Dateline NBC - Crossing the Line

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

In this Dateline classic, after a fatal car crash, investigators find a series of revealing text messages that lead them to believe it may not have been an accident. Keith Morrison reports. Originally aired on NBC on November 11, 2011.

All of a sudden I realized, what's going on? Why are they late? Something definitely was wrong. He said, your family was in an accident. I had my own world just dropped out from underneath me. The scene told the story. What did you find? Something I don't want to see again.

A deadly crash on a dark road. Two gone, one barely alive. A tragic accident. But in all the broken glass and twisted metal, was there a clue to a crime? The last thing I wanted was to have to take a double fatality and have to now treat it as a homicide. Murder, an accusation no one saw coming i couldn't

deal with it two families in torment we were both just a small town trial with big emotions you took him you did it and the verdict we the jury that would shake them all. Welcome to Dateline. I'm Lester Holt. Big sky country, a small town, and a famously dangerous highway. That was the setting for a deadly crash that would seem to unite two families in shock and heartbreak. Except they were about to find out that this tragedy was also a mystery, and the truth about what happened on that late winter night might be darker than anyone knew. Here's Keith Morrison. March 19, 2009 Night fell heavy in Montana's Flathead Valley

Something off that night, something wrong At Mary and Randy Winter's house in Kalispell, anxiety spiked Where was she? It just felt like something was not right It's hard to explain that there's something not normal. You could set your clock by their daughter Justine, that reliable. But a new driver to just 16, new home at eight from her boyfriend's house. And though she wasn't very late, the feeling seeped in like a poison. Something wrong. I called her starting about 5 after 8

and no answer. Called the house where she was at and they said she had left 15 minutes before that. I was thinking she had, you know, went off the road between their house and us. Not far away, another family, the other half of our story,

was on the road too. Erin Thompson was driving her son Caden home from a school concert. He played the drums. I had always attended all of Caden's concerts, and this was the first one that I didn't attend because I had car troubles. This is Caden's stepfather, Jason Thompson. My car was in the shop and finally fixed, and so Erin dropped me off, and that's why I wasn't with him.

And soon the poison, the anxiety, seeped under Jason's door through his windows onto his nerve endings. Just all of a sudden I realized, what's going on? You know, why are they late? And it just struck me that something definitely was wrong. At Justine Winter's house, the fear was deep now. Justine's dad, Randy, was a National Guardsman, a volunteer firefighter. He was trained to keep his head, knew what he had to do. Randy got in his truck, drove out of town to the road he knew she'd take, coming home from her boyfriend's house. And then he saw it, in a construction zone zone on the highway 93 overpass what did you find

something i don't want to see again so you could say fireman's worst nightmare someone tried to hold him back he kept on and then i saw her over at the side. His perfect daughter is Justine. Obscenely broken, but amazingly still alive. How does she look? I didn't really see a lot of her

on the gurney there, but I got to see her at the hospital. She was pretty bad. You don't want to ever see your kid in the hospital. Every bit of her was damaged horribly. Broken bones, brain damage, ruptured organs. The chance she'd survive? Slim, said the doctors.

Oh, but the winter's news could have been worse. And a few miles away, where the phone rang at Jason Thompson's house, the news was much worse. The caller was the county coroner. He said, Jason, your family was in an accident. And he said, I'm sorry to have to tell you this on the phone, but they were just killed. And my world just dropped out from underneath me.

Jason's wife, 35-year-old Erin Thompson, was four months pregnant. Her son, Caden, the boy who just played the drums at his school concert, was just 13. And just like that, they were gone. The crash was head on. And in school counselor Jason Thompson's life, the lights went out. That night of that realization, I'll never forget that news. Nor, of course, will Aaron's mother, Diana. We were both just bonkers, just, just...

Nor her sister, Amber, who, with David, her husband, missed Erin so much they'd made plans to move to Montana to be close. Not possible now. That was the hardest, the hardest piece of news we could fathom. And to lose both of them and the baby, it just didn't even seem like it could be real. And in the little house he shared with the love of his life, where he'd been waiting with such excitement for their baby to arrive, Jason, like Job of old, was overcome by the heaviest sorrow of a whole life of sorrows. It's like I'm nine years old and 79 when my sister dies,

and then I'm 19 years old and at 89 when my mother dies of cancer, and then now I'm 39 and 09, and I lose my family. Missing that concert, you lived. How's that been, to wrap your head around?

