War Story

What's important to remember, Cara Snook says now, is that on their final night together, before they came to that stoplight in Midtown Atlanta, she and Jack were happy again. They were out celebrating, in fact. Celebrating their reconciliation.

The Snook family Jack Snook's official Marine portrait

The months before that April night had been hard on both of them. Part of it was the war. Part of it was her. She had been sick -- very sick. So Jack had to watch as his fellow Marines went back to Iraq for a second tour, while he stayed behind to tend to his wife. He worried they'd think he was afraid. None of them thought that, though. Jack Snook was a lot of things, but he was never afraid.

Back in 2003, he and his platoon had been among the first Marines to cross into Iraq from Kuwait. He must have made a tempting target. Six feet and all of it lean muscle, Jack manned the .50-caliber machine gun mounted atop a Humvee speeding toward Baghdad. The company's job was to draw out the enemy and protect the convoy. They were called the Suicide Squad.

But back home was different. Or maybe it was Jack who was different. Crowded restaurants unnerved him. He looked strangers up and down. At home, he'd sit for hours playing video games. He'd turn off the game and look at Cara and say, "I'm so sorry. I don't mean to do this to you. I just don't know what else to do."

He didn't talk about Iraq, except sometimes at night. Then his eyes would tear up, and he'd ask her, "Do you know what it's like to watch somebody die?"

"I can't begin to understand that," Cara would say. "I wasn't there and I didn't see it, but help me get to where you are."

EARLY LAST JANUARY, Jack's four-year stint in the Marines ended. Jack and Cara moved into an apartment in North Carolina. But though he had left the Marines, the Marines had not left him. One night he watched every episode of the 10-part miniseries "Band of Brothers," which follows a group of World War II soldiers from basic training through D-Day and into the Battle of the Bulge.

The next day, he left. Packed up his things while she was at the bank, wrote her a note and took off for his parents' house in Cumming. Divorce seemed inevitable.

It wasn't a clean break, though. Like old friends, they talked on the phone. They e-mailed. The ambiguity became too much for Cara, who one day told him, "You need to make up your mind. I'm not doing this back and forth."

Then, in early April, she drove to Cumming from North Carolina. She was planning to sign a lease to move in with a girlfriend. But Jack called. He asked to see her. She told him to meet her and some friends at Fajita's, a Mexican restaurant in Cumming.

It was Saturday, April 2. He walked up to her, flashed the killer smile that had always made women melt, and said, "There's my wife."

Cara just grinned and shook her head. He told her not to sign the lease.

"Are you sure?" she asked him. "Don't let this be a momentary thing."

"No," he said. "I've thought about it."

And just like that, they were back together. They called friends to celebrate. They drank some beers. They went dancing at a country bar in Gwinnett County. And late that night, in the hours just before dawn of the next day, five of them decided to get a hotel room in Atlanta instead of driving back to Cumming.

But as they came to a stoplight on Linden Avenue, right near the Renaissance Atlanta Hotel in Midtown, they heard the blare of a horn behind them. The next moments are, even now, six months later, frozen in Cara's brain. She sees the truck. She sees her husband, falling to the ground. And she sees the blood.

Sometimes she wonders if she'll ever see anything else.

A MARINE CORPS FLAG flies outside the Snook home, a white-shingled ranch set halfway down a hill in a quiet Cumming subdivision. Gunny Snook and his wife, Pat, moved here in 1996, when Jack was 16 and their other son, Jason, was 14. Gunny had just retired from the Marines after a 20-year career that had taken him and his family to posts in Hawaii, Virginia, North Carolina, Malaysia, Austria and California.

Settling in Cumming was an easy choice. Both Gunny and Pat -- who'd met in high school in New Jersey in 1976 -- have relatives in the Atlanta area, and North Forsyth High School had offered Gunny a job teaching ROTC.

Gunny's first name is actually Jack, just like his oldest son, but Gunny is what almost everyone calls him. During the 1991 Gulf War, the elder Snook was gunnery sergeant, a kind of logistics chief for his company of 200 -- making sure his soldiers had ammunition, food and supplies.

