Deriek Crouse was her first true love and her best friend, and in the shadow of his death, Tina Crouse grapples with grief and anger.
By Matt Chittum
December 11, 2011
The bullet that tore through Deriek Crouse on Thursday didn’t stop in his lifeless body.
It carried on and on, ripping through a home and family he had been after his whole life and only recently got, breaking the heart of a woman to whom he was a first and only real love, and bringing a crashing end to what had been a working-class fairy tale of a romance.
Crouse, 39, a Virginia Tech police officer, was killed seemingly at random during a routine traffic stop on the Tech campus by a part-time Radford University student, Ross Truett Ashley, 22, of Partlow, who soon after killed himself.
“Nobody knows what he lost,” said Crouse’s widow, Tina, 37, from her Christiansburg townhome Saturday morning. “Somebody took our life from us.”
Deriek met the woman who would become his first wife, Marie Thomas, in Galax.
He joined the Army to save himself from himself, Tina said. His life was on a wrong path and headed for trouble.
He spent three years in the Army, mostly at Fort Hood, Texas, where he and Marie had their only son, Dustin.
They returned to Galax, where Deriek installed vinyl siding for a while, then worked at National Textiles. He also joined the Army Reserve.
About 2002, he and Marie separated, and shortly after he had moved out, he was deployed to the war in Iraq.
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