Well, it's been an embracing of life, right? But I definitely didn't fear death anymore. There's times where I would have welcomed it. But the dreadful truth of it is that accidents happen all around America every day, every night.

Still, just as the permanence of loss began to sink in, before anyone had given a thought to a now diminished future, there was another piece of news. before anyone had given a thought to a now diminished future, there was another piece of news. This time, the fatal accident might not have been an accident at all. Coming up... The last thing I wanted was to have to treat it as a homicide. A prosecutor's stunning decision when Dateline continues.

For decades, Montanans have almost morbidly intoned the words, pray for me, I drive Highway 93. They say it because of nights like March 19th, 2009. Except, as everybody would soon know, this crash on this night may have been no accident. A revelation which, in Jason Thompson's devastated mind, would register later. Just now, his whole life was a bomb crater, a ruin. Erin was like my heart, she was so old to me. You know, I've waited all these years looking, but I was always, I had an ideal. And I was searching for her. And she, as she told everybody, had been looking for him. Erin was a single mom when Jason met her brilliant smile.

She was a hairdresser who loved to dance, and she was a seeker in all matters spiritual. Her mother, Diana. She was single and a young mother, and she was wondering what she was going to do with her life. She answered her own question and just said, well, as long as I'm about the business of spreading love, it doesn't matter. Erin married Jason in the summer of 2006 in the glorious Montana sunshine. And young Caden seemed as pleased as she was. Caden, who shared his mother and new stepfather's craving for outdoor adventures. Backpacking on the coast, in the mountains, river rafting.

It was all about just sharing that time together. Yes, and there was that plan Erin hatched with her sister Amber. We always had a dream of growing up and living right next door to each other and, you know, raising up our families. And soon the plan expanded beautifully. When Erin and Jason announced they were expecting a child of their own. Every day I would praise my life, praise my wife and my little baby that I was finally going to have. And, you know, it all made sense. And then came March 19, 2009. But as the news and the grief spread, there was still hope, remember,

for one of the victims of the crash. Justine Winter was alive, though barely, with a broken neck and broken legs and major internal injuries. Doctors told the family they didn't think she'd live through the airlift to a hospital in Seattle. What did they tell you? They told us three times that she wouldn't live. I said, She's flying in that airplane and don't even give me any grief. And she did survive the flight to Seattle and the emergency operations to stitch together the broken pieces of her body. She was unconscious when she arrived.

The doctors kept her that way, induced a coma, so she could avoid the pain or any recognition of her desperate condition. While her body slowly, slowly began to knit itself back together. Until more than a month later. And her eyes just went poof. That was just like the most incredible feeling of, she's there, she's in there, and your heart's just beating. It was days later before Justine could understand what was going on around her.

But the news had to be faced eventually. And so when she seemed ready, they told her. When you told her what happened in the accident and how those other people had died, how did she react to that? I was very emotional for her. It was very devastating. And then what was discovered was, well, quite frankly, unimaginable. For in the middle of that river of tears, relief on the one side, abject grief on the other, there was an undertow, a twist nobody saw coming. For while Justine spent 45 days in the hospital recuperating and months more at home in Montana healing,

it didn't take investigators very long at all, a matter of hours really, to solve the mystery of who and what caused this crash. In fact, the first Montana Highway Patrol officers who raced to the scene in that construction zone believed that Justine Winter's car was the one that crossed the center line and smashed into Aaron Thompson's car. But the worst of it, the inconceivable part was, at least as investigators told then-Flathead County District Attorney Ed Corrigan, this was not an accident at all. What was your first reaction, what did you think?

Nuts. This was the last thing I wanted, was to have to take a double fatality and have to now treat it as a homicide. Homicide? Yes. Right there in Justine's car, officers found what amounted to a minute-by-minute narrative of the events leading up to the collision in text messages. And in those messages, the prosecutor said, was the evidence. He believed required him to press criminal charges against that girl doctors had quite miraculously saved, Justine Winter. Charges of murder. Coming up.

