother’s dreams.
“I know it was her dream to see me [play softball] and see me graduate college because both my parents didn’t graduate college,” she says as her voice chokes up just a bit. “So it’s kinda like living their goals for us, and I just happened to be the first and oldest to do it. But it’s definitely been a huge crutch to know that I can go out there and I can physically exhaust myself playing.”
“Think about the good things, not the end — it’s a lot easier that way.”
“I’d say at least 100 times a day they’re in my mind — more so the good stuff than what happened at the end,” says Brittany. “You look back and all of the times you spent with them are cherishable right now. Once they’re gone, every one of those moments mean the world to you. But yeah, think about the good things, not the end — it’s a lot easier that way.”
As tears start to roll down her tan complexion and splash onto black cotton pants, Brittany’s once perfectly composed face melts away.
“I think they would say that they’re proud of us, all of us, how we handled everything,” Brittany says of her parents, her voice shaking, her eyes welling up behind made-up eyes. “I don’t know what I’d say to them. I would just grab onto my mom and never let go.
“Honestly, I don’t think there’d be words that could come out.”