Gunny is 47. Asked if he wishes he was serving in Iraq now, he says, "Every day I think about it. Every single day. I've looked at ways to try to go back. But they don't want old gunnys anymore."

Still, he keeps himself in fighting shape. He runs almost every day. He wears his hair cropped close. To strangers, he is brusque, speaking in clipped tones. But he warms quickly. He cracks jokes that make his wife smile and shake her head. In that way, friends say, he and his oldest son are very much alike.

Several years ago, Gunny converted the basement of his house into a recreation room, complete with bar, pool table and dartboard. A framed poster of the World Trade Center looks out from near the stereo. In one corner sits a burlap sack, emblazoned with the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Printed on the sack are the words "Terrorist Body Bag" and, under their faces, "Locate -- capture -- kill! Stuff wretched remains in bag and send to hell!"

Near the dartboard is a door that leads to a bedroom. After Jack left Cara, that is where he slept. The room is cleaned out now, but there are reminders of Jack everywhere in the house -- in the pictures, the plaques, the scrapbook of his high school football days, and especially in the silence that greets his parents when they descend the 16 steps into the basement and see his empty room.

Jack and Cara Snook at their Nov. 17, 2001, wedding

This fall, Gunny, besides teaching ROTC, has taken on another job at the high school, assistant football coach. It's been difficult for him, because he had been a coach when Jack played in 1998. Back now on the same field, it's easy to wonder where the years went.

TALK TO ANYONE who knew Jack Snook the athlete and they will all say one thing: The boy could run. Mike Hudson, defensive coordinator for North Forsyth High's football team, the Raiders, remembers the first time seeing him at practice. Jack had pasted a sticker on his helmet that said simply, "Flash."

"I didn't know what that meant," Hudson says. "And then I realized he was the fastest kid I'd ever seen."

Jack was faster than even his father had been 20 years earlier, when Gunny had run track in high school in New Jersey. At North Forsyth, with Gunny as track coach, Jack set school records. His 400-meter time of 48.58 seconds still stands. His trick -- well, it wasn't a trick, it was a gift -- was his finish: In the closing meters, he'd turn on the speed and leave everyone behind.

"The 400-meter was his race," Gunny says. "The 200 is strictly speed. That's all it is. The 400 is all heart. You can have talent, but you need the heart."

At a meet in Cartersville one year, Jack ran the last leg of a 1,600-meter relay. His mother remembers the competition was mostly African-Americans. Jack's team was falling behind until he took the baton. From a quarter-track behind, he caught up with the pack. In the bleachers, Pat heard someone shout, "Look at that white boy run!" She stood up and announced, "That's my white boy!"

But it was on the football field where Jack felt truly at home. As a free safety, Hudson says, "he could cover anybody man to man. He had a nose for the football."

Jack wasn't huge -- 175 pounds -- but he loved to hit. That, combined with his punishing speed, convinced Hudson to put together a highlight tape he could send to local colleges. Jack was one of those oddities high-school coaches see only a few times in a career -- the real thing.

IF HIS TEAMMATES were jealous of his speed, they were more envious of Jack Snook's other great talent: his success with the ladies.

Jack Snook in Iraq, 2003

"Every girl he was ever with feels like he was their soulmate," says his mother. "They all say that. I'm like, 'Jack, you can't have that many soulmates.' "

It's been six years since they broke up, but Christen McGaha still has a shoebox filled with mementoes of her high school romance with Jack. McGaha is 24 now, and remembers clearly the first time she laid eyes on him: English class, junior year, 1998.

Jack was already at his desk, wearing a jacket from the University of Arkansas. Her mind raced.

He's gorgeous. Please God, don't let him switch out of this class.

She found a seat next to him. She looked at the mascot on his jacket.

"Is that a warthog?" she said.

"No," he said with that smile. "It's a razorback."

Their romance seems almost an anachronism: He played football and she was a cheerleader, a teacher's pet who let Jack cheat off of her. She was even Junior Miss of Forsyth County.

But their relationship wasn't without complications. The fact is, just as McGaha was first getting to know Jack, he became a father. Mallory was born Feb. 11, 1998, the result of a fling he'd had with another classmate.

For McGaha, it all seemed slightly surreal -- she was worrying about things like cheerleading practice while Jack was missing English class for his daughter's birth.