They're suing you for her pain and suffering. When Dateline continues. The sorrow ran deep in Montana's Flathead Valley that awful spring and summer of 2009. Deep and wide, the whole valley, in fact the country, heard about the crash that killed Caden and Aaron and her unborn child

and heard a strange and disturbing story that 16-year-old Justine Winter took deadly aim at Aaron's oncoming car, crossed the center line, and plowed right into them. On purpose. Shocking? Oh yes, as was the alleged reason. Justine said the police was trying to die by suicide. How did they know? They found the evidence on Justine's phone, they said. Text messages, which she wrote herself, and which once County Attorney Ed Corrigan saw them. Gave him no choice, he said.

He charged her with deliberate homicide, Montana's equivalent of murder. Justine purposely went into the wrong lane of traffic and smashed head-on into another car. And by doing so, she should have known her actions could have killed somebody. And under those circumstances, I think deliberate homicide was the only charge we could find. Right. So you decided to charge her as an adult. Yes.

Why? She was 16. She was. The taking of two lives is not, in my opinion, a delinquent act. It is a crime. It needs to be prosecuted as a crime, and if convicted, it needs to be on her record for the rest of her life. Perhaps because of her own massive injuries or continuing operations, her age, Justine, after pleading not guilty, was released to house arrest, fitted with an ankle bracelet to await trial. She was allowed to attend classes at Glacier High. And at home, her parents fumed. No matter what those text messages said, the idea Justine would cause

that crash on purpose? Just crazy. You angry about all of this? It builds up inside and it gets to a point where you can't take it anymore. Turned out, and it was frankly hardly surprising, in a town the size of Kalispell, the two families actually knew each other. Justine's mother and Aaron's mother had worked at the same school. Aaron's family made it perfectly clear that what they wanted from Justine most of all was a heartfelt apology and some sort of indication she took responsibility for the act with which she was charged. They actually saw that as a way to award forgiveness, and most people around town thought that was a fine idea. But from Justine

and her family, it's just an awkward silence. And then, early one morning in the fall of 2010, an entirely unexpected knock at the door took emotions to a whole new level. This private investigator, you know, just hands me these papers, like he's serving me papers, and it's, you know, he said they're suing, you know, my errands estate. They're suing you? Suing for her pain and suffering. It was true.

In a legal preemptive strike, Justine Winter's attorneys had filed a lawsuit on her behalf against Aaron's estate, as well as three companies in charge of the construction zone where the crash occurred. The lawsuit claimed Aaron had negligently operated her car, resulting in the collision, and also that the companies had failed to adequately construct and maintain the vicinity, causing hazardous and confusing conditions for the traveling public. I can't even begin to guess what they were thinking about when they decided to file that lawsuit. It inflamed the whole town. It inflamed the whole town. This wasn't Justine's decision. That was a decision made by her attorneys. Ah, yes, the attorneys. Their names? Maxwell Battle and David Stuft. And according to the Winters, the attorneys assured them the lawsuit, assuming Justine was found not guilty, would give

them a better shot at an insurance company reimbursement later. There was no intent of going for the estate, making that family endure more than they've already endured. But the optics were awful. Oh, the timing could have been, who knows, better. Oh, you'd pick up the newspaper, you'd look at the blogs, you'd hear the radio, and what you got was those awful people, those disgusting, terrible people. What are they thinking? They're

trying to sue the victims of this crime. That's what was portrayed, but the actual intent was not that at all. Misunderstood or not, by the time Justine Winter's trial for deliberate homicide started in January 2011, the tide of public opinion had turned as bitter as a Montana winter. The hearts of Aaron Thompson's family, too, had toughened. And Justine, who showed up in an almost childlike polka dot hairband,

certainly didn't look the part of an accused killer facing as many as 200 years behind bars. But there she was. I can see the debris field. With the two families just a few feet away,

she watched investigators testify to a certainty that it was just Dean's Pontiac Grand Am that crossed the center line. Here you can see all this debris from the initial impact

of the crash. Slamming into Aaron's Subaru so hard, it was driven backward into the highway barrier. And crash reconstructionists agreed. Justine Winters' car encroached into the northbound lane, striking Mrs. Thompson's vehicle. But what evidence was there that Justine had done it, as the law says, purposefully?

Investigators pulled the so-called black box out of Justine's Pontiac, analyzed the data, and found another sign that pointed to suicide. She'd taken off her seat belt. The black box also recorded speed, acceleration, and braking, and found that Justine was accelerating, flooring it, so to speak, in the five seconds before the crash, speeding up from 81 to 86 miles an hour before hitting the brakes at the last second. She did not swerve, and she drove head-on into that other vehicle. To back it up, prosecutors pulled the speedometer from Justine's car. Right above the mark indicating 85 miles an hour

found an orange mark. It's known as a slap mark. Made, the experts testified, when the needle smashes against the console at high speed. And finally, prosecutors revealed the reason, they said, behind it all. Justine, like many 16-year-old girls, had a boyfriend. Hers was named Ryan. It was quite hot, this relationship.

