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thedrifter
12-31-05, 07:49 AM
A year of joy, sorrow and giving
Darrell Smith
The Desert Sun
December 31, 2005

You shared your lives with us in these pages, lives, hopes, dreams, pain and grief and joy and the spaces in between.

You shared your lives with us and helped us tell the desert's tale for 365 days, a story at once universal to all of us and unique as a fingerprint. Here are some of the stories of the people who affected us, big and small, that could only be told here in the Coachella Valley and only now as we come to the end of 2005.

Hello, Daniel. Welcome to the world. You joined us, all 6 pounds and 19 inches of you early on a Saturday morning; 5:11 a.m. on the first day of the New Year.

The newborn son of Rosa and Arnulfo Contreras of Indio, you waited for your parents to celebrate then gave them a more special reason to rejoice.

A new year, a new life and a new beginning for a family that grew by one.

Sixteen years ago, the late Palm Springs Mayor Sonny Bono gave birth to a brainchild of his own, a festival to spotlight the films and vanguard filmmakers from Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States.

But in a city that Hollywood has long called its second address, a large part of the legacy of the Palm Springs International Film Festival is the star power that connects the older and newer Hollywood in a city still very much connected to Tinseltown.

That star power shone in spades at a high-watt opening gala at Palm Springs Convention Center that even a wet January night couldn't cool.

They were all here, I wrote then, Kevin Spacey and Samuel L. Jackson; Laura Linney and a breathtaking Nicole Kidman. There was praise for new voices like director Alexander Payne and a hero's welcome for the legendary Kirk Douglas, who reminded us why we were all here in the first place.


"If you want to see a star, don't go to Hollywood," Douglas of Palm Springs told us. "Come to Palm Springs."

We also mourned in 2005 for our fallen Marines from Twentynine Palms' Marine Air Ground Combat Center; and philanthropists and community leaders such as John Curci, the Desert Cancer Foundation's Arthur Teichner, the Desert Highland neighborhood's Frankie Ware, and philanthropist/angel Coeta Barker.

But the shock that came early on a May morning shook the community to the core.

Early on a Tuesday, something horrible happened on Devil's Ladder Road. Riverside County sheriff's deputies found five people shot dead in their beds in their sprawling Garner Valley home.

A sixth body, that of Riverside County district attorney's investigator David McGowan, was found dead in the home's entryway.

They were all gone: 14-year-old son Chase; 10-year-old daughter Paige; and 8-year-old daughter Rayne, who loved the outdoors and their mountain home above Palm Desert; Karen McGowan, a pioneering Cathedral City firefighter from a longtime valley firefighting family, a loving mother who was also, friends described, tough as nails; her mother-in-law, Angela, 75, who recently moved onto the family's Garner Valley property.

And David McGowan, the popular former Cathedral City police officer-turned-Riverside County district attorney's investigator was found to have killed them as they slept before turning the gun on himself, a revelation that provoked sadness, anger, shock and disbelief.

"There's a lot of emotion going on," said Cathedral City Mayor Kathleen DeRosa at the time. "They don't understand it. No one understands it."

Months later, we're still struggling to understand.

Days later, an already-shaken community was dealt another blow with the report of a light plane that crashed into Tahquitz Peak.

Inside were the bodies of local business leaders Timothy Jessup and contractor Garold Miller Jr., best friends who died when their small plane crashed into a mountainside overlooking the valley where they raised families, built lives and careers.

Both passionately lived life: Jessup, the seemingly born leader, Marine captain, sportsman, pilot, businessman, father; and Miller, the self-described redneck from a small Florida town who built homes and neighborhoods across the Coachella Valley, worked and played hard and stayed true to his roots.

"When you were with him, you always felt you were in the right place, doing the right things," friend Mike Rowe said of Miller. "He enjoyed his life and brought life to the people he met."

Anxiety, joy, pain, relief, and for too many, grief. It's a life the Marines of Twentynine Palms know well.

In all, 75 Marines and sailors from the high desert base have died in the war in Iraq, nearly a third of those in 2005.

Faith is tested in this town.

In few places is the war in Iraq felt as deeply as in Twentynine Palms and the base that shares the city's name, a key training ground for the war in Iraq and home to a third of the 1st Marine Division.

