A month after wreck claims two popular brothers, Loris still trying cope

Tiny pieces of glass dust the side of Red Bluff Road. They lie near a wooden cross that’s adorned in pink roses.

Coming into town, these are the first signs that something has happened, that someone is gone.

The something would be the crash. On the night of Dec. 22, police say a drunk driver crossed the center line of a two-lane blacktop. His SUV hit a Jeep Cherokee head on.

The someone would be 26-year-old Christopher “Critter” Waddell, who was coming home from Christmas shopping when he died that night. Eight days later, Waddell’s 17-year-old brother Miles became the second victim, succumbing to his injuries from the wreck.

People who knew the brothers say those eight days are about as long as they could stand to be apart.

“Those two guys were as close as any two brothers I’ve ever known in my life,” said Damon Kempski, the Loris Parks and Recreation Department director who worked with both brothers. “If Christopher was there, Miles was with him.”

The brothers were also close to the town. As the middle and youngest sons of Tommy Waddell and Myra Gore, they grew up in the Loris Drug Store, where their father has long been the pharmacist. They spent many Sunday mornings sitting in the balcony of the Loris First Baptist Church. They served as umpires in the youth leagues of the city’s rec department and they had a regular corner booth at Shorty’s Grill, where Miles Waddell’s name is still listed as the high scorer on one of the arcade games.

A month after the wreck, the town continues to mourn.

Ask the people in the diners or the downtown stores. They gush about the brothers. Look at the signs on country churches and at the rec department. Pray for the Waddells, they say.

For many folks, the memorials and anecdotes help shift the conversation from the way the brothers died to the manner in which they lived. They don’t want Christopher and Miles Waddell to be another anonymous statistic in a state that was recently ranked as the worst in the country for drunk driving deaths.

So they make signs and stickers and share stories. Next week, Miles Waddell’s friends plan to place a cross at parking space No. 139, the one that belonged, no, still belongs to him.

“We’re just trying to keep him alive, honestly,” said Brianna Gerald, who calls Miles Waddell her best friend. “Doing more stuff helps all of us heal a little bit better.”

‘The biggest heart’

When they returned from Christmas break, Loris High students didn’t know how to react.

There was a moment of silence, which was fitting. They couldn’t bring themselves to talk about their classmate in the past tense.

“On the first day, I believe that’s probably the roughest for everybody,” said Matt Stevens, a junior who grew up with Miles Waddell. “Whenever you walk into the class and see nothing but balloons on his desk, that hits you kind of hard.”

Everyone knew what had happened because everyone knew Miles Waddell.

Although he stood just a haircut over five feet tall, the junior lived with the swagger of a giant.

He wanted to eat the biggest steaks, wrestle his friends’ fathers and let folks know about his black belt in karate. He lived by Gamecock football and always had a few Starburst candies in his pocket.

“He had like four packs a day,” Gerald said. “He would eat them in color coordination: He’d eat yellow, then orange, then pink, then red. He did it from the ones he disliked the most to the ones he liked the most. … He was a picky little thing.”

Miles Waddell teased his friends in a good-natured way, and they never missed a chance to respond.

“We were always saying crap to each other,” said fellow junior Mayson Cox, who often chided Miles Waddell about his stature, which earned him the nickname Lil’ Waddell.

“I didn’t really have any room to talk,” she said. “We were the same height for the longest time. He kept growing. I didn’t.”

Last year, Miles Waddell played JV baseball. He was a bench warmer who occasionally got on the field as a pinch runner.

But his teammates loved their baserunning specialist.

“Probably had the biggest heart of anybody out there,” said Stevens, who played second base.

When football season arrived, the skinny 11th-grader wanted to play quarterback. He was usually the holder for kicker.

Coach Jamie Snider remembers telling the aspiring signal caller that if he hoped to actually get on the field, he’d better practice at slot receiver. Throughout the season, Snider watched Miles Waddell improve. The coach said he almost willed himself into playing time, even getting minutes in playoff games.

“In Miles’s mind, he was 6-5, 200 pounds and ran the fastest 40 on the team,” Snider said. “Now reality was a different case and he got reminded of reality a few times. But huge heart. Great kid, great person.”

Despite his size, No. 2 did get his chance to shine.

During one game, there was a bad snap on an extra point. Rather than fall on the ball and end the play, Miles Waddell grabbed it and scampered into the end zone for two points.

“You would have thought Loris won the Super Bowl,” Snider said. “Not the state championship, the Super Bowl.”

The next week, Miles Waddell wanted to add trick plays so he could replicate that glory.

The coach said no.

“There’s probably nobody I loved giving a hard time to more than Miles,” Snider said. “On a daily basis if I could. … He’s one of the few people I know that enjoyed you giving him a hard time.”

Nate Bellamy also appreciated swapping wisecracks with the youngest Waddell.

As the school’s agriculture teacher, Bellamy advises Loris High’s Future Farmers of America (FFA) chapter.

