A Single Bullet, A Thousand Questions -- A Revered Teacher Is Dead, A Former Student Jailed, And Those Who Knew Them Are Looking For Answers

It may be sadly appropriate that as he lay dying on a hall floor at Whitman Middle School last Monday, Neal Summers' final words conveyed not an outcry or complaint, but a question.

"I heard an explosion," he said to a colleague. "What was it?"

The question left on the 45-year-old teacher's lips became the first of thousands asked in the past six days as police, parents, teachers, students and families struggle to understand the rifle blast that shattered the early-morning quiet at the Crown Hill neighborhood school.

Chief among those questions are the ones for which answers may prove most elusive:

Just who was Neal Summers: Dedicated teacher? Caring mentor? Scheming pedophile who maintained a sexually abusive relationship for 10 years with the man accused of killing him?

And exactly who is Darrell Cloud: The 24-year-old former student accused of murder? Celebrated athlete? Hotheaded gun nut? Helpless victim of abuse?

In the weeks and months to come, prosecutors and defense attorneys will continue to ask why and how the killing happened.

School-district officials are facing a troubling question of their own: If a teacher was sexually abusing a young victim, how could he hide it so well that he was regarded not just as a satisfactory teacher, but as a role model?

Until more answers are found, the two men's lives appear as a series of snapshots that in some ways seem unremarkable, and in other ways shed light on their relationship and its violent end.

NEAL SUMMERS: EARLY GRIEF

In the first four years of his life, Neal Summers watched his mother deteriorate from cancer. A few weeks after the boy's fifth Christmas, Beulah Summers died.

Because Neal's father felt he couldn't watch over the youngster the way he could three older sons already in school, Neal in 1953 was sent to live in the nearby home of a family friend, adding the pain of separation to the grief of losing his mother.

Outwardly, Neal was a cheerful kid when he moved back home after his father, Lyle K. Summers, remarried in 1955. He was often the one to help his father and lend a hand to their Wallingford neighbors.

"No evidence of any of the things they are accusing him of," said Anabel Dishnow, the woman who cared for Neal after his mother died.

The earliest indication of trouble may have come from a woman who lived near the Summers home in the early 1960s, when Neal was about 15.

Her 7-year-old son told her Neal Summers had twice masturbated in front of him in the basement of the Summers home.

"I was very upset," said the woman, who now lives out of state and preferred to remain anonymous.

The son, now 37, said he didn't understand what the teenager was doing then, but the image stuck with him throughout his life.

"There was an unexplained anger in me that I couldn't put my finger on. It was kind of a bitterness," he said.

A year later, the woman said, her older son, about Neal's age, was visiting him in Summers' upstairs bedroom when Summers proposed that they masturbate together. He refused.

The woman said she told Summers' stepmother but didn't inform authorities because she figured Summers was a confused adolescent.

As Neal grew up, it seemed certain he would become a teacher.

His parents met as teachers in Anacortes during the Depression. Though the father changed careers, attending the University of Washington law school in the mid-1930s, friends say there was a deep commitment to learning and teaching in the family.

Neal's stepmother, Jean, was a teacher, too, as were the two people Neal lived with during his early years.

Growing up just a half block from Hamilton Junior High School (now Hamilton Middle School), Neal and two brothers would become teachers. The second oldest, John, became a preacher.

Their father was conscientious and somewhat old-fashioned, often taking the bus or a taxi rather than driving. Now 85, he is described as a kind man who would hand out candy to youngsters and see to neighbors' needs.

His second wife, who died in 1990, was an accomplished pianist and is remembered as a caring stepmother.

Neal, three years younger than his nearest sibling, was never as athletic as his older brothers, who played baseball and basketball.

But he enjoyed the outdoors and liked to hike, fish and camp. As an adult, he would become an avid sports fan, following the athletic accomplishments of his former students.

Neal seemed to follow in his father's footsteps as a concerned neighbor. One neighbor recalls he would regularly help an elderly woman park her car, and he'd run errands for others.