News that Jack would be a father hadn't gone over well in the Snook house. He told Gunny first. It was at football camp. Gunny made him call his mother.

"I was furious," Pat says. Still, over time, both families got used to the arrangement: Mallory lived with her mother, while Jack worked to pay child support. And Pat, who'd always wanted a girl, had a granddaughter to spoil.

"He loved her so much," McGaha says. "You hear plenty of stories about guys having babies and not doing anything about it. But he wasn't that way at all. He was very responsible."

Still, while his classmates were going to parties, Jack was often stuck at Pizza Hut, washing dishes. When he arrived at Georgia Southern on a football scholarship in the fall of 1999, he cut loose. His enthusiasm for academics was no match for his love of partying. By the next spring, with his GPA dismal, he decided to drop out.

"I've got to get my life together," he said to his parents when he moved back in with them. He took odd jobs. And he found a new girlfriend -- Cara Parrish, a vivacious blonde with a heart-shaped face. At 17, Cara was still in high school. Jack was older but still a star in Cumming. And he was as magnetic as ever. They dated casually, never intending to be too serious.

That fall, he decided to join the Marines.

THE FIRST TIME Erik Watkins met Jack Snook, they almost got into a fight. It was the winter of 2001, Parris Island.

One morning a few weeks into basic training, Watkins was straightening his bunk. He turned to help Jack with his. But Jack wouldn't have it.

Parents Gunny and Pat Snook

"Get off!" he said.

"What?" Watkins said, "I'm just trying to straighten it."

"I got it, I got it!"

"Fine, forget you then," Watkins said.

"Screw you," Jack replied.

Their next encounter wasn't much friendlier. Their drill instructor dumped a trash can full of water onto the barracks floor and made the recruits crouch down and push a towel from one wall to the other. Jack, who was behind Watkins, wasn't happy with how fast he was going.

"And he pushed me," Watkins says. "I'm like, 'You mother ... .' I wanted to get up and hit him."

As the weeks wore on, Watkins saw Jack for what he was: a "squared-away Marine." Growing up the son of a career Marine, Jack knew what to expect. He flew under the radar of the drill instructors. He loved the physical training, but as it is for every recruit, mail call was the best part of the day. And he wrote dozens of letters, not only to his parents, but to Cara. Despite the distance between them, their relationship was growing more serious.

Letter to Cara, Jan. 15, 2001

I pray for you every night and I started to go to church here, but I think it's just to get away from the drill instructors. Did you know they still do the same shit as they did when I was an altar boy? Not that that is bad but damn, change the shit up a little.

Letter to Cara, Jan. 15, 2001

I have decided to stay in the Marine Corps for 4 years only and then use the money they give me to go to school and get some kind of degree. Then marry you sometime in the process, have about 1,000,000 kids and a big house. How does that sound?

Letter to his parents, Jan. 26, 2001

I look back on my life and what I've done and I get discouraged. I don't know if that's bad or good but I know it will change! I have done a lot of good things but probably twice as many bad things, like lying (for example). I see now that it's stupid and pointless, it makes no sense to do it. Anyway I'm changing and I'm glad.

On his 21st birthday, Jack transferred to Camp Pendleton, just north of San Diego. For Jack, California was a homecoming; he'd spent a large chunk of his teens there, and he loved the beach and surf. But Cara was back in Georgia. One day he called her.

"What would you say if I asked you to move out here?" he said.

"Well," Cara said, "I'd say, 'Yes.' "

She started saving up to furnish their apartment in California. Then he called again, inviting her to the Marine Corps Ball. Be sure to bring your Social Security card and a birth certificate, he reminded her. Security's tight.

That seemed odd. Cara asked a friend who was a military brat. "Girl," the woman said, "I think he wants to marry you!"

Cara called him back. "I don't know what you're planning on, but if it's what I'm thinking, I'm not gonna get married in a blue dress!"

So she packed another dress and they married in a tiny chapel in Vista, Calif., next door to a Pizza Hut. Watkins was a groomsman.

