LAKE OSWEGO – It was a rainy October night when 22-year-old former University student Dani Tabor’s life changed forever – for the second time.
It had been seven months since University student Brian Reams walked her home and she looked on as he was hit by a green Cadillac Seville at the intersection of 15th Avenue and Hilyard Street.
Even though the horrific memory of watching him die still haunted her, she had coped with the tragedy that rippled through the University community. She was happy now.
It wasn’t long before her happiness was ripped from her, and she was forced to deal with an even greater loss.
That rainy night, Oct. 19, seven months after Reams’ death, Dani and her 26-year-old boyfriend, whose name was withheld upon his family’s wishes, returned to his house after a night out with friends in Eugene. His house had been broken into a few nights earlier, so when they heard a noise around 3 a.m. they were especially startled.
“Did you hear that?” Dani asked her brown-haired, strong-jawed boyfriend.
“Yeah,” he replied, climbing from bed to get his gun. He checked the house: doors, windows, all locked and secured. There was no intruder.
When he returned to the bedroom, Dani told him to put the gun away.
“It’s empty babe, don’t worry about it,” she recalls him saying before agreeing to put it in its case.
Standing a few feet in front of her as she lay in bed, he took the clip out and checked the chamber.
“Look, see. It’s empty.” To prove his confidence, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
It wasn’t empty.
“I didn’t realize what had happened,” Dani said through tears from her Lake Oswego home in December. “I thought it was a stupid joke that he was playing on me. It didn’t register until I heard him fall to the floor.”
She frantically rifled through the room searching for a phone. She ran outside and screamed at the top of her lungs.
Two men walked up as she ran back inside. She found a phone and reached a 911 operator.
The two men asked if she was OK.
“No!” She replied. “My boyfriend just shot himself, wait on the street for the ambulance!”
They followed her inside and watched as she held the phone against her ear and pressed her hands against the sides of his head in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding.
“Don’t do this!” she said to him. “I love you I love you I love you. You love me. You can’t do this. You can’t leave me. I’m not going to let you die!”
His eyes rolled back into his head, but he still had a pulse.
“‘I love you so much,’ is all I could say.”
The paramedics arrived and Dani waited on a recliner outside the bedroom.
When a paramedic emerged from the room, he shook his head.
“No, he’s gone.”
“Then I just lost it and was completely hysterical,” she said. “For some reason I had this glimmer of hope that he was going to be OK.”

Moving on

How does a person persevere after not only suffering through the accidental deaths of two loved ones, but also witnessing their brutal occurrences first hand?
Through her therapist, new golden retriever Porter and her family, Dani is healing. But the overwhelming memories and sadness still crest and fall in her mind like waves.
“It’s a really long process,” she said. “It’s not even close to being over. I don’t think it ever will be.”
After Dani went through Reams’ death in the hit-and-run accident in March, she began seeing a therapist.
When Dani returned to her therapist after her boyfriend died, her therapist was at a loss for words.
“I have no idea what to say to you,” Dani recalls her saying at the time. “There’s nobody who’s 22 years old that – nobody who’s below the age of 50 who goes through what you’ve gone through in the last six months.”
After Reams died, Dani got a tattoo on each hip. “Live” on the right hip, “Life” on the left. The saying, which was inspired by Reams’ passion for life, has become one of her mottos in dealing with tragedy.
She’s determined to get another tattoo, this time a guardian angel in remembrance of her boyfriend.
Fall term this year would have been Dani’s last at the University, but instead she’s taking time away to grieve and be with her family.
In addition to her therapist, her dog Porter, and her family, her boyfriend’s friends have been instrumental in her emotional recovery.
“‘We know that (he) loved you so much because we’ve never seen him act like that around a girl,’” Dani recalls his friends telling her after his death. “‘That means that you’re our family now too,’ and they’ve all said that. And that means so much coming from people you barely know.
“He loved his friends so much, they were everything to him in Eugene,” she said. “So hearing that from his friends means the world. It’s kind of a weight off my shoulders.”
The deaths of Reams and her boyfriend weren’t the first time Dani has experienced death. When she was in middle school, a close family friend died of cancer. As a sophomore in college, a high school friend committed suicide.
Throughout it all, her parents have admired her strength. Her therapist says she’s progressing well.
“I don’t think any parents ever expect this to happen once, much less twice to their innocent child,” said her father, Gareth Tabor. “The overriding thing for me has been how strong Danielle has been throughout the whole thing. I admire her a tremendous amount for her fortitude and being able to get up in the morning and do what she’s supposed to do. It’s remarkable.”
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