Darlie Routier: Doting Mother/Deadly Mother

In the meantime, the K-9 unit had arrived on Eagle Drive, its animals unmuzzled and sent sniffing. Officer Waddell briefed its commander on the case and joined the team for a search of the neighborhood roundabout. This, while Sgt. Walling managed to calm the frantic Mrs. Routier on the front porch.  While they gauzed her bleeding, she told the sergeant what she had told Waddell earlier: that an intruder had entered her home and mounted her on the sofa while she slept; she had awakened to him, screamed, and, after struggling with him, warding off his blows, he absconded toward the garage. It was then she noticed that he had left behind her two butchered boys. Of his attack on them, she had heard nothing.

She halted and grimaced as paramedics Koschak and Byford applied an IV line into her arm, then paused again as they placed Steri-Strips across a shallow but ugly throat cut. Recuperating from the smarting applications, she continued to speak to the policeman. She described her attacker as a man of medium-to-tall height, dressed entirely in black: T-shirt, jeans and baseball cap.

Three o'clock a.m., and Welling had concluded his interview. He stepped aside as the paramedics escorted her to their ambulance. She required further medical aid at Baylor Center. Darin told her he would follow; much too shaken to drive, he called on neighbor Tom Neal to drive him. Neal's wife remained behind to baby-sit infant Drake.

The Routiers were on their way to the hospital, but the police remained at their premises. In fact, their ranks grew in number. Squads drew up as an army, their rolling flashers severing the darkness to rudely lighten the cul-de-sac where the Routiers lived. Neighbors, roused from their beds, emerged from their dark homes to their assorted yards to gape as troops of dark uniforms flanked in marching fashion around and through the Routier house, across its lawn, through its colonial-style front door. Under the glare of the torch, police threw up a cordon around the property. The staring citizens had never expected to see anything like this in Rowlett, here in the crime-free suburb of Dalrock Heights Addition. Especially on their own street.