Franz Kegel holds photographs of his daughters who were both killed by a drunk driver. (Jerry R. Tyson/News-Sentinel)

Family copes with tragedy of drinking and driving

By Brian Ross
News-Sentinel staff writer

It was on a carefree Saturday night in June 1985 that Franz and Bernette Kegel, returning home from a friend’s wedding, were stunned by the news that would forever alter their lives.

Theirs had not previously been a life overly fraught with hardship — but rather a joyous one of hard work and religious faith, anchored firmly by a strong devotion to family.

A native Pennsylvanian and the son of German-born parents, Franz Kegel came to California to study agriculture at the University of California, Davis.

After graduating, he went to work for the UC’s ag cooperative extension as a field crop adviser. That’s where he met Bernette, a colleague who later became his wife.

The young couple settled down in Morada, just south of Lodi, to the business of raising a family — five girls — spaced more or less two years apart.

By all accounts, Liesel Kegel, the family’s second-oldest child, was a shy but spirited girl.

Possessed of what her parents describe as something of a stubborn streak, like a lot of normal 16-year-olds, Liesel indulged in her share of adolescent rebellion.

“I can remember her first word was: ‘No!’ ” her father said.

Kelli Flesher and Liesel Kegel met in a seventh-grade class and soon became friends.

Flesher remembers every so often how the two would play hooky from Tokay High School to spend the day at the beach — or maybe hang around at a local AM radio station and pester the disc jockeys.

“She was a lot of fun to be around,” Flesher said. “She was smart as a whip. She could do anything she set her mind to, but if she didn’t want to do something, she wouldn’t do it.”

All of her sisters studied and excelled in German, but Liesel declared she would learn French instead, somewhat to her father’s chagrin.

“She said, ‘Hey, it’s a beautiful language, and that was that,’ ” Franz Kegel said.

During the summer break between her freshman and sophomore years, Franz Kegel sent his quiet but headstrong daughter off to France to stay with relatives.

There, she worked in earnest to learn the French language, mastering conversational basics in just three months.

She was also smitten with the rich culture of France — even taking up art, sketching nudes, among other things, in a drawing class she attended with a cousin who was about her age.

For Liesel, this was a turning point, her father remembers.

“When she came home, Liesel had blossomed as a person. She had been transformed from a little girl into a young woman.”

Elke Kegel was quite different in many ways from Liesel, say those who knew them best.

“Elke was very easy to get along with,” said Brad Shingler, a popular student athlete at Tokay who enjoyed a close friendship with her for years.

It was Shingler, in fact, who was the only one to survive the crash that fateful June evening.

Elke Kegel had invited him to the year-end, girl-ask-boy Sadie Hawkins Dance at Tokay.

With the girls’ parents out of town at the wedding that evening, Liesel had agreed to act as chauffeur for the pair of 15-year-olds.

They left to pick up Shingler at his parents’ Thornton Road residence about an hour before the dance. Their plan had been to meet up with some friends at a north Stockton pizzeria for dinner before the event. He hopped into the back seat of the white 1973 Volkswagen — a model which was not equipped with seat belts.

They had no reason to suspect it would be the Kegel sisters’ final journey.

The driver of the car that took their lives had been drinking.

Reportedly, a number of his friends at the dairymen’s banquet he had attended that night at the Stockton Ballroom had gently suggested to Mario Franco he may not have been in any shape to get behind the wheel of a car.

Insisting he would be all right, Franco, 34, left the function shortly after 8 p.m.

He didn’t get far.

Only about 200 yards north of the Stockton Ballroom, Franco’s full-size American-made car suddenly drifted into the southbound lane, smashing head-on into the Volkswagen driven by Liesel, who would have turned 17 in less than two months.

The absence of brake marks suggest she never had time to react.

She was killed instantly along with Elke.

Franco, who sustained massive injuries in the wreck, died early the next morning following emergency surgery at Stockton’s Dameron Hospital.

Tests run at the hospital determined Franco’s blood-alcohol level to be 0.20 percent — twice the legal limit at the time. He left behind a wife and two children.

Although gravely injured, Shingler miraculously survived.

When Franz and Bernette Kegel pulled into their driveway, a sheriff’s deputy was waiting to deliver the heart-rending news.

“At that moment, my mind went absolutely blank,” Franz Kegel said. “I maintain that it has never been the same since.”

For the Kegel family, the healing process has been long and painful.

