Cool's Parents Can Only Wonder What Happened -- Questions About Metro Bus Shooting Cloud Happy Memories Of Their Only Child

Copyright 1998, Seattle Times Co.

NORTH PLAINFIELD, N.J. - The house is small - "more like an apartment than a house," says Daniel Cool - but big enough to harbor a few memories. In the living room, atop the old Zenith hi-fi console, sit two bronze baby shoes wedded to the base of a lamp.

The attached plaque reads:

Silas Cool

May 14, 1955

Ena Cool remembers buying the shoes in Singapore while the family lived in nearby Indonesia. Before being bronzed, they were red with delicate vine-shaped cutouts across the instep. They had straps for ankle support.

Now, such sweet memories are clouded by dark questions. Why did their son, now 43, have two handguns in his possession when he died? As a child, he never had more than a BB gun, and that he got rid of. Why would he carry handguns on a public bus?

And why would he shoot and kill the bus driver, then himself, and in that moment of rage or irrationality, send dozens of passengers tumbling 50 feet from Seattle's Aurora Bridge on a sun-patched afternoon the day after Thanksgiving?

Daniel and Ena Cool, far away at their modest home in New Jersey, knew only that their only son had acute chronic back pain that kept him from working and seemed to make him ever more irritable.

"All we could see was the physical condition of his back building up to a crescendo over the years," Daniel Cool says.

"I can't believe he's dead," says Ena Cool, perched on her floral sofa. "I can't believe he'd do something like that. . . . He was here only a month ago, and he didn't give any indications he would do such a thing."

"It happened Friday," said his father. "And here it is Tuesday. We're still very shocked about this."

Metro bus driver Mark McLaughlin, 44, died after being shot while driving Route 359 south on Aurora Avenue Friday afternoon. Passenger Herman Liebelt, 69, died of injuries sustained when the bus barreled off the bridge onto an apartment building below. Twelve other passengers remain hospitalized.

Parents left confused

The shooting also made victims of Daniel and Ena Cool, leaving them lonely and confused. "This is the biggest tragedy of my life," says Daniel Cool, who at 81 is in poor health. "When you have an only son . . ."

"You always think," adds his wife, Ena, 77, "if you're left alone, you're going to have your son around. But it's not happening that way."

The Cools have spent the better part of the past four days huddled alone in their house. They've received only a few cards and none of the flower baskets that tend to pour through the front door in moments of grief. They say they have no friends nearby. What support they've had has come from Daniel Cool's sister, who is 90 and lives in Wisconsin.

The phone rings often, but the callers tend to be reporters from Seattle, New York and local newspapers. Daniel Cool has brushed them off. "A plague of locusts," he says.

Yesterday, after Seattle police told him the investigation of Silas Cool was winding down, Daniel Cool offered to make a statement. Bothered by reports of his son eating in soup kitchens and yelling at a neighbor about a barking dog, he feels "it would be nice to have something nice said about him for a change."

He also wants to express his condolences to the other families hurt in the shooting and crash.

"Stress that to all those other people involved," he says. "Holy cow. It's such a shame."

He is composed as he tells his story. His son was born in Indonesia, where Daniel Cool worked as an accountant for a petroleum company. The family lived a few years in Pakistan, then moved in 1960 to North Plainfield when Cool took a job with asbestos-maker Johns Manville.

An only child

Silas Cool was an only child. He went to Bible school, joined the Boy Scouts, developed a fondness for golf and swimming, and graduated from North Plainfield High School in 1973.

"He was quiet, unassuming, a mind-your-own-business type," his father says. "He never bothered anybody."

"He was kind-hearted," his mother says. "He didn't have a quick temper. . . . He had patience when you spoke to him, and he listened to you. He never gave me any problems as he grew up."

After high school, Silas Cool traveled with his mother to her native South Africa so she could tend to her ill mother. While there, he trained as an architect for the city of Durban's engineering department.

"This is the kind of stuff he did," Ena Cool said, showing off a framed, meticulous drawing of a park bathhouse.

Silas Cool perhaps was happiest then, his father says. The young man returned to New Jersey with his mother in 1975 and studied civil engineering at Middlesex County College. After graduating with an associate degree, he moved west, to Seattle.

Details of his Seattle life are sketchy, even for Cool's parents. For a time, they say, he held a variety of engineering jobs. "He never really specified," Daniel Cool says. "I know he had a few jobs, though. He never really told us."

But in March 1989, Silas Cool "retired" as a result of scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that would often cause his neck to twitch uncontrollably. There is no record that he applied for disability payments; rather, his parents sent him nearly $700 a month, plus gifts on his birthday and Christmas, and airfare home each October, when the family would go on drives or walk in nearby parks.

"All this bothered him because he didn't have any income," Ena Cool says. She felt he could still work with his hands and wished he had.

"He was just wasting his life, when you think about it," she says. "But what can you do?"

Ena Cool last visited her son in Seattle in 1991, when he was living in a nicely decorated apartment on Taylor Avenue North. She never saw the dingy one-bedroom place on 15th Avenue Northeast, where tin foil covered the windows and police this week found knives, two pellet guns and an empty gun box.

Over the years, the Cools urged their son to move home with them, but ultimately agreed he could fare better on his own in Seattle than in a car-dependent suburb with aging parents, and a childhood bedroom barely big enough for a narrow four-poster bed, a wooden dresser and a desk with space for little more than an open book.

"He said he could do more there," Ena Cool says. "He could get around on buses and go where he wanted to go, whereas here you're pretty stuck."

Silas Cool's back pain worsened with time. He couldn't reach lower than his knees. If he sat for long, he would have to get up and walk around - a possible reason, Daniel Cool says, that he became known on the buses he frequented because drivers would have to tell him to sit down.

No help for back pain

Doctors told Silas Cool he would have to live with his problem; a chiropractor was of no help. He ended up treating himself with magnetic belts and heating pads.

And with the pain came what his father calls a "gradual buildup" in irritability. "This thing must have gotten worse over the years," Daniel Cool says. "The last visits, he was much more edgy."

On Silas Cool's last trip home, for 12 days in October, he grew so impatient waiting in line at one restaurant that the family left and went to another one. He also yelled at a neighbor whose dog was barking, but his parents say reports of the incident were overplayed; the dog barks all the time, they say; it could be heard barking again yesterday.

Silas Cool's last cards home to "E and D" give no hints of personal problems. One sent in August mentions the PGA tournament in Redmond, tells of a walk to an Albertson's by a lake, and asks if their 14-year-old cat was getting fatter.

"Still use a magnetic belt daily," he wrote. "See they also have one for the neck."

His last card, written Nov. 8, mentions riding a bus to the Capitol Hill Safeway one day and walking to a nearby supermarket, where he got a dinner of scalloped potatoes.

But somewhere in that mix of mundane notes, cloying back pain, chronic unemployment and isolating quiet lurked a threat the Cools are only now coming to recognize as possible mental illness.

"He seemed on the very withdrawn side, if you know what I mean," Ena Cool says. It was the back pain, Daniel Cool says.

"I think his nerves were in such a state," he says. "But this gun business . . . we can't figure it out."

Without answers to their questions, the Cools cling to what memories they have. They pore over the snapshots they took each year when their only son visited home. They have no plans for a memorial service. Silas Cool will be cremated in Seattle, and the funeral home has been asked to spread his ashes there rather than send them back to New Jersey.

"We have the pictures," Ena Cool says. "I'd rather remember him alive than think about the ashes."

Eric Sorensen's phone message number is 206-464-8253. His e-mail address is: esorensen@seattletimes.com