Just as the couple was settling into their new home in California, Jack's company shipped out on a six-month "float" -- a deployment that took the unit to Guam, Singapore, Australia, Djibouti, East Timor. Then, just weeks after their return, the Marines were back on a ship. Their destination: Kuwait, staging ground for a potential invasion of Iraq. It was winter, 2003.

Knowing the possibility of combat lay ahead, the Marines on the USS Bonhomme Richard had mixed emotions.

Courtesy the Snook family Jack and his daughter, Mallory, Christmas 2003

"Some people were thinking, 'Good, we're finally going to war,' " Watkins says. "Some people were probably still in denial, hoping and praying we're not going to war."

The long boat ride grew even longer when their ship had boiler trouble, forcing a repair stop in Guam. The Marines were given base liberty, and Watkins, Jack and some buddies bought some beer and drank it on the lawn outside a club.

"Anything and everything you can think of was said at those conversations," Watkins recalls. "All the way from 'I don't know if I want to do this, I'm scared' to 'Shut up, you little bitch, we're gonna go kill some Iraqis.' "

Jack, Watkins says, was consistent. "I'd say, 'You scared, man?' He'd say, 'A little bit. But I'm ready to go.' "

Downing beers with them that day in Guam was another Marine, Nicholas Myhre. "I was talking about fighting and I was saying, 'Man, I haven't been in a fight since I was like 11 years old. I can't remember the last time I got punched in the face.' We were both kinda drunk at this point. So Jack just punches me in the face. I was like, 'That's pretty funny, dude.' So then I punched him in the face. We're both laughing. So he punches me again. Watkins is like, 'You gotta stop.' Jack just did not care. He did not care about anything."

Call it blowing off steam or something else, but Jack got into a lot of fights as a Marine, most of them not as funny as the drunken slugfest with Myhre.

"He did like to fight," Myhre says, who's out of the Marines now and lives in Illinois. "If he didn't like one thing you said to him, that was it. He wouldn't be afraid to tell you. And if you showed any little bit of aggression toward him, he'd fight."

But, Myhre says, the opposite also held true. "If you were his friend, he'd give you the shirt off his back."

PAT SNOOK HAS grown accustomed to the long separations and nagging uncertainty that come when your loved ones are in harm's way. For those on the home front, a sardonic wit becomes vital body armor.

Before Jack shipped off to Iraq in 2003, she demanded to know his burial wishes, just in case. She tried to make light of it. She'd ask, "Do you want to be cremated, or in the ground with the bugs?"

Jack would change the subject. A soldier prefers not to think of such things. But she persisted. Finally, in a phone call just before the invasion began, he gave her the answer: in the ground with the bugs.

Letter to his parents, March 3, 2003

Well, Kuwait sucks, it's freezing over here. I'm sure by my next letter we should have moved into Iraq. (I hope.) I hate waiting. So what's going on on the home front? Yeah, Dad, just in case Mom didn't tell ya, I'm the lead vehicle in CAAT (gunner) so I will be getting some. And damn did you guys leave a mess behind you. Kuwait looks like an ammo dump.

ON ONE OF HIS first nights in Iraq, as the endless convoy barreled toward Baghdad, Watkins watched U.S. artillery pound a nearby city. The sky was red with explosions. He thought, Man, this is exactly what I imagined Armageddon would look like.

Jack and his fellow Marines in Iraq. Seated center is Erik Watkins. To the right, seated, is Jack.

"That's when it hit me: We're in the shit," Watkins says.

Although much has been made of the military's relatively easy march into Baghdad in the war's early days, the reality is that resistance, when it came, could be stiff. With their .50-caliber machine guns, Marines such as Jack, Myhre and Watkins were called upon to return fire into buildings and down alleyways. "We went through there guns blazing," Watkins says.

Letter from Jack to his parents, March 29, 2003

How are you? I'm doing just fine. Can't wait to come home though. I miss you guys. Well, we've been in Iraq for a week now. Going city to city wiping out anyone who resists us. I already have 2 confirmed kills. One ... was a guy who opened fire on us in a two-story building. Needless to say my .50 cal took care of him and anyone else on the second story. I don't know about you, Dad, but I've seen some nasty shit over here, and of course I took pictures. Well, we should be leaving for Baghdad in a couple of days. I just wanted to say I love you both very much and appreciate you for being my parents. I know we've had differences but it was all for the good. Anyway, I'll be home soon.