He was her world. But that day in March, there had been a tiff. It had words. And so that night she drove Ryan home, asked him to get out of the car. He said they were through. Then Justine drove north to clear her head. She was on her way home when detectives testified. She began texting Ryan, apparently while behind the wheel.

The first text, half an hour before the crash. Goodbye, Ryan. Just live your life knowing you did change me. My last words, I love you Ryan Then her text became somehow threatening If I won, I would have you, and I wouldn't crash my car And Ryan answered You kill yourself, I kill myself So come on, don't be selfish

That's the only thing I want to live for You Ryan, you keep me living Stop, you hurt yourself living. Stop. You hurt yourself and I'll know and I'll do the same. That's why I'm going to wreck my car because all I can do is f*** up. It shows you would rather me die because I want to kill myself. Goodbye, Ryan. I love you. Then the final message from Ryan. You killing yourself is just another way for you to run away. Now just five or six minutes later, prosecutors said, Justine Winter drove her car into Aaron Thompson's lane of traffic to die by suicide,

but instead killed a mother, child, unborn baby. The prosecution had made his case for murder. Now the question was, what could Justine Winter's attorneys possibly say to make a jury believe otherwise? Coming up, the defense takes on the heart of the case, those texts, when Dateline continues.

Every day in the Montana courtroom, the family of now 17-year-old Justine Winter dutifully shuffled to the front row seats directly behind the defense table. Their faces, by their attorney's decree, they say, an intentional blank, emotionless. Their apparent demeanor, a spur in the side of an already angry town. But almost no one knew what was really going on. Justine's mother, Mary, who had been struggling with alcohol, caved in to the stress. Tell me how it's changed your life. I ran away for a while.

I couldn't deal with it. I just left the house. I didn't come back. Justine's brother, Kyle, dropped out of college to help keep things together at home and get Justine to her medical appointments. And Randy, her father, the strong and tall as a Montana spruce firefighter and National Guardsman, turned angry and bitter at the continuing prosecution of his little girl. I could be sitting and living and watching TV, and all of a sudden I hear something, I just completely lose it. I just start crying.

The whole world, said Justine's dad, seemed intent on misunderstanding, demonizing his little girl. Yet, he said, she'd always been so good, kind, thoughtful, and responsible. Was getting almost straight A's in high school. But mostly, wouldn't harm a bug, literally. And cared about people. Would never, never want to hurt that sweet woman or her son or her baby.

Always had a smile, always wanted to help is who she was. Which kind of a little girl was this? She was just a good girl. But it might interest you to know that as the Winters spoke to us, they were doing so against the expressed advice of their attorneys. And when it was time for Justine's defense team to make its case in court, attorneys Maxwell, Battle, and David Stuft told the jury that everything the prosecution told them, everything they knew about the case so far, was wrong.

What happened out there was an accident. Including where the crash occurred. Remember, the prosecution's experts testified there was no doubt Justine crossed the center line and veered into Aaron Thompson's lane, causing the crash. But a forensic engineer hired by the defense said his research turned that finding

on its head. He claimed it was Erin who drove out of her lane in that construction zone and struck Justine. And the defense went further, claiming that slap mark near the 85-mile mark in the speedometer of Justine's car was planted there by investigators. That the black box that measured speed and braking was plain wrong. That Justine always wore her seatbelt. And finally, a psychologist said, well, actually a lot of experts said, that a spat with a boy wasn't enough to lead to a suicide attempt. And those texts, they should not be considered a suicide note at all. It was a way of exercising power and control in the relationship to make that kind of threat.

But it was always clear that it was never meant. What would Justine Winter say about what happened that night, about those texts? The jury would never know. She did not testify. On the advice of attorneys, said her family, and of course that was her perfect right, but there was another reason too. Justine suffered a brain injury in that crash,

so her recollection of the last few days leading up to the crash on that night itself, she doesn't remember. She is charged with a crime about which her memory is a complete blank. So then, how could the jury know Justine knowingly crossed the center line, having decided to take her own life by hitting the other car? The question we put to the prosecutor. In order to draw that conclusion, you have to read her mind, essentially. You've been a prosecutor for years.

