Thomas Richard Washington was born in Flushing, New York in 1974. At the age of six, his parents moved to Pickering, Ontario due to an illness of his father's. Thom's mother was Canadian, so it made sense to move to Canada to be with his mother's family, who could help take care of his father.
Thom's teenage years were rough. He got into some trouble with the law after getting involved with some delinquent friends, and when at 15, he lost his father to cancer, he had a hard time dealing with the loss. After a near-death incident involving a stolen car at age 16, Thom had a wake up call and started to get his life together. He dropped the criminal activity, went back to school, and took care of his mother as she tried valiantly to support them both. After high school, Thom went to university and studied music production, which he graduated with honours.
He worked for a few years with a label producing underground hip-hop music, which is where he met Nicole. Nicole was an assistant to one of the artists Thom was working with and they hit it off instantly. After dating for about 6 months, they moved in together. After only 3 months of living together, Thom proposed to Nicole by playing a song he wrote for her over dinner that he recorded with Kelvin Mercer of De La Soul, who was a long time friend of Thom's. Needless to say, it won her over and she said yes.
Thom and Nicole (who were often teased about the Cruise/Kidman connection) moved into a cozy house in Pickering and they started up their own small hip-hop label, Clarity Records. It was quite successful and afforded them a comfortable life. In the summer of 2001, Nicole announced nonchalantly over some late night work that she was pregnant. The next time I saw Thom, he beamed as I had never seen him do before. Their daughter, Samantha (or Sam, for short), was born on March 15, 2002, and was the joy of their lives. They were the picture perfect family, right out of the pages of a magazine--or a baby food commercial. They were all so happy and content with their lives and their good fortune. Fortune is a funny thing though, as for some bizarre, unexplainable reason, it always tends to have a short shelf life.
On December 11, 2008, Thom, Nicole, and Sam were visiting family in Oshawa, just east of Pickering. The weather had turned bad that day as they visited Nicole's parents, planning the Christmas ahead, and letting the grandparents have some fawning time over their precious granddaughter.
As it was time to leave, they had to decide whether to stay the night or brave the storm. Thom opted to tackle the storm. Having lived in Ontario most of his life, he had seen some doozy's in the snowstorm department, and this one didn't look all that bad. Plus, it was only about a 40-minute drive home. They bundled up and headed out, blowing drifts circling around them as they loaded into the car. Thom liked to stay clear of the busier roads in weather like this; the panic of other drivers on the road seemed much worse to contend with than the snow itself.
He took Winchester Road most of the way westbound into Ajax, the last town before Pickering. Winchester ran through some remote woods and farms, but it was a well-used and reliable road. As Thom drove cautiously over a small bridge and up over a hill he had traveled many times, he normally would have been alerted by headlamps as they beamed up into the falling snow, and he could have edged over to the right shoulder for safety. However, on that particular night, a 17-year-old boy named Caleb Martin thought it would be fun to go out with his friend and do donuts in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Sure enough, they had fun, but when he thought it would be just as much fun to turn off his headlights and cut the ignition on the way home, just to give his friend Dennis a fright on the near-abandoned Winchester Road, the evening took a turn for the worse. As Caleb hit the bottom of the first hill after turning off the lights, his car careened off to the left, fishtailing and then spinning 90 degrees, sliding sideways straight up the next hill. Caleb panicked and Dennis screamed. Caleb turned the ignition back on as the car slid up the hill, but by that time it was too late. All Thom saw was a bright flash of headlights burst off to his right onto the trees, and his eyes instinctively followed that light. When his vision switched back to the road, there was only enough time to see the passenger door of Caleb's car slam into the front of his own car. The crash was thunderous, bashing Caleb's car violently back and off the road into the tree-lined ditch. Thom's car skidded forward and to the left, the trunk of the car swinging out towards the trees on the opposite side of the road. Thom's car was now moving with great momentum sideways and downhill. The sides of the tires pushed through the snow until they could push no more, and just stopped. The rest of Thom's car wasn't finished moving yet, so it just rolled the rest of the way down the hill, a total of six times, until the bumper caught a pothole under the snow and pitched the car trunk over hood until it finally came to a stop upside down in the valley between the two hills. It took about 13 minutes before another car finally came down that road and saw the carnage that the collision had caused. 911 was called, and the paramedics from the fire department arrived on scene first. The two teenage boys were dead on the scene, still in their seats with their seatbelts fastened, Caleb with a massive head wound from contact with the doorframe and Dennis with a punctured heart and lung from his ribs collapsing after the case of beer on his lap met the airbag.
When the first paramedic glanced into the overturned driver's window of Thom's car, he saw Thom looking about, his eyes frantically blinking, trying to get the blood out of them. He had just awoke from his blackout, and his hands frantically searched out in front of him, feeling the dash, the steering wheel, and finally the passenger seat. He couldn't turn his head, as being upside down had forced him out of his seat, his cheek was pressed against the ceiling of the car interior and bent towards the onlooking paramedic. His hand searched blindly, but he could only feel the seat itself. He started shrieking to the medic, asking about Nicole and Sam. The blood on his face was now mixing with tears and hysteria, watering down his hairline as they steamed up his forehead. The paramedic looked past Thom, but there was no one in the passenger seat, only a dangling seat belt. Thom watched the medic's face as he turned to look behind Thom and into the back seat. The expression on the medic's face blanched, his pupils dilated and his skin paled. He turned back towards Thom and assured him he would be alright. Thom started to sob deeply, not knowing what had happened or the state of his lovely girls. After a while, they managed to cut Thom's door off and cut through his seatbelt, sliding him out of the car and onto one of those trauma stretchers, putting a neck brace on him and immobilizing him onto the narrow board. As they lifted the stretcher and turned Thom towards the helicopter that had landed in a field by the road, he noticed a pale orange emergency blanket about 60 yards from the car, in the grass off to the side and about 5 feet from a tree. The blanket was covering something, someone. He could tell from the length of the shape that it had to be Nicole. His heart emptied and his sobs echoed throughout the now hollow chamber in his chest. He wouldn't find out for another hour that Sam was still in the car, but the cervical spine at the base of her skull had been shattered. She had died on impact. Upon hearing the news, Thom wished he had too.