Palms Southern Baptist Church sits on a hill above the base and it's here where that faith is restored. Determination, too, in a congregation where six of every 10 parishioners are Marines, or the wife, son or daughter of a Marine.

"There's a feeling of, 'We're going to get through this. I am going to be OK. We're going to be OK.' You see it on their faces," said David Squyres, the church's young pastor, said. "It's not a vague hope," Squyres continued. "If He can raise the dead, He can protect our troops."

That faith was tested again in December in the wake of the deadliest single day for Twentynine Palms Marines.

A powerful improvised explosive killed 10 Twentynine Palms Marines from the 2nd Battalion , 7th Marines and wounded 11 more troops inside their patrol base outside Fallujah following a promotion ceremony Dec. 8.

Lance Cpl. Brian Jackson, 24, of the base's 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines, had 30 days left of a six-year hitch when we talked about the fatal explosion in front of his Twentynine Palms home.

He told me he had stopped checking on news sites like CNN.com and watching the news, hoping to avoid reports of deaths in Iraq.

"It's a depressing war," he finally said. "It's sad," he said, then groaned softly. "Just like every other war."

They knew only that they could help and that there were people who were wanting. Hurricane Katrina had devastated the Gulf Coast, destroying lives and livelihoods and they wanted, needed, to help.

So they drove, 10 volunteers from Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, 26 hours to the ravaged Mississippi coastline on a mission of mercy to do what nurses have always done: care, comfort, heal.

Their travels took them first to Biloxi, then Waveland, Miss., where the devastation wrought by the great Aug. 29 storm and the resilience of the people who lost so much in its wake, affected them in ways they're still figuring out here at home.

They saw the faces of those who had lost everything but remained strong and hopeful; found towns in Waveland and Bay St. Louis, Miss., unrecognizable except for the spirit of the battered town's residents.

They're regular people who, just like in the Gulf, were moved and changed by what they saw and by what returns in their dreams at night.

"It was truly our privilege," Karen Stewart, the Eisenhower nurse who led the effort, said. "We share a bond that is truly life-changing."

Caring found a home here in the Coachella Valley, too, in the home of a Cathedral City family with strong connections to hurricane-battered New Orleans; in a Desert Hot Springs hair salon-turned-community kitchen on Thanksgiving Day; in the sanctuary of a church whose parishioners knew they could do something to help those less fortunate.

They escaped, the 31 members of the Foley family, from the flooded hell that was New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck.

Their story, like that of so many others in the city, was one of struggle and survival amid nearly indescribable odds first in their inundated homes, then amid the chaos of the Louisiana Superdome and the city's convention center.

Their salvation would come from relatives Theresa and Francis Rouzan of Cathedral City with a large assist from the Palm Springs African-American Chamber of Commerce and the Ramada Resort in Palm Springs who reached out to house, feed and clothe the extended family who had endured so much.

And, like so many other evacuees, a new home in a new state they hope will mean a fresh start.

Regina Scruggs' mother knew she had to do something. Susie Berry knew because God had told her so. He told her to feed the homeless. So she did.

Berry's "little ol' bitty kitchen" would feed the homeless and hungry this Thanksgiving. The sidewalks outside her daughter's hair salon on Palm Drive, Just Gina, would become a dining room for those without a roof over their heads.

As many as 90 people would find comfort and a hot holiday meal that day.

"I did it. We did it. God did it," Berrry said.

The Desert Sun shined a light on the plight of the valley's homeless in December, documenting a hard day-in-the-life of men and women on the margins in a valley where tremendous wealth bookends with poverty and a life lived on the street.

And the Coachella Valley responded.

Clothing and blankets came to warm them; food to slake their hunger. Money to help find rooftops and beds for shelter and sleep.

"It's so amazing to me that these people have to sleep outside," said Sylvia Jacobs, a 63-year-old La Quinta woman who shopped online Wednesday for sleeping bags to send to Martha's Village and Kitchen in Indio.

A Palm Desert church raised $60,000 in four Masses, money to build a new shelter at Martha's Village and Kitchen in Indio

"We have a roof over our heads and they do not," Father Howard Lincoln of Sacred Heart Church said of the homeless. "They need our help."

These are but a few of the stories: the joy of birth and the pain of indescribable loss, of the valley's heart and its capacity to give. These are the stories of the people who make the Coachella Valley unique; the stories of our neighbors, our valley.

Our home.

Ellie