You know that car accidents happen in the most bizarre ways, that people do crazy things on the road. But you clearly said, this was a situation in which I know what somebody was thinking when they drove across that lane of traffic and into that other car. No. I just don't know how you can know what she's thinking. I can't know what she was thinking. Nobody knows what she was thinking at the time.

Right. She doesn't know what she was thinking at the time. Precisely. All I can do is base my decision on what the evidence shows. Did the evidence clearly show that Justine Winter had made up her mind to die by suicide by driving into an oncoming car? Up to the jury now. Coming up.

Everyone just cried about it. A verdict comes quickly, but the pain and one final question remain. When Dateline continues. As a Montana jury prepared to decide the fate of 17-year-old Justine Winter, the members of Aaron and Caden's family struggled to hang on to the frayed remnants of their former goodwill. They had tried so hard not to be angry at Justine. That is, until they were served with that lawsuit, blaming the crash on Aaron, and then watched defense attorneys battle in stuffed twisters. They saw it anyway.

But the family believed were the facts of the case. You're unusual as victims because of this willingness to forgive Justine. It's the adults in her life that should be steering her in this direction. It's not her decisions. You know, it's these adults. So I've had plenty of anger towards them. But for Justine's family, too, there was considerable strain. So much that Justine's father, Randy, buckled under the pressure

and was rushed to the hospital and not present in the courtroom. I will ask the clerk to file the verdict and to read it, please. When after just four hours of deliberation, the jury came back. We, the jury, enter the following unanimous verdict. To the charge of deliberate homicide for the death of Aaron Thompson, guilty. For the death of Caden O'Dell, guilty. This was a absolutely horrible, numbing experience that put my head, had it been to my knees. It was like the whole courtroom. I felt like everyone just cried about it. How did she look, Mary?

She's led off to jail. Your little girl. She looked very stunned. She didn't look... Just a week after that verdict, Justine Winter marked her 18th birthday in a jail cell. And then came sentencing day.

And everyone wondered, would Justine finally tell Aaron's husband, her family, what they desperately wanted to hear? In your ideal world, what would you like to hear from Justine? To be sorry for what she took from us, because it was huge. But just before sentencing, the family received a statement written by Justine. And it wasn't even close to what they were looking for. In it, she called herself a miracle who was wrongly convicted of a horrific crime. She wrote that she would never, ever in a million years take her own life or anyone else's. That this was an accident that had been blown out of proportion.

That she didn't need time behind bars. Just a chance to turn a horrific situation into a positive one. And so with this statement in mind, the family of Aaron and Caden took the stand to have their own say. I want for you to make something positive of your life through this, but you still have yet to grasp the truth. Caden's father, the same message, more anger. You took him. You did it. And you need to own it. You killed my boy. You need to own it.

And finally, Caden's stepfather, Jason, the elementary school counselor, first displaying compassion, then a rare stream of venom aimed at Justine's defense team, the attorney's battle and stuffed. I've chosen not to believe that you, in crashing your car that night, wanted to harm or would ever think about harming them. But it has been very, very, very difficult to hold on to that thought, given that you've been led by these two men and influenced by them to

not do what is most important in all of this, and to show and demonstrate to us that you are sorry for having taken them. Then, finally, the moment as Justine Winter herself took the stand to speak for the first time. I've wanted to speak with you for two years now. I've wanted to let you guys know that my heart goes out to you. And as every single one of you came up here today, my heart was breaking. But I just hope that you guys will be able to forgive that I will never

be able to say that I intentionally crossed the center line wanting to take three lives from all of you. But before the judge allowed Justine to leave the witness stand, the prosecutor stepped to the podium and asked a question on behalf of the victim's family, a question that froze the courtroom.

What they've wanted to hear from you for a long, long time also is I'm sorry. Can you tell them that? I'm sorry for your loss, but I cannot, I don't know what you're meaning by you want me to say that I'm sorry. And so the hammer came down. It's the order of the court. The defendant is committed for a period of 30 years, with 15 years suspended. Justine was sentenced to 15 years in prison. And her father, back on his feet and in court for sentencing day, began his own prison term. The one deep inside his own soul. The system betrayed me.

