It was a clear Saturday in March the day that dark-blond-haired, 22-year-old Brian Reams planned for a night of bar-hopping with friends. It was like any night off for a college student: text messages about where to go, when to go, and who was coming with.
Meanwhile, in the same town, there was another man, Aaron Vernon Heyer, also 22, who was making similar plans to go to the same bar. Heyer wasn’t from Eugene, though. He was visiting some friends for the weekend. His birthday was coming up and they were going out.
What neither man knew, however, was that their lives were about to collide. They didn’t expect that hours after their plans were set, Heyer would drive north on Hilyard Street at the same time Reams would be walking home a friend, and that Reams would step into the street where Heyer’s car would hit him at roughly 35 miles per hour.
Neither knew that Heyer wouldn’t stop, and that Reams would later die from his injuries. Heyer later lied about his involvement and led Eugene police officer Ben Hall on a three-month-long investigation that culminated in 19 months in prison for Heyer.
They didn’t know that night would change dozens of lives forever.

Two athletes, two paths

In high school, hundreds of miles apart, Reams and Heyer were both popular and athletic.
Reams grew up with both his parents and an older sister. The family lived for five years outside Detroit before moving to Pocatello, Idaho, where Reams attended high school.
“He played nearly every sport you could imagine,” said Reams’ mother, Debra Reams. “He was real popular and gregarious.”
Brian Reams was a passionate Notre Dame fan, and he adopted their football team’s slogan, “Play like a champion today,” as his own personal motto.
Reams courted several universities in the Northwest before deciding to attend the University of Oregon in the fall of 2003. “The city and the University of Oregon fit him perfectly,” Debra Reams said. “Brian came all on his own.”
After his freshman year, Reams joined the Beta Theta Pi fraternity on 10th Avenue and Patterson Street where he formed close relationships with the chapter’s members. After his death, several members got tattoos that reminded them of Reams.
“Brian was one of those guys who lived his life to the fullest,” said Marty Hermens, University senior and Beta’s chapter president. “He had the motto, ‘play like a champion today’, and that’s one way to describe him, he played like a champion everyday.”
Heyer grew up in Coos Bay, and he had two younger brothers. He graduated from Marshfield High School in 2002, where he wrestled and played football, said Heyer’s younger brother, Raymond Heyer.
Raymond Heyer said his brother was like a “big teddy bear.”
“He has one of the biggest hearts that I know of,” he said.
Socially, Heyer was the life of the crowd, said his high school friend Thomas Mayes. Mayes said Heyer wasn’t quite on the right track before the accident, but he had a lot of potential.
“He was the guy you could always count on for a laugh, and you could also count on to be there for you,” Mayes said.
Before the crash, Heyer worked at a local mill with his father. He occasionally participated in cage fighting at local venues.
Heyer didn’t attend college, as he had trouble applying his skills in the classroom, his father, Alan Heyer said.
“He’s obviously not a perfect kid,” Alan Heyer said. “He’s made his share of mistakes … and he’s paying dearly for what has happened.”

The night

On Saturday, March 3, Reams text messaged back and forth with University student Dani Tabor. The two became friends after they shared two classes and studied together. Reams’ mother Debra later read the messages when she received his belongings from the police that were once collected as evidence from the crash.
“She’d say, ‘We’re gonna dance,’ and he’d say, ‘No, we’re not gonna dance. I’ll meet you there but we’re not dancing,’” Debra Reams recalled from the text messages.
“They were just meeting up with friends and having fun,” Debra Reams said. “They were all walking.”
Tabor and her friends met Reams and his friends at Taylor’s Bar and Grille at the start of the night. At Taylor’s, Tabor got Reams to “frolic a little bit,” Tabor recalled.
From there, the group went to Rennie’s Landing and stayed until at least 1 a.m. Reams went home, but about 30 minutes later he sent Tabor a text message saying he’d be up for a while if she wanted to meet up again.
“We had a blast that night,” she said. “He was just one of those people who could bring the life to the party. I didn’t even know him that well, it just poured out of him. You’d see him and he’d always be smiling, and he’d say, ‘Oh, are you OK? Do you need anything? What do you want to do? Let’s do this it’ll be really fun.’ Just something silly. He could make the worst idea sound so great.”
Tabor went to New Max’s Tavern and met up with Reams. The two drank Hefeweizen and talked at the end of the bar until it closed.
“Well, it’s getting late, I should maybe go home,” Tabor recalled telling Reams.
He offered to walk her home.
“Oh no, you don’t need to, it’s fine,” she told him. “I live like two blocks from here.”
“No, that’s just what we do,” Tabor recalled him saying. “We walk each other home.”
Tabor agreed. “He was just being a good guy,” she said.

