[ad_1]

On the night of July 2, 2015, Tommie Woodward was doing what Tommie did on Thursday nights — shooting pool, playing shuffleboard, drinking beer, having a good time at Burkart’s Marina, a beer and burger joint in Orange, Texas. Sometime around 2 a.m. he decided to go for a swim in the murky waters of Adams Bayou.

Michelle Wright, the bartender on duty, became concerned upon hearing Tommie’s plans. A few weeks earlier, the bar’s owner, Allen Burkart, spotted an exceptionally large alligator patrolling the bayou. He immediately erected a “No Swimming” sign, which was disregarded. The people of Orange frequently swam with the reptiles, and even nicknamed two of them Cheeto and Marshmallow. Wright pleaded with Tommie, but he was stubborn, never backed down from anyone or anything. He was going swimming. Wright returned to her bartending duties.

Tommie removed his shirt and billfold and, joined by his companion Victoria LeBlanc, tiptoed toward the water. At this point LeBlanc saw a big gator — maybe the same animal Burkart had encountered — emerge from beneath the dock. She alerted Tommie to its presence, who shouted back, “Fuck that gator!” and plunged into the bayou.

Tommie was near a small island across the swamp when the gator got his arm. When LeBlanc jumped into the water to save him, he yelled for her to return to land. She obliged, then frantically ran inside for help. After dialing 911, Wright grabbed a flashlight, killed the lights to reduce the glare, and scanned the water for him. After five minutes or so — she’s unsure — Wright found him facedown near the pier. The gator quickly pulled Tommie under again. He resurfaced about 20 yards downstream, before disappearing into the darkness.

Two hours later Tommie’s body was found with the left arm missing from the elbow down. His cause of death was drowning.

Tommie Woodward was the first person to die from an alligator attack in Texas since 1836. Shortly after the start of the Runaway Scrape, the mass evacuation of Texans fleeing Santa Anna’s army during the Texas Revolution, an alligator killed a man identified as Mr. King in a bayou near the present-day Harris County border. Mr. King was leading his horses across water when an alligator thumped him with its tail and dragged him under. Luckily for Mr. King — and his friends and family — his death occurred before the advent of television and social media.

Photos of Tommie Woodward from his Facebook profile.

Facebook

News of Tommie Woodward’s death went viral with articles on, among other places, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail, Fox News, and Gawker; the Associated Press picked up the story; it led the local TV news, of course. The local Beaumont Enterprise published a cautionary op-ed. The comment sections were busy and typically unsympathetic. The particulars — an animal attack, his famous last words, according to the police report — provided irresistible content.

“I was severely pissed off at a lot of people that I’ve never met before. I was mad at everybody.”

Some outlets used an image from Tommie’s Facebook page of him chugging a Miller High Life while wearing a T-shirt that reads “Classy Motherfucker”; a news anchor for KFDM, the CBS affiliate in nearby Beaumont, breathlessly noted “the hundreds and thousands of pageviews and hundreds of comments” that the story generated on its website. Another circulated photo portrayed Tommie as the epitome of dudedom: grungy reddish-blonde chin strap beard, middle finger up, wearing a goofy cowboy hat, wraparound Guy Fieri shades, and a “This Guy Needs a Beer” shirt. On Facebook, strangers littered Tommie's wall with comments like “lol rip dumbass” and “What. A. Dumb. Fuck.” A controversial hunt for the killer gator ensued, which only compounded the attention.

Tommie’s friends and family refuse to allow his final actions define the 28 years that preceded it. He loved Van Halen, Marilyn Monroe, and Ken Griffey Jr. He was good with his hands. He enjoyed assembling computers, building sandcastles with his nephew, fishing, swimming, camping, and grilling. He had an adoring big sister, a mom, a best friend, and an identical twin brother, Brian, all left to wrestle not just with grief over a freak tragedy, but also the aftermath of public humiliation. “I was severely pissed off at a lot of people that I’ve never met before,” his sister, Tabatha, says. “I was mad at everybody.”

But no one was affected like Brian was.

Brian Woodward

William Chambers for BuzzFeed News

Within minutes of meeting last December in Beaumont, Brian Woodward ditches me inside a popular seafood restaurant and retreats to the parking lot. Moments later I find him standing beside his 1999 Dodge Ram 1500. “Come on,” he says, climbing into the driver’s seat. He blows into a Breathalyzer to start the car. “I don’t like people,” he tells me. “I walk in somewhere packed with people I don’t know, fuck you, I’m gone.” We drive to a Chili’s in Orange, the easternmost city in the state, where he now lives.