April 15, 2003

Dear Mom & Dad,

Well, I write to you from the middle of Baghdad. Well not really the middle but the streets of Baghdad. It's pretty crazy over here. I have countless kills now with my .50 cal and I'm sure there's more to come. Anyway, on a bright note, the people we aren't killing, love us. Um, not much else to do over here, a couple more blocks or so and we should have cleared the city.

IT WAS ABOUT 20 miles south of Baghdad that Jack got shot. Myhre, who was with him at the time, laughs when he tells the story.

"We were near a canal. We hadn't heard a shot fired in so long. We'd unbuttoned our flak jackets to take off our Kevlar. It was like a hundred degrees. Next thing we hear is shots. So we started putting on our Kevlar. I got behind the truck for cover and for some reason Jack runs away from the truck and gets behind some bushes. I'm yelling at him, 'What are you doing?' The shots were coming from the canal, about 200 meters away. We heard them crack over the top of our heads. I was wondering why he was getting behind some bushes. He's just sitting there laughing. All the sudden he jumps up. He says, 'Oh man, this motherfucker just shot me in the ass!' He jumps up on top of the Humvee and gets behind the machine gun, kicks off one of the sergeants who's behind there, and says, 'This is mine!' He starts going off. I don't know if he ended up getting him or what, but the guy stopped shooting."

WHILE JACK WAS in Iraq, Cara was back home at their apartment in California, sick. The diagnosis was ulcerative colitis. Medication did nothing but make her feel worse. Jack had returned from Iraq by the time she had to have her large intestine removed. He proved to be an excellent nurse, and even was a good sport about the colostomy bag she had to wear for four months.

"There'd be days I'd get really down and embarrassed," she says. "One day he took a bag and stuck it on his stomach, walking around with his shirt off, saying, 'I want one.' He made me feel better."

At the same time, his fellow Marines were gearing up to return to Iraq. He wanted to go, but Cara needed him, and the Marine Corps agreed he should stay behind to care for her.

To Myhre, he said, "This is B.S. that I gotta stay here. I really wanna go back with you guys. Don't look at me like I'm some chump who's scared to go over there."

"I totally understood," Myhre says now. "No one blamed him. But he just beat himself up so bad. He started blaming Cara. He was really, really upset he didn't go back."

With his buddies headed back to Iraq, Jack became sullen and reserved. He started drinking more than usual, and the effects would be unpredictable.

Jack Snook, his wife Cara, and his daughter Mallory on his return from Iraq in 2003

"He wasn't an alcoholic, but whenever he did drink, it was hard to get him to stop, and you never knew how he was going to react," Cara says. "You didn't know if he was going to be happy-go-lucky fun Jack or if he was going to break out in anger or if he was going to get emotional. You just never knew."

They argued about the drinking. He'd shut himself off from her, and resentments would fester. She'd come home and find him in the same position she'd left him in -- playing Diablo, a video game that pits the hero against the devil in a dark netherworld.

"The way he described it to me, Diablo was his escape from reality," Cara says. "He was in control. It may sound silly, but that's how he felt. He'd felt really out of control for a long time. He tried to act like a lot of what he'd had to do in Iraq hadn't bothered him, but there were times at night out of nowhere he'd start talking about it and cry."

He left her just days after they'd moved into the apartment together in North Carolina. With his Marine career over and his marriage in jeopardy, he headed back to his parents' house in Cumming.

For his mother, it was a time to reconnect with a son she hadn't seen much of in four years. They developed a routine. He'd join her every morning at the kitchen table and they'd chat.

"I was getting to know him again," Pat says. Over time, they settled on a plan. Jack would live at home while he studied to be an emergency medical technician and paramedic. Iraq had convinced him that he wanted to ease suffering. Best of all, he'd be close to Mallory, who was now almost 7 and living with her mother.

But it was his relationship with his wife that most needed to be settled.

IT HAD BEEN RAINING off and on all week. By the night of Sat., April 2, the clouds were breaking up. The air was cool. Spring was coming.