The crash

Reams walked with Tabor from Max’s until they were about 200 yards from her apartment, which was on 15th Avenue in between Hilyard and Alder streets. Before they crossed Hilyard, Tabor told him she could make it the rest of the way, but he told her he didn’t want anything bad to happen to her, so he’d see to it she made it to her front door.
At the northwest corner of the intersection of 15th and Hilyard, Reams looked to his right and saw a car about a half a block away in the left lane that was slowing to either park or turn into an alleyway. He entered the street, but Tabor stayed on the edge of the road. At the same time, Heyer, driving a dark-green Cadillac, accelerated and passed the slowing car that Reams saw moments earlier. As the Cadillac crossed back into the left lane it struck Reams, sending him into the air, the investigation report says.
Heyer panicked and drove off. Tabor was horrified. She ran to Reams and called 911. She checked for his pulse. She stopped traffic. More than six months later, she doesn’t remember much from the incident.
“When something like that happens you just completely go blank,” she said. “It’s just horrible. Your heart starts racing and you can’t function. You try to do 10 things at once but none of it seems to be making sense.”
While Tabor and others waited for paramedics to arrive, Reams lay with his head resting on the center line between Hilyard’s two lanes. His feet were to the northeast, his body at a slight angle, according to the investigation report.
Another member of Reams’ fraternity just happened to be driving along Hilyard moments after the crash. He stopped to help, then noticed it was Reams and contacted other members of the chapter’s brotherhood.
Tabor went with Reams to the hospital for about seven hours. Around 8 a.m. on Sunday, she had her mother drive from Portland to come pick her up. “I was thinking, ‘I can’t be here anymore. My eyes are all cried out and my heart hurts. I can’t function. I haven’t slept for 36 hours.’”
Tabor returned for Reams’ memorial a few days later, but she remained in Portland with her family for the rest of the school year.
“There’s just like so many what if questions that I ask myself,” she said. “Like what if I hadn’t called him and said ‘come meet me’? What if you weren’t such a gentleman? What if we had taken a different route home? That’s the part that eats away at me. It just kills me. Was there something I could have done? Could I have yelled at him? Could I have been holding his hand? Could he have been c
loser to me? The list goes on.”

Officer Ben Hall

Minutes after the crash, blond-haired, 28-year-old Eugene police officer Ben Hall parked his patrol car about a block away to close off traffic. When he arrived in the intersection, Reams was being carried to Sacred Heart Medical Center in an ambulance. His superior officer, Sgt. Carolyn Mason, had already arrived and helped monitor Reams before the paramedics arrived.
He saw Reams’ shoes, socks and hat in the street. There were pieces of plastic from a broken headlight.
The investigation was on.
Just five hours later, shortly before 7 a.m. on Sunday, Heyer was still driving the Cadillac. He was pulled over by Springfield police for driving the wrong way down Springfield’s Main Street. Springfield officer Evan Sether reported Heyer did not appear intoxicated so he was not given a sobriety test.
The officers contacted Hall, and before 7:30 a.m., Hall met Heyer for the first time while Heyer was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac, which had damage to the front windshield and left headlight.
Heyer lied to Hall and told him he hadn’t driven the car that night, but had woken up early to get breakfast. He told Hall that he should ask the car’s owner, Patrick Robinson, who was staying at the Eugene Motor Lodge (which is now called the Broadway Inn) with Heyer and other friends.
But Heyer was driving with a suspended license, so Springfield police impounded the damaged Cadillac and left Heyer stranded on foot miles away from his motel room.