“It gets easier after a time,” Franz Kegel said. “Today, we are all fully functional. But you’re never really quite the same again.”

Liesel had shared a bedroom with her two youngest sisters.

In the days following her daughters’ deaths, Bernette Kegel removed all of Liesel’s belongings from the room so as to avoid stirring up painful memories for the younger girls.

So vivid and excruciating were the memories of her lost daughters, in fact, that Bernette Kegel was unable to bear the thought of celebrating Christmas at home — and the family celebrated the holidays for the next three years at their Tahoe cabin.

Shingler was not expected by emergency room doctors to survive the night of the crash — and he hovered between life and death in a comatose state for more than 48 hours.

His injuries were serious and extensive: His upper lip had been ripped away from his gums, an injury which still sets his lip askew whenever he smiles.

He had bitten completely through his tongue and cracked his front teeth, suffered a life-threatening head injury which resulted in permanent memory loss, broken his right arm, ruptured his spleen, had both his lungs collapsed, sustained deep gashes on his knee, eyelid and neck, and fractured his left leg.

During that grim battle for life, he reports having a vivid, dreamlike out-of-body experience.

“I was looking down on my bed, and saw Liesel and Elke standing on either side of me,” said Shingler, now a 31-year-old Nazarene pastor residing in Mission Viejo. “They were telling me to go on with my life; that they were going to be all right, and not to worry about them any more.”

It would be no easy task, however. For Brad Shingler, recovery was long, often bitter and sometimes almost unbearable.

He required two full years of cognitive rehabilitation training to help him pick up coping skills to compensate for his greatly diminished powers of short-term memory. Shingler also struggled through almost three years of gruelling physical therapy after the crash to mend his broken body.

The psychological wounds would take even longer to heal, he was to discover.

Returning to Tokay High, Brad Shingler soon discovered that because of his disfiguring wounds, he was no longer considered “cool” to hang out with by many of his former athlete friends on campus.

Socially alienated, confused and angry, the former Tokay soccer standout was faced with the difficult task of learning to walk again.

The humbling experience gave him a new compassion for the suffering of others, Shingler said.

Shingler still remembers absolutely nothing of the crash — and many major events in his life which preceded it.

“I’m not sure if that’s a result of my head injury or just the subconscious desire to avoid the pain of remembering. For years, I didn’t want to remember. Now, I just wish I could.”

Shingler took to writing as a form of therapy, he said, writing numerous fictitious accounts of ghastly auto crashes — all loosely based on his own shattering ordeal, but taking pains to ensure none were similar enough to evoke the demons that had pursued him constantly since the time of the tragedy.

It took nearly seven years for Shingler to discover a way to exorcise those demons.

One day, while in a contemplative mood, he said it suddenly struck him that while he had never resented Mario Franco for turning his life upside down, he’d never bothered to forgive him yet, either.

The cathartic, liberating experience of granting Franco forgiveness on his own spiritual terms proved to be a major turning point, Shingler said.

“I remember just crying like a baby for hours,” he said. “It felt like a huge stone had suddenly been lifted off my chest. From that point on, I was finally able to begin to move on with my life.”

The journey has also been a hard one for the Kegel family — the members of which found different ways of dealing with their grief.

Franz Kegel became active with the group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which started as a small grassroots movement to evolve into a powerful lobbying group largely responsible for winning stiffer penalties for DUI offenses and raising public awareness and understanding about the issue.

He regularly addresses audiences in settings like drinking driver offender programs, jails and prisons about the dangers and consequences of drinking and driving.

Franz Kegel also worked through his grief by attending victims support groups.

“I found that being with other people who had lost children gave me great comfort,” he said.

Bernette Kegel said she coped with her grief by staying constantly busy — joining activity clubs, stating up new household projects, gardening and the like.

“As long as I stayed busy, it kept me from thinking about it,” she said.

For others, like Flesher, the pain has faded over the years, but the bittersweet memories and regrets about what should have been still vividly remain.

“Liesel should have been there for my wedding and the birth of my children,” she said in a distant, melancholy tone. “She was the best friend I ever had.”

Contents

» High number of drinking and driving arrests in Lodi raises questions
» The .08 debate: Does low standard net social drinkers?
» Students tell stories of drinking at parties, rural areas
» Family copes with tragedy of drinking and driving
» Embarrassment, fines just the start when getting a DUI
» Tips on how to avoid a DUI charge, or to stop drinking altogether