Miles Waddell was the group’s historian and served on the meat judging team.

“Miles lived in town, but he enjoyed the agricultural part of it,” Bellamy said. “We always got to go on trips and we went to Clemson a lot. That’s one thing we always picked about because they were big Carolina fans and I always carried him to Clemson. He was like, ‘You’re always trying to turn me into a Clemson fan.’ ”

Although his student had a sense of humor, Bellamy said Miles Waddell was not disrespectful.

“He was one of those ‘Yes ma’am, yes sir’ guys,” he said. “You don’t see a lot of that anymore.”

Miles Waddell’s ties to so many students and teachers are why the school has had so many tributes.

Friends decorated his parking space with flowers and chalk messages. Some of them are trying to start a chapter of Students Against Destructive Decisions, a group that encourages highway safety. On a recent Friday, students and staff wore red because of his passion for the Gamecocks. Even students at Loris Elementary School participated in “Wear Red for Miles Day.”

“It’s a healing for the students,” said bookkeeper Krystal Causey, who has worked at Loris High for 17 years. “We have lost students in the past … over summer. It’s hard for those individuals to start a new school year without their friends and they’re certainly missed. But when it happens during a school year, I think them talking about the good times and talking about the wonderful memories and doing these things are part of their healing process.”

At Miles Waddell’s funeral, the football team served as honorary pallbearers. Dozens of players, from college-bound seniors to green freshmen, attended. When spring practice arrives, Snider knows there will be a void on his roster.

“Loris is a small community and it’s a close-knit community,” he said. “When a tragedy like this happens, it’s painful for everybody.”

‘He was just born happy’

Next to the high school sits a royal blue box that serves as the city’s recreation department.

It’s a place with plywood walls, a grocery cart full of dingy baseballs and softballs, and shelves upon shelves of youth football helmets.

For more than five years, it was Christopher Waddell’s office. Since his death, parents have stopped by to express their heartbreak.

“It’s going to be real difficult out here,” said Joshua Singleton, who works there. “He spent so much time out here that he’s kind of ingrained out here.”

Kempski, the director, still keeps his former co-worker’s sunglasses and Atlanta Braves baseball cap on his desk. The ballcap is coated in orange dust from the clay fields Christopher Waddell maintained.

“It’s not going anywhere,” he said.

Kempski started using the nickname Critter during his early days at the rec department. Christopher Waddell was already working there and Kempski told him his name sounded too formal. So he called him Critter.

Like his younger brother, Christopher Waddell was a jokester.

When a weekly newspaper reporter asked Kempski to pose for a photograph with the department’s new lawnmower, Christopher Waddell told his boss that he shouldn’t be in the picture because other employees, namely Christopher Waddell, spent more time mowing the fields than the director did. He taped a copy of the story to Kempski’s desk to emphasize the point.

Oddly enough, Christopher Waddell would have probably refused to sit for the photo in the first place.

“He didn’t want the attention,” Kempski said. “He didn’t want his name in the paper.”

Along with being humble, Christopher Waddell was also a peacemaker.

He kept his cool while refereeing ballgames, but afterward he’d tell co-workers that the angry comments from fans got to him.

“Did you hear that up there?” he’d often ask.

“It did matter to him,” Kempski said. “He didn’t want people upset or angry with him.”

When parents would come in with complaints, Kempski or Singleton would deal with them.

Christopher Waddell was the guy who threw the football outside with the kids while their parents took care of business at the desk.

“The kids loved him,” Kempski said. “And you’ve got a nickname like Critter. Kids are already drawn to you.”

Before he was called Critter, Christopher Waddell had another nickname: Caddie.

When he was in elementary school, he approached a Dixie Youth baseball coach and asked if he could be the team’s bat boy. Only he didn’t know what that job was called, so he asked if he could be the caddie. The name stuck.

Caddie was what Todd Harrelson called him as Christopher Waddell grew up with Harrelson’s twin sons, Seth and Jared. The boys rode bicycles around town during the summers, sometimes stopping to eat shaved ice outside the furniture store.

Harrelson coached the boys in baseball. He loaded them up in his red F-150 and hauled them to all-star tournaments and the occasional South Carolina football game.

“He was an awesome ballplayer,” Harrelson said of Christopher Waddell. “Fast. He was just a good baseball player. Well rounded. … He could play any position.”

In high school, Christopher Waddell was a three-sport athlete. In football, he wore No. 9. Like his older brother Matthew, he played wide receiver.

Also like his brothers, he had a reputation for being a polite guy who still knew how to crack up his friends.

“Christopher was somebody that you would want your son to grow up and be,” said Paiton Harrelson, who went to high school with him. “Christopher was funny and electric. He’d walk in the room and brighten it up. He was just born happy, I believe.”

She became friends with Christopher Waddell when he moved to her neighborhood during her elementary school years. They lived a street apart, separated by woods. One of her earliest memories is having a pine cone-throwing war with him.