The area in Southeast Texas between Orange, Beaumont, and Port Arthur is referred to as the “Golden Triangle.” In 1901, a gusher in the Spindletop oil field in Beaumont blew for nine days, spouting an estimated 100,000 barrels of oil per day and transforming the region’s economy. The Texas oil boom was on. A century later, refineries and chemical plants are still big employers in the area.

Brian worked at the shipyards upon moving into town. It was arduous labor, just as he liked it. A vessel needing repairs would be dry-docked. From there, Brian and his team, a tight, rowdy crew of ballbusters, would do anything from change rudders to remove the motor. He enjoyed going to work each morning, but soon realized that promotions at the shipyards were unattainable. “The only way you can move up,” he says, “is if someone dies.”

We talk while he drives. “I can go to that shipyard now, ask for a job, and have it. You can’t find too many people that can outwork me. Pound for pound, you can’t beat my little ass. Tommie was the same way. He worked real hard. Most people nowadays, they’re not — they just don’t. Tommie lived with me and worked with me at the shipyards. Then I had to get out. I wasn’t making enough money.” Brian worked on tugboats offshore for a while but didn't like being away from home. “I do AC work now. I install air conditioners in people’s homes — million-dollar homes, piece-of-shit homes.”

Brian weaves between lanes on Interstate 10 hugging the 80 mph speed limit; his toolbox clangs violently around the backseat. The Breathalyzer beeps, and he blows into the black plastic tube. “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band plays on the radio. “Why are you grabbing the ‘Oh shit’ handle?” he says after noticing that I’m clutching the passenger side roof handle. “Are you scared?”

Once at Chili’s, Brian orders a 10-ounce sirloin cooked rare. “If they sear it on each side and serve it to me bloody as hell,” he says, “I’d be happy with it.” He takes pride in having eaten things a lot of people wouldn't think to eat, especially during lean times.

“You’ve ever eaten cat? It’s not bad,” he says. For a few months in high school, Tommie and Brian lived in a tent on the banks of the Meramec River. Food was scarce. “The cat kept hanging around — fat motherfucker. I said, ‘I was hungry, so I’m gonna go get it.’ It was more of a vendetta than anything because he kept shitting and pissing everywhere. So I set up a snare to get him. I got him, skinned him like a rabbit — put a stick up his ass all the way through his mouth and then put him over a fire.” How did it taste? “Oily, man. Oily.”

He’s an active storyteller with a McConaughey-esque twang whose eyes gleam when he gets to the good parts. His nickname is Cowboy. Like Tommie, Brian is 5 feet, 10 inches tall, wiry, no more than 150 pounds after Thanksgiving dinner, and wears his long reddish-blonde hair in a monastic ponytail like a Greek priest. The only physical difference between the twins is the webbed toes on Brian’s left foot and a scar outside Brian’s left eye that runs behind his ear, the result of a January 2014 motorcycle accident; the discoloration around the wound makes it look like a tattoo. Brian suffered a fractured skull, broken femur, and shattered pelvis, and was placed in a weeklong medically induced coma following the crash, which also left him with memory problems. “That wreck fucked me up pretty good,” he says. “Tommie helped me. Moral support.” He chuckles quietly to himself.

The Woodward twins were born on July 20, 1986, healthy, on their due date. Their mother, Kelley Creamer-Shibles, stayed home with the twins and Tabatha, one year, one month, and one day older than her brothers, while her husband Tom worked the assembly line at Chrysler. But the couple split when the twins were 3. An acrimonious divorce and custody battle followed.

As teenagers living in Pacific, a small city 30 miles southwest of St. Louis, the twins' divergent personalities manifested: Tommie was the prankster, a social butterfly who made conversation with strangers; Brian was more reserved, sincere. For both, high school was an afterthought, and they dropped out after four years to work fast-food jobs.

“I never would have imagined Tommie going that way. An alligator. That’s just weird.”

Tommie’s peripatetic journey began when he abruptly joined a carnival, a perfect match for him, says his mom. “You know how when you go into a carnival, the people running the games are slick talkers? He was the same way. He could talk you into anything.”

