Sunday, March 18, 2001

Parents' pain grows since son's murder

Julie Muhlstein

Herald Columnist

You are getting out of the shower and find a lump in your breast. And doctors discover cancer.

You miss so much work that bills go unpaid. And filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy is the one hope for keeping the house.

You are driving home and get in a traffic accident. And the truck you've had since 1988 is totaled.

All these things happen at once.

You feel ... what? Like giving up?

Or, having just undergone a mastectomy and facing radiation and chemotherapy, would you pronounce the cancer "just an annoyance"? Would you say the disease is "no big deal"?

Can you fathom anyone saying that?

I can. Since meeting Donna and Ken Stoner, I can fathom it.

"We've already gone through the worst thing we're ever going to go through, the loss of our son," Donna said Thursday as a torrent of rain fell on their modest south Everett home.

I can fathom it, but I can't know how it feels.

"Sometimes people say, 'I know how you feel.' Well I'm sorry, you don't," Donna said.

"Not unless you've lost a child through murder," said her husband,.

Their son, Jesse Stoner, and his friend Jason Thompson, both 18, were gunned down in a car last May after a fistfight they had gone to watch ended in gunfire. On Feb. 26, a Snohomish County jury found 18-year-old Dennis Cramm guilty of first-degree murder in the killings.

Three days into the two-week trial, 47-year-old Donna was diagnosed with cancer. On March 2, she had a radical modified mastectomy. She'll start radiation and six to eight months of chemotherapy later this week.

Ken, 49, was headed home Monday afternoon when his truck hit a car making a left turn in front of Mariner High School.

"I have no vehicle, and I'm still hurting," he said.

Yet, the couple seem hardly fazed by the accident or the cruel disease heaped atop the nightmare from which they can't awaken.

Nine months after the teens' deaths, life is still all about Jesse.

An urn containing their only child's ashes rests on a stereo speaker. White leather baby shoes, sturdy and scuffed, are there, too. Pictures of the tall young man -- smiling, wearing a silly hat, posed with Jason -- flash by on their computer screensaver.

In the bedroom of the couple, who will have been married 25 years come June, snapshots cover the walls -- a toddler in a laundry basket, a kiddie-team basketball photo, young teens dressed for a date.

The trial made it all fresh, the loss, the pain.

"We wanted Dennis to pay. We'd prefer that his father would have to pay also," Donna said.

Dale Cramm pleaded guilty to two drug felonies and asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege during his son's trial.

"What kind of father puts guns around and leaves his son out to dry?" Ken asked.

Donna, describing herself as "a spiritual person," said she prayed to forgive Dennis Cramm.

"In the courtroom, I made eye contact with him. I felt sorry for him," she said.

Her husband, a Roman Catholic and deeply religious, said they don't approve of the death penalty.

After the verdict was announced, Donna approached Dennis Cramm's mother, Jacque Cramm, and gave her a hug.

"We're not the only ones who have suffered," she said.

Their hearts go out to Sonny and Mary Thompson, Jason's parents, to the boys' friends, and to anyone who has lost a child.

"We used to watch the news and see school shootings and violence. Now we have an inside view," Ken said. "Before, we felt for them. But we didn't know. Now we do."

Their financial struggles stem from health problems and work time lost after Jesse's death.

Ken is employed by an electronics company in Bothell. He wasn't paid for absences taken for hearings in the case or during the trial. Donna, who has worked at JanSport but isn't now working, isn't sure how she'll handle chemotherapy.

"We are in the middle of filing bankruptcy," she said.

"Everything's up in the air. We don't know if we're going to end up losing our house," Ken added.

Any one of their setbacks could be seen as a last straw.

"We're usually pretty optimistic, but we keep getting dumped on. It tends to wear you down," Donna said.

"All we can do is keep on keeping on," her husband said. "If it wasn't for my belief in Christ, that and the love of my wife, I don't know what I'd do."

There were long silences as I sat with the Stoners. The clock ticked. Jesse's dog, Swisher, snuggled on the couch. Donna, petite with dark curly hair, wiped her eyes.

"Since the trial, we wonder, 'What do we do now?' We have no other children," she said. "Now that it's all over, it seems like he's slipping away."

"We were hoping someday that Jesse would have a family," Ken said. "We would have loved having a little Jesse and Jessica running around the house."

Fighting now for her own life, Donna said softly, "It's something we'll never know."