A couple of days after the accident, someone fastened two orange highway-worker safety vests to a tall juniper using wooden clothespins -- a warning to all who traveled there.
The five women who died lived in the Country Club Group Home, a supervised four-bedroom residence that houses up to six people at a time with mild cases of mental retardation.
Betty Schuchardt, the former house manager, remembers each of the women fondly, especially 43-year-old Dawn Deltour, who would spend weekends with Schuchardt and her husband.
Deltour had no contact with her own four children, including her twin 18-year-old girls, one of whom attended her funeral. A chain smoker whose other addiction was coffee, Deltour delighted in making the group home smell good with her spirited housekeeping.
Mary Carroll was a quiet 55-year-old who had limited use of her swollen left arm after a mastectomy failed to heal properly. She could play the piano just fine, though, with her one good hand. Alice Rosipal, 66, could speak German and often trailed people around the house, picking up after them. She would take out a trash bag long before it was full. Sherry Grudziecki, 36, was a fan of crossword puzzles. Kim Snowden, 26, had a really bad crush on Tom Cruise.
Every weekday morning, the five women and 23-year-old Kristen Lindy, the only roommate to survive the wreck, would hop in the van for a 20-mile trip to La Grange, where they would work at Texas Rural Health Services, which operated the group home.
At the eight-hour vocational workshop, they sorted paper napkins, plastic forks, spoons and knives and paper packets of salt and pepper, putting one of each in a plastic bag for use at takeout restaurants. Or, they would string color chips on metal rings for use at paint stores.
Although heartbroken, Schuchardt blames no one -- especially not Nitsche -- for what happened.
"It just happened," she said. "One of those freak things. I feel sorry for that woman. I think she has gone through enough just having to live with knowing what happened. They should just leave her alone."
Weems, the Lee County district attorney, is aware of the sensitivity of the prosecution. Many have pointed out the ironies to him. The pit was a creation of the state, dug by a highway contractor. The state was delinquent in its duty to require that the pit be filled or barricaded. And now the state is charging a great-grandmother with homicide for deaths that occurred in that pit.
The truck driver who ran a stop sign and hit the school bus in 1989, in Alton, was acquitted of 21 counts of involuntary manslaughter in May 1993 because jurors were not convinced his brakes worked properly and, undoubtedly, because they viewed him as another of the accident's victims.
Many in Giddings view Nitsche, a churchgoer and lifelong resident, in the same way -- including Weems.
"Mrs. Nitsche has suffered terribly, along with the families and friends of the five victims," he said. "This is a terribly difficult case, because it was purely an accident."
An accident state legislators promised to prevent.
E-mail Stuart Eskenazi at eskenazi@ibm.net.