Earlier that day, Jack called Cara and asked to meet her out that night. She hesitated, and finally told him she was meeting some friends at Fajita's. He was welcome to join them.

At the restaurant, Cara was on the lookout for Jack. When she saw him, he was wearing jeans, gray sneakers, and a long-sleeved thermal white shirt beneath his blue T-shirt. And he was grinning. She couldn't help but smile back.

"There's my wife," he said. He looked at her hand. "I want you to wear your wedding ring again," he said. Cara was skeptical. "Are you sure?" she asked. "I am," he told her. And so they celebrated.

Later that night, five of them -- Jack, Cara, Dennis Canfield, and two of Cara's girlfriends -- piled into Canfield's car and drove to Wild Bill's, a massive country dance club in Gwinnett County. Jack sipped on his favorite drink, Jack Daniel's and Coke. He had one, then another. But he wasn't driving, and besides, to Cara, he didn't seem drunk -- at least not the way she'd seen him in the past, when he would grow volatile or moody.

One of Cara's friends suggested they get a room at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in downtown Atlanta. They piled back into Canfield's car. Jack, as he sometimes did when he drank, lit a cigarette. He sat up front and opened the window to let out the smoke. The chilly nighttime air rushing in led Cara, who was sitting behind him, to reach around his seat and embrace him.

Canfield had the radio up loud, and the lights of the city sparkled brighter as they drew closer. Just after 4 in the morning, there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

Unfamiliar with downtown Atlanta, they missed their exit off I-75/85. They turned around, got back on the highway and saw a sign for Spring Street and West Peachtree. They took the exit. At the first light, on Linden Avenue, everyone was arguing about where to go. Jessica Handley -- sitting right behind Canfield, her boyfriend -- had just called 411 to get directions to the Westin.

The light turned green, and they heard a horn behind them. It came from a dark Ford F-150 pickup truck. Canfield drove up the hill. Two blue "H" signs indicated that Emory Crawford Long Hospital was just a block ahead. Canfield stopped at the light at West Peachtree Street. To his left was the Renaissance Atlanta Hotel, where a row of cabs awaited some late-night fares.

Jim Stawniak Pat and Gunny Snook outside Charles Key's preliminary hearing in April.

Close behind Canfield was the truck, its horn still honking. The driver was alone. He and the passengers in Canfield's car exchanged middle fingers. The truck swerved into the turning lane, just to the left of Canfield's car.

At that point, the cab of the truck was lined up with the backseat of Canfield's car, where the three women were sitting. Cara remembers the driver of the truck -- a black man in his 20s -- leaning across his seat to open his passenger door. His dome light came on. She says he called them "bitches."

Jack leaned back so his head was next to Cara's. She remembers he peered across the backseat to the driver of the truck, who looked at Jack and said, "C'mon bitch, c'mon!"

Enraged, Jack hopped out of the car and rushed around the back. Cara remembers him yelling at the driver of the truck, "Get the fuck out of here!" Handley, who'd also gotten out of the car and met Jack between the two vehicles, recalls Jack shouting something like, "I'll mess you up!"

Jack went up to the truck's passenger door. Handley tried to restrain him, grabbing his arms from behind. But Jack was undeterred. He pulled the truck's passenger door open wider. According to the witnesses, the door was still ajar from when the driver had opened it.

By now, Cara was also out of the car. As she was coming around the back, she heard the gunshot. She saw the smoke inside the cab of the truck. Handley was screaming, "Oh my God! Oh my God!"

As the truck sped off, Jack stumbled backward. He said, "I'm OK. I'm OK." But he wasn't, and Cara knew right away. Her husband had been shot just above the left corner of his mouth. As she tried to hold him up, Jack began coughing up blood. It got all over Cara. It ran down her jeans, onto her heels. It stained the blacktop. She remembers how warm it was.

Then his legs "went to putty," Cara says. She dropped to the pavement with him. She started rubbing his back and arms. "You're gonna be fine," she sobbed. "Just hang in there."

He looked up at her. She said, "I love you so much," and though his response was too faint to hear, she knows he was saying the same. Jack squeezed her hand, and then he died.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME, almost 2,000 miles away, Pat and Gunny Snook were heading to their hotel room in Las Vegas. They'd just attended a friend's wedding.

