On the evening of Saturday, September 18, 1993, Chase took the car out for the evening. He planned to take a group of his friends to a shopping mall. Chase was in the driver’s seat, and, like so many teenage boys, he must have luxuriated in the freedom it gave him. He accelerated, and felt the speed and power of the Explorer.
Chase Koch was in charge, and he was going fast.
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That evening, a woman named Nola Foulston was out for a walk. She happened to be the prosecuting attorney for Sedgwick County, which encompassed Wichita. As she strolled along, Foulston saw a Ford Explorer driving through the neighborhood. She would later say that the Explorer was going so fast that she took notice of the car and remembered what it looked like. The car was barreling through residential streets. It is unclear if she saw the teenaged boy who was driving.
At that moment, a twelve-year-old boy named Zachary Seibert was out for a jog. Zac, as he was known to his parents and two siblings, ran a three-mile loop from his home, about three times a week. His father, Walter, had helped him trace out the route. Walt himself had been an accomplished runner; he met Zac’s mother while he was training in Boulder, Colorado, to run in the Olympics. Zac was the couple’s oldest child and, in September of 1993, Zac was almost thirteen years old and becoming an enthusiastic runner. He often woke up before five in the morning to get in a run before school started.
Walt taught his son to be mindful of cars. That evening, while Zac was running south through the neighborhoods near his family’s home, he stopped at the intersection on East Douglas Avenue, a four-lane road that was a major thoroughfare for crosstown traffic. He stopped at a pedestrian crosswalk beneath a traffic light, and pressed the button to activate the crossing signal. Zac had his headphones on and was listening to Kris Kross, an upbeat hip-hop group with a driving beat.
The traffic light on Douglas turned yellow, and then red. A big van slowed down and stopped in the lane closest to Zac. The van would have obscured Zac’s view when he looked left to scan for traffic heading west on Douglas Avenue. Walt had coached Zac on looking both ways when he entered a crosswalk, so presumably Zac did so. Then he jumped into action, running out into the street.
Chase Koch was driving the Explorer on Douglas with at least one friend in the car. They were going to a shopping mall called Towne East Square, presumably to waste away the hours of a Saturday night in the tradition of teenagers everywhere, hitting the food court, meeting up with other friends, browsing the windows.
Chase was going fast. He was about a block away from the mall, and driving in the left lane. As he approached the crosswalk, the traffic light was red and the big van was stopped in the right-hand lane.
Just as Chase passed the van, Zac lurched out in front of his car. There must have been less than a second for Chase to respond. The front right corner of Chase’s car struck Zac, and Chase kept driving. He went about two hundred yards until he came to a parking lot, where he turned his car around. He called 911 to report the accident from his car phone.
Zachary Seibert was still alive when the ambulance arrived and transported him to HCA Wesley Medical Center. Someone called his father, Walt, who rushed to the hospital to be at his son’s side. When he arrived, Walt was told that Zac was still alive. Details were sparse, but it appears that everyone involved already knew that the driver of the car was the son of the richest man in town. This created an awkward, painful dynamic. Walt Seibert didn’t think much about it because he was desperate for news about his son, but he couldn’t ignore the dynamic for long.
“At the hospital, there was a cop . . . from the Wichita Police Department that actually told me not to ‘seek a pound of gold.’ At that moment, when I don’t know if my son is living or not,” Seibert recalled. He assumed the police officer was referring to the notion that the Seiberts might sue the Koch family in order to profit from the tragedy. Seibert said such an action was inconceivable to him.
Zac died roughly an hour after arriving at the hospital.
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Charles Koch was more than a prominent citizen of Wichita—his company was one of the city’s economic engines. On Tuesday, September 21, 1993, subscribers of the Wichita Eagle learned that Charles Koch’s son, Chase, was driving the car involved in a horrific tragedy.
Charles and Liz Koch took swift action to protect their son. But they also took action, just as swiftly, to expose Chase Koch to the dire consequences of his mistake. They did so in a way that was severe and that ensured Chase could never deny the reality of what he had done.
To protect Chase, the Kochs employed Don Cordes, the bulldog attorney who was general counsel for Koch Industries at the time. Cordes became the Koch family’s spokesman, and he conveyed a narrative that minimized Chase Koch’s culpability in the accident.
Cordes told the Wichita Eagle that Chase Koch thought the traffic light over the crosswalk was yellow as he approached it, an account that Chase had provided to authorities after the accident. Cordes said it seemed unlikely that Chase Koch was speeding, in part because there were no skid marks at the scene of the accident. “We are going on the theory that, when he swerved to the left, if he would have been going at a high rate of speed, he would have spun out of control. This is just one of those tragic things,” Cordes told the paper. “There was no drinking, no drugs. This was a straight-arrow kid. Good grades, athlete.”
It might have been easy for Charles and Liz Koch to shield Chase behind their company lawyer. It might have even been pragmatic. They didn’t know the Seibert family, and didn’t know if the family might seek to extract its “pound of gold.”
But the Kochs chose a different strategy. Shortly after Zachary Seibert died, Charles and Liz Koch told their son to visit Zac’s parents in their home; to be accountable for what he had done. At the time, Walter Seibert was still trying to process what happened. Elizabeth Koch accompanied Chase to the Seiberts’ home. Walt Seibert said that he wanted to talk to Chase privately and suggested that he and Chase could sit in the front seats of the Seibert family’s van. Chase agreed to it. When they closed the doors, Chase and Walt were encased together in silence. Walt Seibert could see that the sixteen-year-old next to him was distraught, and maybe terrified.
“I just wanted him to tell me his version of what happened. He was extremely, extremely nervous. Maybe I don’t blame him, for what he went through,” Seibert said. Chase apologized, and his deep remorse seemed utterly sincere. Seibert pressed the boy for details about the accident.
“He basically just said he didn’t know what was happening. He thought the light was yellow, and didn’t say anything about speeding,” Seibert recalled. This fact would gnaw at Seibert later, because he felt like he hadn’t gotten the whole story. County prosecutor Nola Foulston later told him that she had seen Chase’s vehicle speeding through neighborhoods before the accident. But while Chase might have fumbled his words with Seibert that day, he later admitted in open court to running the red light and accepted blame for what he had done.
Charles, Liz, and Chase Koch attended Zachary Seibert’s funeral. A friend of the Seibert family would later tell the Wichita Eagle that it was “emotionally wrenching to watch [the Koch family] at the funeral . . . It took a lot of courage to walk in that group of people. And every eye in that church was on them.”