Strong Feelings Expressed by Both Sides About Chain Residents Placed Across Path
By Fredrick Kunkle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
It's an ordinary chain, maybe six feet long, its white paint stained by rust. One end is fastened to a forlorn-looking tree. The other is attached to a wooden post with weather-beaten signs that say: "Private Drive. Do Not Enter."
The chain marks the end of a path that runs along Popes Head Creek from the tiny town of Clifton to the lawn of a private home at the foot of a forested hill. The chain also marks the spot where 14-year-old Samuel Seipel was killed last month when he crashed into it while driving his ATV -- and it has become a symbol of an emotional fissure in a small Fairfax County town where everybody knows everybody.
Why, people ask, was the chain strung across a path often used by birders, horseback riders, walkers and kids on motorbikes and ATVs? Others see the four fluorescent traffic cones that were placed in front of the chain after the fatal crash and wonder why some kind of warning wasn't put there earlier.
"I think everybody is just -- the whole town is questioning, and somewhat angry. People are upset that that chain was up and it wasn't clearly marked," said Elsa Armendaris, 36, who said Sam often lent her a hand after her husband died 10 months ago.
And still others want to know why such a young boy was on such a powerful machine on someone else's property.
The Nov. 23 death of Sam, a teenager living a life that Huck Finn might have led if Mark Twain's fictional hero had traveled by ATV instead of a raft, has shaken this Northern Virginia town of 225 people. It has also brought people closer together as they collected money to pay for Sam's funeral, cooked meals for his family and mourned a boy who loved anything with a motor and made a friend of just about everyone he met.
They told of Sam's talent for resurrecting junkyard castoffs with a little tinkering. They talked about how he was a whiz at fixing other people's bicycles and lawn mowers, about how he was always giving away kittens or newly hatched chicks, and about the way he often stopped at Armendaris's home to fix things or cut the grass.
The last image some people had of Sam was in helmet and goggles pushing his 350cc Yamaha Banshee across the Virginia Railway Express railroad tracks in the center of town shortly before he was killed.
"He was just full of life. He was like sunshine -- lit from within," said Sarah Coster, 45, whose 14-year-old son, Willie, was riding with Sam when the 3:34 p.m. crash occurred.
But there is compassion, too, for the family of William S. and Katherine A. Jasien, a high-powered Republican couple on whose Dunquin Court property the crash occurred. Bill Jasien, 47, a senior vice president at ING Financial Advisers, served as assistant U.S. treasury secretary under President George H.W. Bush. Katherine Jasien, 45, is the sister of former Virginia governor and U.S. senator George Allen.
The Jasiens' property in the Glencairn development includes an easement for the path, which was a farm road before the development was built, according to town officials and Fairfax County Circuit Court land records. The path extends west from Chapel Street, which becomes a dead end. It also borders the Webb Sanctuary owned by the Audubon Naturalist Society of the Central Atlantic States. Cliff Fairweather, senior naturalist for the society, said the chain lies about 30 feet past the conservation group's property line.
The Jasiens also own an ATV and often piled onto it for a short drive down the gravel path to Main Street for a treat at the Ice Cream Depot, neighbors said. It was the Jasiens' 14-year-old son whom Sam was going to visit that afternoon a few days before Thanksgiving when the crash occurred, neighbors and friends said.
"They're the nicest people in the world. They'll do anything in the world for the town," said Richard King, a retired federal environmental analyst who has served on the town's planning board.
"It wasn't like somebody put up barbed wire across the trail," said King, who lives near the path. But King, 61, also wondered about the wisdom of allowing a boy to operate a four-wheel machine that, according to published reports, packs about 40 horsepower.
The Jasiens have not responded to calls or answered the door at their home. Mark R. Dycio, a lawyer in Fairfax County, said the family had no comment.
Officer Eddy Azcarate, a spokesman for the county police, said officers have closed the investigation and found no criminal violations.
ATV operators are required to wear a helmet, as Sam was. But Virginia law says someone Sam's age should not have been driving such a powerful ATV, as anyone younger than 16 is allowed to operate only ATVs of 90cc or less. The machines are not allowed on public roads, except to cross them, and operators are supposed to have written permission to drive them on other people's property.
The last census counted 185 people in Clifton, which styles itself as "Brigadoon in Virginia." If not for the fact that Clifton lies about 20 miles from the glass towers and traffic jams of Tysons Corner, the sleepy little town might be in the deep South.
Main Street, which covers the distance of a well-hit fly ball, contains a general store ("GOOD HOT FOOD," its sign says), a restaurant, a toy store, an ice cream shop and Clifton Baptist Church, where veterans of Mosby's Raiders long ago bowed their heads. Outside town, houses and horse farms luxuriate among fields and wooded hills protected by zoning laws that require dwellings to have no less than five acres of land, a measure designed to preserve the Occoquan River watershed.
Sam lived north of town on Newman Road, in a stucco house whose yard spills over with a collection of junk as wondrous as the contents of Huck Finn's pockets.
Birdhouses, including multistory apartment-style dwellings, sprout from eaves, fence posts, a grape arbor. There are boats that look as if the only water they have seen in years was rain falling where they sit. Cars are parked every which way, up on blocks and in various states of repair, including a 1972 Chevelle that Sam was rebuilding. A pogo stick leans against a fence beside an upturned skateboard in the weeds. There are several treehouses and a trampoline. In a community where many households have Wiis and computer games, Sam and his friends disappeared for hours in the maze of junk.
"He was a special kid. I don't think anybody didn't like Sam," said his mother, Sharon W. Seipel, 39. She referred further questions to J. Robb Cecil, a lawyer in Laurel. Cecil did not return several calls.
Her son's idea of a shopping trip involved scouring the junkyard at Willow Springs Towing in Chantilly for lawn mower engines and other parts.
Tow truck operator Michael Lee "Tiny" Jordan, 51, said he came to know the boy so well that he let Sam help him with his Pontiac Astro dragster. Sam worked on the motor and spritzed the hot engine with water to cool it off between heats at the Old Dominion Raceway in Manassas.
Armendaris, who lives across the road from the Seipels, said she often called them when she needed help with a leaky kitchen sink or some other problem. One of the Seipels -- Sam; his father, John H. Seipel III; or Sam's 16-year-old brother, Johnny -- would respond. Not long before the crash, Sam gave Armendaris a live chick, thinking it would please the children in her home day care. He built a chicken coop, too.
"He was always knocking at the door, asking if I needed anything," Armendaris said.
Interconnecting trails lead across town to the Jasiens' home, where the only clutter on a spacious lawn is a soccer net and ball, which suggest that children live there, too.
"I'm sure they're pretty torn up about this because their boys were friends," Town Council member Charles Rusnak said.
But talk always comes around to the chain.
"It's seldom up," Rusnak said. "The only time I've seen it up is when [the Jasiens are] on vacation. In the last month, it's been up a lot. I don't know what changed."
Rusnak said he suspected the Jasiens put up the chain to block people in Glencairn from using the path as a shortcut to town -- a concern Rusnak said was shared by many townsfolk, who have always opposed allowing traffic from the development to use the path as a shortcut.
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