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Who's a Hero Now?
By JEFF GOODELL
June 9 was a beautiful spring day in western Pennsylvania. It had been raining much of the week, but that Monday morning the clouds parted, revealing a blue Appalachian sky. Bob Long had plans -- finish remodeling the kitchen, work in the garden, maybe even paint the flower box in the front yard that he'd promised his wife he'd get around to soon. Not that Long was lacking free time. For the past three years, Long, 37, had worked as a surveyor for CME Engineering nearby in Somerset. But several months earlier, he tore his rotator cuff while pounding a surveying stake, and the injury required surgery. He had been off work for about eight weeks, attending physical therapy sessions and catching up on odd jobs around the house. Now Long was eager to get back to work -- back to the routines of ordinary life, which he had been struggling to recapture ever since the events of last summer when, for a brief, hallucinatory moment, he was a hero.
A year ago, on July 24, when nine miners in nearby Quecreek cut into an old mine that was flooded with millions of gallons of water, the attention of the nation was transfixed. Miners, of course, have been getting trapped underground for hundreds of years. But this particular melodrama, coming less than a year after 9/11 and so close to the crash site of Flight 93, was as much about redemption and faith as it was about rescuing nine men. And it was Bob Long who, answering a call in the middle of the night, had raced to the scene and used his satellite surveying instruments to pinpoint the spot to drill the crucial first air hole. Had Long miscalculated, the result might well have been nine dead miners.
In the aftermath, Long discovered that the life of a hero is not easy. After Disney cut him in on a book-and-movie deal for the miners' story, he found himself shunned by fellow rescuers, as well as by the miners. Long, who could be hot-tempered, had not helped himself by openly criticizing the miners in the media. Still, by June, it seemed that the hard feelings had passed, and Long was back to his confident, talkative self.
That Monday morning, Long got up early to help his wife, Michelle, with breakfast and load their three kids -- Lauren, 8, Lindsay, 6, and Luke, 1 -- into their Chevy TrailBlazer. As usual, Michelle planned to drop them off at her mother's house on her way to work at a local lawyer's office. ''As we got ready to leave, Bob was talking and joking around,'' Michelle recalls. ''It was just like any other day.''
Long went to a physical-therapy session for his shoulder and then stopped by his mother-in-law's house to visit the kids. Around noon, he stopped in for a beer at the Jenner Rod and Gun Club, an old coal-miner's hangout he frequented, where he ran into a friend in the construction business who needed to cut some rebar. Long told him he had a grinder that would do the job, so the two of them spent the next few hours up at Long's house, cutting steel rods in his garage. ''We had a few beers, talked, just normal stuff,'' his friend recalls. ''Bob was his usual happy self. We talked about our families, how much we loved our kids. He took me inside and showed me around his house -- he was doing some remodeling and was proud of it. I left at about 3:30. The last thing Bob said to me was, 'I'm going to go plant some cabbage.' ''
Long never made it out to the garden. What exactly he did during the next few hours is not known. The only thing Michelle is certain of is that when she arrived home with the kids at 5:30 p.m., Long was asleep on the couch. ''The kids woke him up,'' Michelle recalls. ''It was time to go to their soccer game. When he got up, he started yelling because he couldn't find any clean socks.'' Long's father, a former police officer, says that a toxicology report would later show that his blood-alcohol level was .26, more than twice the legal driving limit in Pennsylvania. There was no argument, no big fight, Michelle says. Just the missing socks. Before she was sure what was happening, Long walked out to his Dodge pickup in the driveway, pulled out his 9-millimeter semiautomatic Glock pistol and put it to his head. Michelle followed him outside; the kids remained inside. ''I kept saying to him: 'Please, don't do this. Please, don't do this.' I begged him.''
Her voice falls to a barely audible whisper. ''Then he just did it.''
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