“He was a mess,” she said.

Christopher Waddell thought about teaching, but after earning a history degree from Coastal Carolina University he changed his mind.

The guys at the rec department often asked him what he would do. He was smart, talented, someone with options. He finally decided he wanted to be a nurse anesthetist and was pursuing an education in that field.

He also talked about his future with his longtime girlfriend, Mary Reagan Floyd. Friends say he planned to marry her.

Kemp Floyd, Mary Reagan’s father, said his daughter was still too hurt to talk about Christopher Waddell.

She did have one request: “Just print something nice.”

Searching for answers

How does a town grieve?

Not a family, a church or a school, but a whole town.

The Waddell brothers were a thread sewn deep into the fabric of this community. And now that they’ve been removed so quickly, many are struggling to hold things together.

“You’re talking about such potential lost,” Kempski said. “Both these guys, man, you’ve got to understand. Critter worked out here. Miles went to school next door. When Miles got out of football practice or workouts or baseball practice, he was over here. We’re out on the ballfields. We’re playing. These guys were like my two kid brothers.”

For Todd Harrelson, the pain is similar.

“Everybody, they understand when somebody 90 years old moves on to be with the Lord, but when it’s 26 and 17, it’s really hit the neighborhood hard,” he said. “I’ve been a pallbearer a lot of times. When I was carrying Christopher, it was the heaviest that I’ve ever carried. I guess it’s just the burden and weight in my heart. It’s a heck of a loss.”

That sentiment resonates throughout the town.

A few doors down from Loris Drug Store is Wolpert’s Department Store, a town staple for 90 years. Owner Gene Mills has worked there for about 50 of them. Mills watched the brothers pop in and out of his shop as boys. He measured them for prom tuxedos and cheered them on as they played ball for the Lions.

The town, Mills said, is hurting.

“The entire community,” he said. “Everybody liked them. It just shook this town.”

The brothers’ funeral services were held six days apart. Each crowd at the First Baptist Church grew so large that church officials had to direct mourners into the fellowship hall.

Despite the loss, the congregation has taken comfort in their belief that heaven isn’t an idea, but a permanent residence.

“Everybody at church is really reassured knowing the kind of boys that Christopher and Miles were,” said Paiton Harrelson, who attends First Baptist. “They were Christians and they were ready to go whenever their time came.”

Kay Vaught, who sings in the choir and designs costumes for the church’s productions, remembers both brothers volunteering at the church.

They went to youth group meetings and mission trips. For the Christmas cantata, Miles Waddell played one of the three kings. At Easter, Christopher Waddell was a Roman centurion.

“You don’t meet many people you say the world is a better place because they were in it,” she said. “But Loris is a better place because they were in it.”

The brothers’ family members said they’re still aching too much to talk about them, though father Tommy Waddell said he’s proud of his sons. When told of the kind things others had said about them, he responded simply with “I’m honored.”

Since the crash, friends say Tommy Waddell has tried to help them cope, even as he manages his own grief.

“He’s a strong man with a lot of faith,” Mills, the store owner, said. “Has to be.”

Kempski, an Army veteran, said the boys’ father consoled him at the hospital on the night of the crash.

“I just broke down crying,” he said. “He’s telling me it’s going to be alright and it’s like, ‘You just lost one of your sons and the other one’s upstairs right now in ICU and you’re telling me it’ll be alright.’ If that doesn’t tell you something about the strength of that man … he spent that night walking around the hospital with everybody walking up to him and him taking care of them as opposed to them taking care of him. Just an amazing man.”

‘Just the way they were’

When Loris folks talk about Miles and Christopher Waddell, they usually mention both in one breath.

It’s not just because they lost their lives in the same wreck, but because they were truly a pair.

They would often practice football together, with Christopher Waddell harping on his kid brother about running routes and catching balls.

When Miles Waddell started volunteering as an umpire at the rec department, he did so because he watched his older brother do the same job.

Sometimes, Christopher Waddell even let his baby brother tag along on dates with his girlfriend.

“Christopher was Miles’ hero,” said Vaught, the church friend. “No ifs, ands or buts about it. … Both of them were so proud of each other.”

There’s a photo of the two brothers that has been circulating on social media since the crash. It includes this message from Miles: “This is one of those people I couldn’t live without. … He is my partner in crime, my sidekick, and most of all he is the best brother I could ever ask for and I love him.”

“That kind of said it all,” Vaught said. “That’s just the way they were.”

The brothers are buried in Whiteville Memorial Cemetery, about 40 miles from town in North Carolina.

Their plots lie on a gentle slope in the back of the graveyard. Two bronze plates bear their names.

Appropriately, they are buried the way they are remembered.

Side by side.

This story was originally published January 24, 2015 at 6:06 PM with the headline "A month after wreck claims two popular brothers, Loris still trying cope."