The next morning

Meanwhile, minutes before Heyer was pulled over by police in Springfield, Reams’ mother Debra Reams received a phone call at her home in Pocatello, Idaho from one of her son’s fellow Beta Theta Pi fraternity members.
“He said, ‘Brian’s been in an accident, and it was really bad,’” she recalled. “My first reaction was that I needed to get there.”
By 9 a.m. that morning, Debra Reams was on a plane and on her way to see her dying son.
As the news spread among Reams’ fraternity brothers, dozens of alumni poured in from across the country. Nearly all the brothers in the chapter went to Sacred Heart to be with him. Sunday afternoon, doctors told the family that Reams wouldn’t survive his head injuries and for the next several hours, at least 60 of Reams’ friends filed into his hospital room in groups of eight to say goodbye.

Uncovering who was responsible

On Sunday morning, while Reams’ friends gathered at the hospital where he was being kept on life support, officer Hall went to the motel where the Cadillac’s owner, Patrick Robinson, was staying.
In the interview that morning and in subsequent others, Robinson told Hall a very different story about the car during the time of the accident.
Robinson told Hall that he, Heyer and three other friends had stayed at Taylor’s Bar until it closed, and together walked from the bar to another friend’s apartment at 15th Avenue and Alder Street.
He told Hall that around 2:30 a.m. they decided they wanted more beer, and Heyer volunteered himself to drive because “Heyer had not had as much to drink,” according to the investigation report.
Robinson also told Hall that about 40 minutes after Heyer left his friends at the apartment, he began to worry about where Heyer was.
After walking from the apartment to the motel in search of Heyer, Robinson decided to call the police, but his cell phone died. Instead, Robinson walked to the front counter of the Eugene Police Department and asked if Heyer had been arrested or if his car had been impounded. The police told him that it hadn’t, and Robinson walked back to the motel.
After talking with Robinson, Hall knew he needed to get back to Heyer, who was last seen walking toward Eugene from downtown Springfield around 7:30 a.m.
Hall notified other officers and gave them a description: The suspect is a white male, dark hair, clean shaven and in his 20s. He was wearing a black hat crooked and a white T-shirt.
Officer Jud Warden drove around Springfield but couldn’t find Heyer. He left Springfield to return to Eugene City Hall to get a DMV photo of Heyer, and on his way he saw an Oregon Taxi driving north on Ferry Street. The passenger fit the suspect’s description perfectly.
Warden stopped the cab at the intersection of Broadway and Patterson, and Heyer was taken into custody.
Hall took Heyer to a holding cell at EPD where he conducted the first thorough interview. Heyer denied having anything to do with the crash, and gave multiple stories about what happened.

The charges

Hall suspected Heyer was the driver, but because Heyer wouldn’t admit to it, he needed to gather enough evidence to make a formidable case. That required months of waiting for forensic evidence to be processed about the markings on the Cadillac from the collision, the pieces of plastic from the headlights and interviews with witnesses and Heyer’s friends.
When all that was completed around June, there was a warrant issued for Heyer’s arrest. Heyer turned himself in on June 11.
Many have wondered why Heyer was given 19 months in prison, rather than a longer sentence.
“We figured out that it was just an accident,” Hall said. Hall said the greatest factor in determining that it was an accident was that Tabor hesitated to enter the street, while Reams didn’t. There is no vehicular homicide law in Oregon.
Assistant District Attorney David Vill said there was not sufficient evidence to indicate that Heyer was intoxicated at the time of the crash because police contacted him more than four hours afterward.
“They never saw each other until it was too late,” Hall said.

Alcohol’s role

Every person involved in what happened on the early morning of March 4 had drank at least some alcohol that night. All of the witnesses were intoxicated, and Heyer admitted to drinking earlier in the night, but police can’t be sure if he was intoxicated when the accident occurred. According to the toxicology report, Reams had a blood alcohol content of .26 percent, which is about three times Oregon’s legal limit.
In the weeks following the crash, students and community members questioned whether or not Reams was intoxicated or whether that played a role in the accident.
Crossing the street is “a complicated task,” Hall said. “If you’re intoxicated you’re not going to make the best decisions.”
Nevertheless, friends and family of Reams say that doesn’t make him any less of a victim.
“There’s just so much traffic on those streets late at night,” said Hermens, Beta’s chapter president. “Brian was doing the right thing, he was walking a girl home. Whether he was drunk or not doesn’t change the fact that he was doing the responsible thing (by not driving).”
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