A victim’s crafty revenge

Got a great story for you, a tale of ingenuity and sweet justice.

Heard it from a guy who knows a guy who knows the guy in the story.

It begins on Aug. 20, in Georgia. That night, a guy named Mark Herron took his two teenage sons to see the Dave Matthews Band in Atlanta.

After the show, he left the kids at their mother’s house - he and his wife are separated - and headed for his place in rural Alpharetta, about 25 miles north.

By now it was past midnight. Herron was driving a rented Toyota Corolla because he had turned in his van at the end of the lease and hadn’t decided what to get next. He was cruising along McFarland Road, a two-lane highway, when he came up behind a tractor-trailer creeping up a hill.

Herron was in a no-passing zone, so he sat back and listened to the song on the radio: "What’s Love Got to Do With It" by Tina Turner. He remembers that.

Then, kablam. With no warning - no horn, no squealing tires - somebody rear-ended Herron’s car, driving it forward like a croquet ball into the back of the big rig.

"A terrible jolt," Herron said.

Though he was wearing his seat belt, the force of the collision propelled him out of his seat. His head crashed into the Corolla’s roof. The windshield shattered, spraying his face with glass. Both air bags exploded open, bruising and cutting his face.

Then he flopped back into the seat, cracking a rib and bruising a kidney when he landed on the rigid, swordlike seat belt stub. The bucket seat collapsed beneath his 210 pounds, laying him out, he said, like a woman awaiting an annual examination.

"Then everything stopped, you know, like when Dorothy’s house came down out of the tornado in the ‘Wizard of Oz,’ " he said. Herron staggered to the rear of the wrecked Corolla. He somehow remained upright, "though it was more like a Neanderthal upright," he said. All of this took about 30 seconds.

For the first time Herron saw what had hit him. It was a sport utility vehicle, possibly black, though it was hard to say because there were no streetlights and the SUV’s headlights were broken.

The SUV began inching up alongside the Corolla. Herron thought: This is a nice guy. He’s pulling up to see how I am.

Then the driver switched off his taillights. "He looked at me. I’m bleeding. And then he drove away," Herron said.

Herron couldn’t see the license plate because of the dark. He stood there, a stunned and bloody Neanderthal.

Help arrived - other drivers, police, paramedics. The police found the semi, which had also driven off, in a nearby parking lot. The semi’s driver, William D. Love of Ohio, said he never felt anything and didn’t even know he had been rear-ended. He wasn’t charged.

The police told Herron they had no way of finding the guy who had clobbered him. Herron was taken to the hospital, checked over and sent home. He couldn’t get out of bed the next morning: "I was pretty stove up."

Pretty angry, too.

"It was really beginning to eat on me that the guy had gotten away with this," he said.

So he did something about it: He went to the crafts store.

Herron is a creative guy. At 46, he makes his living drawing characters for McDonald’s Happy Meal boxes, producing a quarterly kids’ magazine for Delta Air Lines, and so on. When the accident happened he was doing some work for MKJ Marketing, a Largo advertising firm. MKJ’s senior art director, Paul Orlando, heard Herron’s story and told it to someone, who passed it on to us.

At the crafts store Herron bought a wreath and some white ribbon. Using his best cursive, he wrote the words "Li’l Joey" on the ribbon and clipped it to the wreath. Then he placed the wreath at the accident site. He left a teddy bear next to it. If the hit-and-run driver passed that way again, he couldn’t miss this sad little memorial to a child who never existed.

Poor Li’l Joey. Herron loved him so.

"It was the "Li’l’ part that I really liked," he said. "I wanted the guy to feel guilty the rest of his life," Herron said.

For two weeks the wreath and teddy bear stood on the shoulder of McFarland Road, next to the forlorn gray guardrail. Nobody disturbed them. Workers moved them to cut the grass, then carefully replaced them.

"Out of total respect, I would imagine," Herron said.

He figured that was the end of the story. Then the phone rang. Cpl. Alan Seabolt of the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office was on the line.

Here is what he said:

At 3 p.m. Sept. 4, 27-year-old Chad Montgomery Smerk turned himself in to Forsyth County authorities on charges of following too closely and leaving the scene of the accident on McFarland Road. He paid $325 in fines.

Donald F. Samuel, Smerk’s lawyer, wouldn’t say why his client rear-ended Herron’s car or why he fled the scene. He said Smerk went to the police because "he was terrified he’d killed somebody."

Samuel wouldn’t say whether Smerk saw the Li’l Joey memorial. Herron believes he did. Otherwise, why would he think he had killed somebody?

"It never occurred to me he’d turn himself in," Herron said. "I was delighted."

After Smerk surrendered, Herron went out and got a personal-injury lawyer. Smerk will be hearing from him. Herron also crafted a small sign and planted it on the side of McFarland Road. Then he took a picture of it.

It said: "Gotcha."

Mike Wilson is a general assignment reporter for the St. Petersburg Times. In 1998 he was part of a three-person team whose stories about a corrupt Baptist minister were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. In 1997 he received an honorable mention in the AASFE Short Feature category. Wilson joined the Times in 1995 after 12 years as a writer and editor at the Miami Herald. He has written two books, "Right on the Edge of Crazy" (1993), about the U.S. downhill ski team, and "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison" (1997), about the chief executive of Oracle Corporation. He is a native of Connecticut and graduated from Tufts University in 1983.