Face of Nation : PARKERSBURG, Ia. — You have to make a deep impression to leave a void like Ed Thomas did.
This week marks 10 years since the man most devoted to Parkersburg, Iowa’s, success was gunned down in a shed while supervising high school athletes doing early morning weightlifting. That’s a decade of anguish for those closest to Thomas, which was seemingly everyone who ever came in contact with him. And 10 years of trying to honor the memory of a beloved football coach and teacher who was so much more than that for this northeast Iowa town of 1,870 people.
Parkersburg is a tight-knit community that is also home to the family of the mentally ill young man who killed Thomas — a family grateful to be embraced instead of shunned after one of the most high-profile crimes in Iowa history.
No one feels the weight of Ed Thomas’ legacy more than Aaron Thomas, who moved back home in the wake of his father’s death and is now the principal at Aplington-Parkersburg High School. He gazes daily at an homage to his dad displayed near the school entrance.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about my dad. Not necessarily his death or how he died, but his impact on my decision-making. I try to continue to make him proud. I don’t think that will ever change,” said Aaron Thomas, 40.
“My last name’s not just mine.”Ed Thomas was murdered on June 24, 2009, by Mark Becker, a former football player of his who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Thomas was 58. Becker was sentenced to life in prison and has been at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center facility, known as Oakdale, ever since. Becker had come to believe that Thomas and his parents, Dave and Joan Becker, were poisoning the minds of the children of Parkersburg and needed to be stopped.
The murder scene was ghastly. It still haunts those who witnessed it.
HS coach was murdered 10 years ago – Emotions are still raw in his tiny Iowa town.
Dan Smith got to the shed moments after Becker shot Thomas. He was dropping off his daughter, Shelby, a volleyball player, when he saw Becker leave the building and scream something at some girls.
Smith raced inside.
“There was utter panic. Many of the kids were up against their lockers with their hands up, as if they were under arrest,” Smith said.
He saw Thomas on the floor and hustled Shelby out of the building.
“It was just gruesome. I still have nightmares about that,” Smith said.
The events of that day have given him a new mission. Smith was a Baptist minister at the time. He now works at the Quakerdale Foundation, an organization that provides Christ-focused youth programs, as a fundraiser and teacher.
“The thing that it solidified for me is if we don’t step it up and get more help for kids out there, this is going to be more of a common occurrence,” Smith said. “Do not assume that everything is OK. We need to be more vigilant about helping with mental health.”
Ed Thomas’ tombstone at Oak Hill Cemetery doesn’t stand out from a distance; it’s just one in a long row, as modest as he was in life. You have to search to find it. The most noticeable feature is the five footballs planted beside it. The onetime quarterback at William Penn College was devoted to the sport and to the town he moved to in 1975.
Thomas won 292 high school football games and two state championships as coach at Aplington-Parkersburg. Four of his players — Jared DeVries, Aaron Kampman, Casey Wiegmann and Brad Meester — went on to play in the NFL, an incredible feat for these rural communities of about 3,000 people total. He also taught social studies and served as activities director at the high school. Scores of local teenagers learned how to drive from Thomas, who taught driver’s education in the summer.
It seemed like every boy in Parkersburg participated in the Saturday morning youth football league he began. He knew them all by name and would encourage them to become future Falcon players once they reached high school. Almost all of them did. It was common for 80 to 90 boys to go out for the football teams Thomas coached.
Thomas’ former players have never been shy when discussing the effect he had on their lives.
Two of them — Wiegmann and Jon Jordan — were instrumental in forming the Ed Thomas Family Foundation shortly after the tragedy. The nonprofit offers a leadership academy for 500-plus Midwest high school students each fall in Parkersburg and another each spring in Des Moines.
Erik Kalkwarf still refers to Thomas as just “Coach.” He, too, played on the line at Aplington-Parkersburg, next to his close friend Mark Becker in their senior season. In a sense, Kalkwarf suffered a double loss on June 24 — the coach who inspired him and the childhood buddy he has not seen since the shooting.
“It was a pretty shocking blow when you figure out it was one of your friends who did it and you’d just seen him maybe four or five days before that, and you thought he was doing better than he had been in a long time. It was the best I’d seen him in years,” Kalkwarf said of Becker.
Kalkwarf is a resident counselor for North Iowa Juvenile Detention Services in Waterloo. He was at work the day of the murder, trying to make sense of what he was hearing from afar.
“There’s not too many days that I don’t think about either one of them,” he said of Thomas and Becker. “When I think about Mark, I usually think about the good memories we had growing up.”
That includes bowling trips or taking “The Lap” — a teenage ritual of driving for hours through downtown Parkersburg on a weekend night. It was two pals talking about life, in an era before cell phones.
Kalkwarf’s life now involves trying to steer troubled young people to a better path. “I see kids who aren’t given much of a chance and try to show them there’s still hope for you, there’s still a way to change your life,” he said.
It sounds like something Ed Thomas would have said. Kalkwarf recalls Thomas’ favorite quote: “If all I’ve taught you is how to block and tackle, I’ve failed you.
Parkersburg, surrounded by farmland, is the largest town in Butler County — the only county in Iowa without a stoplight. It was here that Thomas cultivated friendships.
“More people would call Ed their best friend than any other human being I’ve ever known,” said Chris Luhring, who grew up with Aaron Thomas and later helped Ed Thomas coach track at the high school.
Luhring, who was the Parkersburg police chief at the time of the murder and is now the city administrator, was among those who counted Thomas as his closest friend. They spoke nearly every day. They talked about Luhring having a large family someday. Thomas joked that it was one way to assure that the high school could remain classified as 2A for athletic competition. Luhring has seven children. The two oldest, Blaine and Ty, got “draft cards” from Thomas when they were born
Tom Teeple met Thomas in 1969 in What Cheer, an occasion he can recall with clarity 50 years later. In 1977, he followed Thomas to Parkersburg, opening a barber shop downtown that he still runs. Teeple considered Thomas his best friend. They would travel the state together to find Thursday night high school football games, something Thomas insisted on as a way to relax on the eve of his own games.
Teeple and Thomas were scheduled to meet for dinner and a haircut the evening he was killed. Teeple chokes up thinking about his friend.
“I’m a better person for knowing him,” he said.Luhring was dispatched to the scene when Thomas was murdered. He is hesitant to talk about what he saw that morning, not wishing to reopen old wounds for a family he loves dearly. But he said Thomas was breathing before being airlifted to a Waterloo hospital, where he died. Luhring knew it was likely in vain, but he administered CPR to his mentor before that.
