Tied Together By a Tragic Bond

"Yes, I do," Kim replied, a smile spreading on her face. It was 4:20 a.m. and a police officer was at her door, but Kim's first response was pride, not panic. For 19 years, being the mother of Billy Gaines had portended only good things.

Billy was only 5 feet 7, but his closest friends -- five teammates who with Billy called themselves the Super Six -- pointed to him as their leader. An All-Met, he won the last 50 football games he played at Urbana, attended country music concerts with his friends and never told anyone about the love poems he wrote to Natalie Augustine, the high school sweetheart he knew he someday would marry.

His reputation grew so much that a boy Billy never had met invited him to his eighth birthday party. Billy came, signed autographs and tossed a football for three hours.

"It was the weirdest thing for me, having a best friend that was more of like somebody you looked up to," said Travis Sheets, one of the Super Six. "He looked at you as an equal, but I looked at him as being more than I was. It made me feel like I was worthy, because I was his friend."

Billy's teammates at Urbana and at Pittsburgh regarded him as the strongest player on the team for his size, 165 pounds of muscle. They marveled at how quickly he jumped to his feet after being tackled. So when the police officer told Kim that Billy had been in an accident and gave her the phone number for a hospital in Pittsburgh, she assumed Billy would be all right. Maybe he had crashed his truck. Maybe, she figured, he had a concussion.

She dialed the number and spoke with a doctor whose tone alarmed her.

"Does he have life-threatening injuries?" Kim asked.

"Yes," the doctor said.

Kim called Augustine; Billy's mother wasn't leaving for Pittsburgh without her son's girlfriend. Augustine had followed Billy to school at Pittsburgh but had come home for the summer. Billy had worn jersey No. 29 because it was Augustine's birth date. They often discussed marriage. "We didn't assume, we knew," Augustine said. "We were each other's lives."

Kim roused Nick, Michael and Bill, but told only her husband of the severity of Billy's condition. Nick Gaines had planned on filming a home movie with friends mimicking the television show "Jackass" that day, but the change in plans made him look forward to seeing his brother. He figured Billy had wrecked his truck and pictured him yelling at nurses for not letting him out of his bed. He bounded out to the car and called shotgun.

When they arrived at the hospital by 8 a.m., doctors told the family that Billy had massive head and spinal cord injuries and could not breathe on his own. Only family members, at first, could visit him. Augustine borrowed one of Kim's rings to convince doctors she was Billy's fiancee, curled up on the bed next to him and didn't move the rest of the day. He looked, they all said later, like he was napping.

Kim had spoken with her son barely 12 hours earlier. "I love you," Kim said when the conversation ended. "I'll talk to you in the morning."