At Hamilton Junior High and Lincoln High School (now closed), Summers was a friendly and bookish guy, a wallflower who applied himself to his studies.

Lincoln classmate Louis Peterson, a student leader, recalls Summers being active in a lot of student committees, and Peterson doubted anyone disliked him.

Summers lived at home while earning a bachelor's degree in geography at the University of Washington in 1972. Courses at Western Washington University, and a stint as a cadet teacher at Hamilton, led to a teaching certificate in 1978.

Friends say Summers didn't date. At his 10-year high-school reunion he wrote that he was "single - and will probably remain that way." He listed his hobbies as "camping, hiking, working with youth groups."

Summers taught briefly at Denny and Jane Addams Junior High before joining Whitman in 1979.

Darrell Cloud: Troubled boy

The year Summers started teaching at Whitman was, coincidentally, an especially difficult one for 9-year-old Darrell Allen Cloud, then a fourth-grader at Viewlands Elementary School.

Early that year, Darrell learned he had been adopted by William and Ingrid Cloud. A week later, his idolized father left to serve a one-year prison sentence for mail fraud.

In the months that followed, his mother told a psychologist, the boy began flying into rages at small upsets.

He smashed his bedroom door. He broke toys. He tore apart his bed.

He had attempted suicide twice and run away from home three times, his mother said, and school officials reported he was behaving erratically.

William Cloud asked the court for an early release to deal with what was happening at home with Darrell. In support of his appeal, the psychologist, Eileen McCarty, interviewed the boy. She concluded he was a sensitive child for whom learning that he was adopted "was a substantial trauma."

She said "feelings of doubt and mistrust, as well as wonderment about his origin and early rejection" followed, along with feeling abandoned when his father left for prison without explaining what was happening.

McCarty said Cloud avoided talking about his feelings with her. "I am concerned with the burying of feelings because they will surface just as explosively when he is confronted with another crisis," she wrote.

Teacher energetic, helpful

A mile west of Cloud's grade school, the energetic, personable Summers was becoming known at Whitman Junior High as a dedicated, caring teacher whose commitment to youngsters didn't end when the school bell rang.

After living the late 1970s at an apartment near Sand Point Way, Summers had purchased a home north of Seattle on 32nd Avenue Northeast, where he would eventually welcome a steady stream of young visitors who were often packing for camping trips.

Summers' school spirit shows in a 1984 edition of "Whitman Whispers," the school's newsletter. Summers had taken on the role of "eighth-grade party chairman," coordinating a chocolate-bar sale to fund the function.

He promised "an assembly, a special luncheon, a dance in the gym, refreshments, flowers, balloons and other special surprises."

He had a prankish sense of humor, said college student Matt Diefenbach, 18, who has known Summers since middle school. Summers, who stood about 5 feet 7 and weighed 242 pounds, enjoyed the nickname "Buddha" that he had picked up on a field trip to Hawaii. His van carried a license-plate frame labeling it "Buddha's Blue Bomber."

On camping trips, sometimes to his cabin in the San Juan Islands, Summers cooked a version of french toast he dubbed "Buddha toast," and challenged students to eat record amounts. Tops was about 20, said Diefenbach.

On a recent trip, a student who mouthed off to Summers found his pillow coated with shaving cream.

Parents and teachers saw Summers as a spark plug, someone with the energy and willingness to get things done.

On the Whitman faculty, it was Summers who made sure each staff member's birthday was observed, and that special events didn't pass unnoticed.

To co-workers and friends, his summertime barbecues were legendary. "You'd see people there he taught with decades ago. The guy had an unbelievable number of friends," said John Shearer, a Whitman science teacher.

The invitation to Summers' 1990 "Whitman end-of-the-year bash" urged: "Visit old/young/new friends; meet our great group of new 6th grade teachers; have lots of fun; tell lies about each other; all of the above." Invitees were asked to bring a salad or dessert, along with $4 for a New York steak or $2 for a hamburger.

Students remembered Summers for his style, one that could make a subject light and lively. He was also known as a disciplinarian, one who didn't hesitate to put rowdy students on detention.

