A year later, football star’s senseless death still stings

By Ron Kantowski

Monday, June 22, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Here’s the thing about losing a family member or other loved one: You don’t think you can go on, but you do. Inner strength can be a wonderful thing.

But at some point, although it doesn’t seem it can, life will go on, too. It will demand that other family members return to their homes, their jobs. The same goes for your friends. And the neighbors. And then, late at night or early in the morning, the house will be quiet. You will tap into your inner strength again, only to find the tank is empty. And you will cry.

It was early in the morning, a few days after my dad died, when I heard my mom crying in the upstairs bedroom.

I was reminded of that last Monday when I visited Chris Luscombe’s parents and loved ones. I was reminded of that when I saw the eyes of Bob Luscombe — Chris’ old man, a construction worker from Long Island, a man’s man if there ever was one — turn red in a futile attempt to hold back tears.

The six of us — Bob; Chris’ mother, Marie; her longtime companion, Dan; and Tom and Rose Passante, Chris’ grandparents — had been sitting around the patio, talking about Chris, the former Clark High football star who would have been 20 years old had his life not been snuffed out during a drive-by shooting last year.

Thursday is the anniversary of Chris’ death. He fought hard to the end, enduring eight surgeries, but never regaining consciousness after a bullet ripped through his torso in the wee hours of June 8, 2008.

A few hours earlier there had been a fracas at a party, the usual kids’ stuff, that Chris had tried to break up. But the hail of bullets wasn’t meant for him. It wasn’t meant for David Miramontes, either, a kid Chris didn’t even know who was pronounced dead at Bob Baskin Park, the scene of the crime — a word that in this case, doesn’t do it justice, or even begin to explain its senselessness.

If those two were guilty of anything, it was only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or of being kids.

“When your parents die, you are an orphan,” Marie Passante said as we stood before the giant photo of her son that she has placed on an easel in a spare bedroom. “When your spouse dies, you are a widow, or a widower.

“When your child dies, they don’t have a word for that.”

I remember my reaction upon reading that two more kids had been shot for no apparent reason, and that one was named Christopher Michael Luscombe.

“No, no, no. Not that kid.”

I should have thought the same thing about David Miramontes, but I didn’t, probably because these pointless killings have become all too common, and probably because I did not know David Miramontes. That doesn’t make my indifference right, but, sad to say, that’s the way it mostly is when you don’t know somebody and work in the newspaper business. You hear about this kind of thing all the time, and, its grievousness notwithstanding, you become immune to it.

That David Miramontes is dead is no less a tragedy than Chris Luscombe being dead.

But I had met Chris Luscombe on the football practice field, when Clark High was mired in what would become a 42-game losing streak. He had called me “sir” and thanked me for interviewing him. You don’t get that with a lot of kids.

I remember his jersey number, 54, and the way the sun reflected off his helmet, nearly blinding me and forming this shimmering force field around him. Maybe it was just coincidence because I remember it was brutally hot that day, and the sun was beating down hard on everything that moved. But maybe it was something more than that, too.

I shared that story with Chris’ parents and loved ones as his mother reached into a red cloth tote bag to show me his things — a journal his friends had kept during his valiant struggle to live, newspaper clippings that have yet to turn yellow, photographs there simply aren’t enough of, now that he’s gone. She pulled out a blue T-shirt with Superman’s logo on front. That’s what his friends and the other kids at Clark called Chris Luscombe — Superman.

“Yeah, he was Superman,” Marie Passante finally said, flicking the ashes from her cigarette as she tried to find the words, any words, that would do the memory of her late son justice.

Bob Luscombe took a man-sized pull on his Budweiser. His eyes were red again, and you could tell his inner strength was running on fumes.

“Still is,” he said.