Though Cara had asked that a Las Vegas police officer go to their room in person, the news came in a phone call. Pat answered. When Gunny heard her wailing, his first thought was that something had happened to their other son, Jason, who was training to be a Marine pilot. Jack, after all, was at home, safe under the Snooks' own roof. He'd survived Iraq. He was supposed to be out of danger.

In no time, they were at the Las Vegas airport, but every flight into Atlanta was booked. While Gunny tracked down a supervisor to find room for them, Pat sat alone with their luggage and wept.

The Snooks came back to a house crowded with family and friends. It was overwhelming in every sense. Gunny had to get away. He went to the track behind the high school. He started running. And running. He ran for hours.

Later that night, he told his wife, "You may think this is stupid, but I just had to go running. And I took Jack with me."

Jack's old classmates from high school came back for the funeral. Hundreds of mourners packed St. Brendan Catholic church. Watkins gave the eulogy. He recalled a moment in the Marines when Jack had told him, "Watkins, I just want you to know you're my best friend. If I happened to be dying one day, if you were there praying for me, I'd know everything would be OK."

When Jack died, Watkins recalled at the eulogy, "I said, 'God, why couldn't I have been there?' I told my priest. He said, 'You might not have been there at the moment of death, but you were there at the moments in his life when he needed you the most.'

"Jack didn't talk a lot about his feelings. But when it came right down to it, he'd be right there to fight alongside you. He loved deeper than any man I'd ever known."

Jim Stawniak Charles Key, who faces charges of aggravated assault and voluntary manslaughter in the death of Jack Snook, at his preliminary hearing in April.

CHARLES KEY WAS ARRESTED on April 6, the day before Jack Snook was buried. Police tracked him down easily. At the Renaissance Atlanta Hotel the night of the shooting, a cabbie had written down the tag number of the truck as it raced away. In a subsequent photo lineup, witnesses to the shooting identified Key.

Key is a 24-year-old college student and has no felony record, according to his attorney. When police cornered him at a Shell gas station near Fulton Industrial Boulevard, Key at first pretended not to know why he was being arrested, according to Francis Lupo, an Atlanta homicide detective who testified at Key's preliminary hearing in late April. But then Key led Lupo outside to his truck.

"I want to show you this," Key said, according to Lupo's testimony. Key pointed at the passenger side of the truck, which was stained with blood, and said, "This was self-defense." Inside the truck, Lupo testified, police found a marijuana joint, between 50 and 100 plastic baggies bunched into one larger bag, a Llama .45-caliber pistol and one spent shell casing.

At the police station, Key waived his right to an attorney. He wrote a statement. This was his explanation:

On the night of the shooting, Key was driving his parents' truck because he was having car trouble. He was on his way to Buford Highway, where his girlfriend lived. But when his low fuel light came on, he decided to get off the highway and buy some gas.

As he moved into the exit lane, he hit the brakes fast because the car ahead of him was going so slow. As he leaned over to change a CD, he accidentally honked the horn. The passengers in the other car began flipping him off. A man in the passenger seat yelled out, "I will kill you, motherfucker!"

At the next stoplight, Key pulled up on the left side of the other car. They honked their horn, and Key saw the man who'd been yelling at him get out of the car and come up to Key's passenger door. The man was yelling, "I will kill you!" One of the girls tried to hold him back.

"At this point, the guy lost it and pushed her away from him and immediately tried to open the door," Key wrote. "He was successful. Me being afraid [for] my life I had a gun in my name that's registered for protection. When he reached at me I reacted in a scared and shaking manner and I pulled the trigger. I thought that the girl was trying to grab him back, but it was the power of the gun and he fell."

As detectives followed up during the questioning, Key's story began to change. Initially, Key had said he chose not to run the red light to escape Snook because there was a "16-wheeler" coming down West Peachtree Street. But when Lupo said there was evidence that there was no traffic, Key said he'd just assumed there would be traffic coming.

Key made further revisions after Lupo bluffed that a security camera had captured the entire incident. Now, instead of saying that it was Jack who'd opened the door of the truck, Key admitted that he himself had leaned over to open the door, because his passenger window didn't roll down.