"He believed he had to push kids to their best. He was an authority figure," said Alan Patrick, a former student of Summers. "A lot of kids don't take that correctly."

Another ex-student recalled that some students, angry at being disciplined by Summers, would taunt him by shouting, "Pervert!"

Summers, who taught geography, history and special education, had also taken on the complex chore of preparing Whitman's school schedules, making sure that class sizes and teacher assignments were balanced and appropriate.

It was always a juggling act, and it was one reason Summers arrived at school about 6:20 a.m. Monday, nearly an hour before teachers were required to be at their desks.

But even at that early hour, on this first day of a new semester, several other teachers were already at Whitman.

So, police say, was Darrell Cloud.

`All this started' in 8th grade

Exactly how a friendship developed between the teacher and Darrell Cloud is not clear.

Among some students in the early 1980s, Summers had a reputation that was apparently not widely known to adults in the Whitman community. Summers' home, says a woman who was an eighth-grader with Cloud, was a place where teenage boys, including junior-high students, knew they could go to play pool and drink beer after school and during the summer.

"I've known Darrell since I was 6 or 7," says the woman, now 24, married and with a child of her own. She asked that her name not be used. "I was aware of Mr. Summers. First I was aware of Mr. Summers buying beer for the boys at his house.

"It was toward the beginning of the eighth grade," she said. "The guys would just talk about it, that Mr. Summers would buy them beer, and it was a kind of a low-key thing. They didn't want Mr. Summers to get in trouble."

As Summers and the young Cloud came to know each other at Whitman, Cloud eventually became one of Summers' teaching aides, considered an honor, and helped with attendance and other classroom chores.

But there was more, says the woman, who considered herself Darrell's girlfriend in the eighth grade. Darrell told her Summers had made some kind of sexual advance.

"I heard the guys talking about it," she said, "how Darrell had hit Mr. Summers. And then, when we were together alone, you know, because we spent time together, after school and things like that, I'd asked him why.

"That's when he said, `He made a pass at me,' and he (Darrell) was kind of hostile. . . . I remember exactly how he said it to me. It was short, like he didn't want to talk about it."

Eighth grade, the woman said, marked a change in the 14-year-old Darrell.

"I know when his temperament started changing, after the eighth grade," she said. `That's when all this started."

Mark Marquardt, who was a classmate of Darrell's through high school, remembers that boys later used to wonder and joke about the sexuality of their former junior-high teacher.

"You know, maybe people would make jokes about it, about Mr. Summers' being queer, and you could tell it didn't sit right with Darrell," Marquardt said. "It wasn't that he took offense to it, but that he didn't join in."

In an affidavit filed with first-degree murder charges last week, the King County prosecutor said the sexual relationship between Summers and Cloud began after he left Whitman in 1983 and continued throughout high school.

Police say they're investigating indications that Summers may have abused other youngsters, although Prosecutor Norm Maleng said he knew of no other confirmed cases. Cloud: Athletic, explosive

Through high school and into college, there seemed to be two visible Darrell Clouds: the celebrated athlete and the kid with an explosive temper.

From Whitman, Cloud moved to the North End's Ingraham High School.

In his junior year he was quarterback for the Rams' varsity football team. In 1985, in a close football game with Blanchet, Cloud was tackled in the end zone for a safety with just over a minute to play. Final score: Blanchet 9, Ingraham 6.

"Darrell left the field flipping off the Blanchet crowd," remembers his coach, Ron Sidenquist. "And I benched him."

There was another incident not long afterward. Cloud lost his temper during a junior varsity basketball game, was ejected, left the gym and punched his fist through the school's front door.

This time, the high school suspended him.

The Cloud family moved to Kirkland, and in the fall of 1986, Darrell enrolled at Juanita High School, a prep-football powerhouse that had won two straight Kingbowl championships. He became quarterback for the Juanita Rebels, leading the team to its third straight state title game.

"He had my total trust," said Juanita's coach then, Chuck Tarbox. "He was an extension of me. He did everything I asked of him."