You could say you serve a country, and then you feel betrayed about it. You feel betrayed by the country you fought for? Mm-hmm. About the judicial part of the system. They took her, this once promising college-bound honors student, to a cell in the Montana Women's Prison, where she instantly became the youngest inmate in the place. And two months later, those attorneys, stuffed and battle,

who declined our requests for interviews, were off the case. That civil lawsuit was dropped. And that's when Justine Winter decided to tell us her side of the whole sad story. Coming up... An exclusive interview with Justine.

If you say it's probably you who caused that accident, are you able to say I take responsibility for that? When Dateline continues. Shortly after Justine Winter walked out of the courtroom in Kalispell, Montana, she landed more than 450 miles east across the state at the women's prison in Billings. She sat down with us, quite well aware of how all this time she'd been the target of so much curiosity and anger. I'm curious to know what your thought process was as you went about deciding, yeah, I think I'll talk now. I don't know. I guess it was probably that I was being

shown in a different light than what I wanted to be shown in. When you read accounts of your case and when you see the comments people write, what's that like? They were really hard to read. I heard one that said I needed to hang from a noose on a tree. What does it feel like inside when you saw that comment, for example? I'm really weird with my brain injury. I feel it in the second, but it's hard to, like, recall it afterwards. That brain injury is the reason, she says, she sometimes smiles when she doesn't mean to.

Why everything came out wrong, she says, when she took the stand and spoke at sentencing. And why she says, and even the prosecutor says he believes this, that she recalls nothing about the crash. I don't remember the night of the accident, but I remember events that I know had to have happened right before the accident happened. What events would those be? I remember doing stuff to get ready for prom, because prom was supposed to be two days after when the accident happened but other than that i don't really remember a whole lot about march what do you remember the last time you saw your boyfriend i have no idea i remember we spent oodles of time together you were inseparable basically pretty much in love um kid love yeah well it much. In love? Kid love.

Yeah. Well, it's pretty strong love, that kid love, isn't it? Yeah. I remember if I wasn't with him, I was texting him all the time. But as for those texts following the argument with Ryan just before the crash, Justine said, despite what many believe, she would never, ever have tried to kill herself. Knowing, as she does, that her grandmother, Randy's mother, took her own life when her dad was just a boy. In fact, she said the most likely explanation was she was just playing a game of sorts with Ryan.

He liked controlling everything having to do with like my life and he he'd he'd threatened suicide twice that's what i would think was happening is that i was playing his own card back at him well i'm gonna kill myself then yeah i don't think that they were text messages that were to be taken seriously well if you look at them through Justine's eyes, they don't look like a serious threat. But the jury didn't look at it through your eyes. No. Despite her conviction and all that evidence and the fact she has no memory of that night, Justine still claims she must have been wearing her seatbelt

and cannot imagine driving her car at 85 miles an hour. Just not the sort of thing she ever did, she says. Something happened, you swerved across and hit that other car. Does that sound about right? Yeah. It's probably you who caused the accident. That's fair to say. And if you say it's probably you who caused that accident, are you able to say, yeah, you know, if I did it and I probably did cause it, I just feel horrible about that. And I take responsibility for that. Is it possible for you to say that? I mean, if I knew, then I would take responsibility for it. You know, if it was me, I'd take complete, utter responsibility for it.

And I do. And now, finally, having said the words almost that Erin and Caden's family longed to hear, Justine says she is finally through with what she called a pity party she held for herself. All I would change about the accident is that they lived. And if it had to be so be that they lived and I didn't, I'd be okay with that. Because I don't, I don't like seeing anyone else in pain. I know my family was put in a lot of pain because of the accident. But they've got to see me grow up.

And the other family can't see that. Yep. And I don't want to put them in any more pain than they've already had to be put through. And I want to make everything, everything okay for them. After serving a little more than four years of her 15-year sentence in prison, in 2015, Justine Winter was granted parole. For Aaron's widower, Jason, his dream is gone.

Only an empty chair and empty ache remain, as he and so many in the family, as if climbing those Montana mountains, try to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It's a dance between the grief of their loss to the joy and the blessing of having experienced them. It's like seeing a meteor. You wouldn't curse your luck that you saw this meteor.

You'd just be thankful that you were blessed to see it. And so we just have to cling to that, just that wow. How amazing that we got to spend a good part of our life with two of the most precious people on the planet. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thank you for joining us.