At the preliminary hearing, the Snooks sat in the front row, flanked by a few relatives. Gunny was in uniform. Farther down the same bench were Key's parents. Behind them were 25 or so of Key's family and friends.

During the hearing, Key's attorney, Dennis Scheib, asked Lupo to read aloud the statements from the passengers in Canfield's car. At one point, Scheib asked Lupo, "Did they admit to calling my client a 'fucking nigger'?"

"They never said that," Lupo responded.

"OK. But my client said that, right?"

"Not that I am aware of."

Scheib then changed the subject.

Asked to comment on the case, the Key family referred CL to Scheib. Scheib, as it turns out, is a former cop. He also served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War.

"I have a great love for Marines," Scheib says. "I feel bad for the family."

Still, Scheib believes the police erred by not testing the occupants of Canfield's car to see if they were under the influence of drugs or alcohol. If they were, he says, the reliability of their accounts is in question.

"It goes to their credibility and their ability to perceive," he says. "If you're drunk, can you perceive? If you're not drunk, you're in pretty good shape." The fact that police didn't test the witnesses for drugs or alcohol will hurt the prosecution's case, he says. "That's gonna come back to bite 'em in the ass."

Moreover, Scheib says he has a witness who heard racial slurs coming from the car Jack was in.

That Scheib might seek to make race a factor in the shooting keeps Pat Snook up at night.

"Jack's white, Key's family is black, so let's just assume this is a racial thing?" she asks rhetorically. "That pissed me off. I got furious, because I know my son would never ever say that."

On July 26, a Fulton County grand jury indicted Key on felony charges of voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault. Each charge carries a sentence of between one and 20 years. A trial isn't expected until 2006.

IT ISN'T RAINING YET, but it will soon. Even the fake flowers over the graves at Sawnee View cemetery are fluttering in the wind, which is carrying in the first rain from Arlene, a tropical storm that is hitting Forsyth County. It is June 11, what would have been Jack Snook's 25th birthday.

Barely two months have passed since he was buried, and the sod over his gravesite has taken only in patches, leaving red clay visible between the clumps of grass. You can see the outline where the earth was broken to make way for his coffin. The stone marker that his parents have ordered hasn't come yet, so all that's here is a vase of flowers, a Marine logo, a statue of an angel in prayer and, inexplicably, an unopened bottle of Newcastle beer.

The Snooks have invited about a dozen relatives and friends to the cemetery to toast Jack with his favorite drinks, Jack Daniel's and Corona. Gunny has dragged a cooler filled with ice-cold beers, which are passed around by Jason. Becky Klaus, a family friend, hands out limes. The shot glasses come from Gunny's basement bar. One glass is labeled "Sober to horny in three shots," which cracks everyone up, especially when it ends up in the hands of Nicole Davis, Gunny's youngest sister, who wears plaid capris and pigtails. Nicole is only 29, and so was more of a big sister to Jack and Jason than an aunt.

Gunny, who sports sunglasses despite the darkening skies, keeps it brief. He thanks everyone for coming, and says this should be a celebration of Jack's life. With that, he downs his shot.

Jason takes a shot and pours it onto the sod and dirt over his brother's grave. "That's just about where his mouth is," he says, and laughs quietly.

Nicole is sobbing softly, and she leans on Pat, who looks down at the plot where her son is buried. "I'm not crying," Pat says, still looking down. "I think this is the first time I've been here that I'm not. I don't know why."

But Cara's tears fall unchecked. She kneels down at the gravesite, kisses her fingertips and presses them into the dirt.

Someone starts to sing "Happy Birthday," and others join in. The wind picks up, making their somber voices even more distant, until the song sounds like it's coming from the far end of a tunnel. Everyone has been given a balloon, and when the song ends, the balloons are let go, and the wind carries a few of them directly into the branches of a nearby maple. Just when it seems as if they'll stay there, the wind stiffens and the balloons bump up through the branches, until they're free and riding the wind. In what seems like just seconds, they've vanished into the leaden clouds.

The family of Jack Snook has set up a fund for his daughter, Mallory. For information, go to www.snookfund.com.