After returning to Pacific, Tommie moved to Arkansas to remodel Sonic Drive-In restaurants with his dad. Work was sporadic, creating tension between father and son. His best friend back home, Jimmy Matthews, would visit, but, Matthews says, the lack of employment tormented Tommie. It soon reached a breaking point.

One day, Brian, now settled in Texas, arrived for a surprise visit. “He was going to live with a friend in the woods. I said, ‘Come with me to Texas. I got a place where you could stay. I got a job for you, too.’”

Tommie lived with Brian, and Brian’s wife and son, for four years, and when he finally left, he moved into a house six blocks away. When Brian would visit, which was often, they’d start a fire in the backyard, throw horseshoes, and drink beer. Splitting three cases was an average night.

Michelle Wright

Jake Daniels / AP

“Three o’clock in the morning it was nothing to get a call from Tommie because he was missing me,” says Creamer-Shibles. “He’s like, ‘Mom, I love you.’ ‘Okay Tommie, I know you’re drinking. What’s up?’ ‘Nothing, I’m just calling to say hi.’ I would talk to him until he [went to sleep]. I guess it was that sense of security.” Tommie had “Mom” tattooed on his bicep when he was a teenager.

The twins were regulars at Burkart’s Marina. “It was more of a family,” Michelle Wright recalls. “Everybody had each other’s backs.” Tommie had multiple roles within the clan. Depending on how much he drank, he could be the big brother or little brother. Sometimes he was the bar’s flirt, sometimes the billiards hustler. He loved to dance. He loved to make everyone smile. He also loved to swim in the waters off Burkart’s Marina, no matter the season or time of day.

“I never would have imagined Tommie going that way,” Creamer-Shibles says. “For some reason, I always thought it was going to be some stupid car accident, not an alligator attack. That was the furthest thing from my mind. An alligator. That’s just weird.”

A view of Adams Bayou

William Chambers for BuzzFeed News

It was 2:34 a.m. at the bayou when Michelle Wright dialed 911. Within minutes, fire and ambulance were dispatched. Orange Police Department arrived at 2:39 a.m. Game wardens from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department were contacted at 2:42 a.m. with instructions to get a boat into the water.

Once on the scene, the Orange PD handled the investigation as if it were any animal attack. A statement was collected from Wright. LeBlanc, who initially fled Burkart’s Marina, was interviewed once found down the road. It then became clear that Parks & Wildlife would not be conducting a search and rescue mission, but search and recovery.

Warden Clint Caywood and Deputy Jason Guidroz found Tommie's body floating up against a bank next to a tree, approximately 200 yards down the bayou from Burkart’s. After the fire department retrieved the body, it was placed in a body bag and brought back to land where the justice of the peace declared Tommie deceased and prepared the death certificate.

The game wardens still had work to do: Locate the alligator. Usually, game wardens set a line or traps and shoot the alligator once it’s caught. But lines take time to assemble. To expedite things, game wardens were instructed to hunt solely with their firearms. They didn’t find the gator on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday. By then, there were more boats in the water. “This is East Texas — there are a lot of country boys down here,” says Capt. Robert Enmon of Orange PD. “I believed that someone was going to find that alligator and kill it.”

One afternoon in June 2015, Kent Robnett, a 33-year-old construction superintendent from Orange, was returning home from Walmart when his dad called and told Kent to hurry into his kitchen. The kitchen overlooked Adams Bayou. Robnett dropped his groceries, ran, and gazed out the window. And there it was, a big gator tooling down the middle of the bayou.

Robnett was stunned. Having grown up on the swamp, he deemed himself an alligator expert of sorts. He knew that big gators didn’t get that big by being stupid. He also knew that swimming down a populated bayou in the late-afternoon sun were the actions of a stupid gator; gators that size hug the banks, avoiding the main cuts, avoiding humans. From his kitchen, Robnett could see that the gator’s face was littered with scars. Something, he thought, wasn’t right with that animal. As he watched the gator heading south, he thought of his children — a 14-year-old girl, 3-year-old girl, and 1-year-old boy — all of whom frolicked in Adams Bayou. Tommie Woodward died in those waters a few weeks later.

“I took it upon myself when I walked out of that bar. I knew I could get that gator.”

[ad_2]