Juanita lost that game to Gonzaga, 14-7.

Cloud graduated from Juanita in 1987 and in the fall entered Washington State University. He turned out for football but left WSU after his freshman year.

He enrolled at Green River Community College in 1988 as a freshman recruited to play baseball by coach Ray Walters.

The temper seemed more under control, but Walters remembers one incident: "A kid belittled him at a party. He didn't do anything at the time, but a couple of days later - it ate away at him - he walked up and popped the guy."

Cloud's playing impressed Bob MacDonald, then the University of Washington baseball coach. Cloud entered the UW as a junior with an athletic scholarship in 1990. His baseball playing was steady if not spectacular; MacDonald recalls him as "a little bit stubborn."

In the spring of his junior year, Cloud married Jennifer Lyn Halverson, whom he had known in high school.

Whatever the undercurrents of Cloud's life, they did not seem to work well with marriage. His behavior seemed to change shortly after they were married, said his former father-in-law.

"He was a nice kid, in fact," he said. "Then he just kind of did a turnabout. He threatened her with a baseball bat and gun."

The young woman's parents urged her to end the marriage. In April 1992 she did, filing for dissolution and asking the court to order Cloud to stay away from her. She said he had problems controlling his anger and had threatened suicide. A downward spiral

The divorce was part of what, in retrospect, looks like a downward spiral.

About the same time, Coach Bob MacDonald kicked Cloud off the Husky baseball team for repeatedly violating a curfew.

He dropped out of the university without graduating.

Says a friend: "Darrell could always bury it (his anger) in sports before, but when he finished college he didn't have that outlet."

Cloud moved into the mother-in-law apartment of a house that his father rented to another tenant in the White Center area. Darrell began working for his father, a contractor.

He also began acquiring weapons - a handgun apparently purchased by mail order in October 1992, a bow and arrow that the White Center tenant reported his children had seen in a closet.

Cloud had received a number of traffic citations, but the one he received in February last year was not routine: He was cited for "displaying a weapon to intimidate" after motorists reported he had been waving a pistol inside his car on Interstate 5.

That led to a court order that he not possess weapons. He bought them nevertheless: a .45-caliber handgun last July, a shotgun and 30-30 rifle, and last August, a powerful AR-15 rifle, the civilian version of a military M-16.

Shock upon shock

It was a single shot from that rifle that, at 6:20 a.m. Monday, felled Summers from behind. He died at Harborview about an hour later.

As news reporters gathered outside the school through the morning, teachers came outside to offer testimonials.

"I loved him as all our faculty did love him," said French teacher Diana Congdon, "He was dedicated to teaching." Over the years, Summers had joined Congdon and students on seven field trips to France, and was planning to make the trip again this spring.

The first reports of a sexually abusive relationship between Summers and Cloud - confirmed by documents found at Summers' home, the prosecutor said - added shock upon shock to the Whitman school community.

A planned memorial service was hastily canceled. School officials were cautious with comments, while vowing on a school hotline that "as soon it's appropriate, we will do everything we can to address questions from the community."

Some acquaintances vowed to remember Summers for the good he did, not for the sordid accusations.

On Friday, Cloud was charged with first-degree murder. Defense attorney John Henry Browne said Cloud will plead not guilty and will be examined by psychiatric professionals.

It may be that no amount of investigation, however, will answer all the questions of those who knew both Summers and Cloud.

Among them is Rebecca Hurt, 18, a former Whitman student who went on a trip to France with Summers and who admired him greatly. She was also a neighbor of Cloud's, and he sometimes babysat her. For both families, she feels terrible grief.

"If Mr. Summers was here, I wish I could tell him I'm really sorry this has happened to him," she said. "On the other hand, I'd like to tell Darrell's family I hope eveything turns out OK."

Seattle Times staff reporters Duff Wilson, Peyton Whitely, Mary F. Pols, Deidtra Henderson, Tomas Guillen, Dave Birkland and Constantine Angelos contributed to this report.