family. Chase seemed happiest on the court, where he competed in silent exertion. “If you had no idea who he was, you never would have known who he was,” Hawley said.
Chase approached tennis as if it were a seven-day-a-week job. Hawley never saw Chase take it easy during practice. Chase developed a game that Coach Hawley called an “all-court game.” Chase’s primary skill was the ability to be anywhere on the court before his opponent could get a ball there. Chase’s strategy relied in part on wearing his opponents down, volley after volley, until they made too many mistakes and crumbled. It was a strategy that relied on hard work, long practice, and physical conditioning. There wasn’t some secret genius in Chase Koch’s serve. He just outworked the competition.
Still, Chase Koch could never beat Matt Wright. If Chase was impressive, Wright was slightly more so. Their close proximity in talent drove a friendly competition between the teammates. During those intense hours of practice, it was often Chase Koch and Matt Wright who fought the hardest against each other.
Chase won more freedom as he excelled in school and tennis. He got a Ford Explorer and, during his sophomore year, he got his driver’s license.
On the evening of Saturday, September 18, 1993, Chase took the car out for the evening. He planned to take a group of his friends to a shopping mall. Chase was in the driver’s seat, and, like so many teenage boys, he must have luxuriated in the freedom it gave him. He accelerated, and felt the speed and power of the Explorer.
Chase Koch was in charge, and he was going fast.
* * *
That evening, a woman named Nola Foulston was out for a walk. She happened to be the prosecuting attorney for Sedgwick County, which encompassed Wichita. As she strolled along, Foulston saw a Ford Explorer driving through the neighborhood. She would later say that the Explorer was going so fast that she took notice of the car and remembered what it looked like. The car was barreling through residential streets. It is unclear if she saw the teenaged boy who was driving.
At that moment, a twelve-year-old boy named Zachary Seibert was out for a jog. Zac, as he was known to his parents and two siblings, ran a three-mile loop from his home, about three times a week. His father, Walter, had helped him trace out the route. Walt himself had been an accomplished runner; he met Zac’s mother while he was training in Boulder, Colorado, to run in the Olympics. Zac was the couple’s oldest child and, in September of 1993, Zac was almost thirteen years old and becoming an enthusiastic runner. He often woke up before five in the morning to get in a run before school started.
Walt taught his son to be mindful of cars. That evening, while Zac was running south through the neighborhoods near his family’s home, he stopped at the intersection on East Douglas Avenue, a four-lane road that was a major thoroughfare for crosstown traffic. He stopped at a pedestrian crosswalk beneath a traffic light, and pressed the button to activate the crossing signal. Zac had his headphones on and was listening to Kris Kross, an upbeat hip-hop group with a driving beat.
The traffic light on Douglas turned yellow, and then red. A big van slowed down and stopped in the lane closest to Zac. The van would have obscured Zac’s view when he looked left to scan for traffic heading west on Douglas Avenue. Walt had coached Zac on looking both ways when he entered a crosswalk, so presumably Zac did so. Then he jumped into action, running out into the street.
Chase Koch was driving the Explorer on Douglas with at least one friend in the car. They were going to a shopping mall called Towne East Square, presumably to waste away the hours of a Saturday night in the tradition of teenagers everywhere, hitting the food court, meeting up with other friends, browsing the windows.
Chase was going fast. He was about a block away from the mall, and driving in the left lane. As he approached the crosswalk, the traffic light was red and the big van was stopped in the right-hand lane.
Just as Chase passed the van, Zac lurched out in front of his car. There must have been less than a second for Chase to respond. The front right corner of Chase’s car struck Zac, and Chase kept driving. He went about two hundred yards until