IBEW Local 1547 (Anchorage AK) Member Michael Shibe Memorialized as "Helpful"

Widow urges others to be helpful in his memory
Michael Shibe Electrocuted Trying to Help Others mw

Widow speaks despite her grief

BY BETH BRAGG

July 31st, 2005

Be prepared. That's the motto Boy Scouts try to live, the motto the nonscouting world thinks of when it thinks about Boy Scouts.

Yet what can possibly prepare a person for a tragedy like the one that killed four well-known Alaska Scout leaders last week in Virginia? What can possibly prepare a person for the grief, confusion and anger that follows a senseless death?

Somehow, Kris Green -- the wife of Michael Shibe, one of the dead men -- was prepared for her wrenching public appearance Friday afternoon.

Reading from a prepared statement but detouring occasionally to add an extra story about her husband or to recall something said by one of her sons, Green provided comfort to friends and co-workers who had spent the week trying to comfort her.

"I want you to know I have felt your love, felt your presence, and I have felt your grief. I want you, my friends and co-workers, to know that I am using those thoughts and prayers to get through this.

"Do not be afraid of your pain or your grief. It tells me you loved him. Your tears tell me he made a difference in your life."

Speaking in front of reporters, a couple of friends and several people who worked with Shibe at ACS, Green evoked laughter and tears. She started a journal on Monday, the day of the accident, and parts of it became her text for the press conference, during which she spoke with few interruptions for close to an hour. A couple of times she appeared to be done talking, and then she'd remember something else, take a deep breath, and relate another memory of her husband.

"I think that's it," she said at one point. "No, it's not it. I want people to know Michael never met a stranger. He knew you all as friends -- as good friends -- and he celebrated your successes."

Green fought tears more than once, and her voice faltered when she spoke of her four teenage sons. Two of them, 14-year-old twins Karl and Paul, were at the Jamboree with their father and saw at least some of the accident. Shibe, Michael Lacroix and Ron Bitzer, all Anchorage troop leaders, and Scott Powell, a former Camp Gorsuch program director who recently moved to Ohio, were electrocuted when the pole tent they were setting up touched a power line.

"My two youngest went out as boys and came back as young men," Green said. "They witnessed a horror that nobody should be witness to."

Green said she was "sorta mad" earlier in the week at remarks made by a Jamboree spokesman. "Boy Scouts are taught not to put their tents under trees or under power lines," spokesman Gregg Shields said on Wednesday. "I don't know what happened in that case."

"That," Green said, "was risk management speaking."

On Friday, the Boy Scouts retracted the statement and said it didn't intend to assign blame for the accident. Green said she was grateful for the clarification.

"There's no one to blame," she said. "This is a terrible accident. This is a human factor, a human error. The wrong place at the wrong time -- but there is no one to blame."

Shibe wound up in the wrong place in the wrong time, she said, because he was responding to a request for help from other men putting up the tent. He always responded to requests for help, she said. She urged everyone to perform random acts of kindness in her husband's memory.

"When you're leaving Sam's Club and you see a homeless man, open your bag of apples and give him an apple," she said. "Donate a pint of blood."

"Irony" is an often misused word, but the events of the last week are teeming with it. Boy Scouts live by the motto "Be prepared," yet in the preparations for pitching the Alaskans' camp, someone picked a place near power lines. Michael Shibe was an electrician and IBEW member with a healthy respect for the dangers of electricity, yet he was killed by electricity. Green works for the Children's Hospital at Providence as the family support coordinator, helping and consoling parents with sick or injured children. Now she's the one in need of support and sympathy, she and her four sons.

Inside the church that sponsors Troop 129, three plaques with the names of the troop's 67 Eagle Scouts are mounted on a wall. The very first name: Michael J. Shibe, who earned his Eagle rank in 1972. Other plaques bear the names of his two oldest sons, Brent Shibe and Neil Shibe. Someday the names of the twins will be there too.

Someday, somehow.

"When Karl and Paul got off the airplane," Green said, "the first thing they said to me -- after 'Hi, Mom' -- was 'Who's gonna help us finish our Scout project now? Who's gonna help us get Eagle Scout?' "

How can anyone be prepared for a question like that?

Beth Bragg's opinion column appears Friday and Sunday. Her e-mail address is bbragg@adn.com.

























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