Chase Koch must have felt those eyes on him. This was the kind of experience that burns into a person’s mind. Chase Koch had been careless and reckless in a way that is common among teenage boys. But in an instant, the carelessness reaped consequences that could never be erased, for anyone involved.
* * *
Nola Foulston recused herself as prosecutor because she was a potential witness in the case. A special prosecutor named Stephen Joseph was appointed to the case, and he charged Chase Koch with misdemeanor vehicular homicide. This was a lesser charge than involuntary manslaughter, a felony that could be applied to traffic accidents where drivers acted with conscious knowledge that they were threatening human life, or acted with a total lack of concern for other people’s safety. Joseph didn’t think that the facts of the case warranted such a serious charge.
Chase Koch plead guilty to vehicular homicide in December. In January, just as he was beginning the second half of his sophomore year in high school, Chase was sentenced to a year and a half of probation, one hundred hours of community service work, and a nightly curfew that would last ten months. He was also required to pay for Zachary Seibert’s funeral expenses and to take a defensive driving course.
Walter Seibert said he was satisfied with the sentence and believed that justice had been served. But decades later, Seibert was still bothered by his conversation with Chase Koch in the van. He felt that Chase tried to evade responsibility. “He was with three other teenagers in the car. So they were screwing off. They were fucking around, driving at too high a speed,” Seibert said. “He didn’t tell me about going through a red light. He didn’t tell me about not seeing the light. The thing is, he was so, so obviously nervous. I can’t honestly totally blame him. But the bottom line is, he still killed my son. And he didn’t own up to anything he did.”
Seibert was not aware of it, but Chase Koch would never be able to escape what he had done. As he grew older and rose through the ranks of Koch Industries, Chase Koch rarely mentioned the accident. But he lived with it every day of his life. “I wish I could take it all back,” Chase Koch said about the accident. “I can’t forgive myself for what I did. And I don’t expect anyone else to.”
The accident permanently removed an element of innocence from Chase Koch’s life. There was before the accident, and there was after. In the time after, the memory of what happened never went away. “I take full responsibility for what happened,” Chase said. “And I think the reality is that I’m going to live with this the rest of my life.”
* * *
During the second half of his high school career, Chase Koch once again found his place on the tennis court. His high school career record was 110 wins and 14 losses. All of those losses were against his teammate Matt Wright.
When Chase Koch was a senior, Coach Hawley suggested that he play doubles with Matthew Wright at the state championship. Hawley believed that Chase richly deserved a state title, and he could get it by playing with Wright. Chase told Hawley he’d think about it over a weekend. When he came back on Monday, Chase said that he didn’t want to do it. Winning a state title didn’t seem as important as being measured on his own merits.
* * *
After Chase Koch’s senior year of high school, an emergency meeting was called among managers at Koch Industries’ oil refinery in Corpus Christi. A manager had just been informed that Charles Koch’s son would be coming to work there for the summer. This set off something close to a panic. One of the employees at the meeting that day was Brenden O’Neill, the engineer who would later earn millions trading derivatives for Koch.
“It was kind of funny,” O’Neill recalled of the meeting about Chase’s arrival. “It was like. ‘What are we going to do?’ ‘We’re going to take care of him and keep him busy and give him some stuff to do.’ ”
O’Neill didn’t find the situation funny for long. He was informed that Chase Koch would work directly under him. This required a painfully tense balancing act. Managers felt that Chase had to be pushed, but also had to be treated well. The job had to be hard, but not grueling. O’Neill was in charge of managing this contradiction day to day. O’Neill was given one key warning from his boss: “Don’t let him get hurt.”
When Chase arrived, he wasn’t what O’Neill had expected. He was tall, quiet, and completely unpretentious. “He wasn’t a workaholic at eighteen, I’ll put it that way,” O’Neill recalled. “He didn’t act like, ‘Hey, I’m going to take over the company someday.’ ”
Early in the summer, Chase told a story that put O’Neill at ease. Chase said that before he came to Corpus Christi, his father had called him into his office and then called the plant manager on the phone while Chase was listening: “Charles calls up the plant manager and says, ‘If Chase screws up, I want you to fire him on the spot. And if you don’t have the balls to do it, I’ll do it myself,’ ” O’Neill said. “Chase told me that. The plant manager didn’t tell me that.”
O’Neill found Chase Koch to be a surprisingly normal teenager. Chase wanted to make friends and spent a lot of time working on his car, installing a souped-up stereo and speaker system during his free time. O’Neill gave Chase jobs that kept him away from the cracking units and refinery towers, where flammable chemicals flowed at high pressure. Chase analyzed spreadsheets of data from the refinery operations and helped O’Neill and his colleagues analyze the units’ performance. It was the Goldilocks job—just educational enough without exposing Chase to too much danger.
O’Neill very rarely saw Chase get agitated, let alone lose his temper. One of the few instances this happened remained vivid in O’Neill’s mind decades later. As they were working in the office one day, an employee from the payroll department came in looking for “Charles Koch,” probably referring to a directory that listed Chase’s full name: Charles Chase Koch.
Chase knew that the payroll employee was referring to him. “I could tell that he was, like, visibly offended that he called him Charles,” O’Neill observed. Chase’s response was swift and terse. “My name’s not Charles. It’s Chase.”
* * *
Fred Koch went to MIT. Charles Koch followed in his footsteps and attended MIT for both his undergraduate and multiple graduate degrees. David Koch went to MIT. Bill Koch went to MIT.
Chase Koch went to Texas A&M. Chase majored in marketing. He didn’t play tennis, and he lived, for the first time, outside the small circuit of the Koch family compound, the Wichita Country Club, and the Wichita Collegiate School campus. When he moved to College Station, Texas, Chase lived in a place where the Koch name didn’t mean anything. For the first time in his life, he could be Chase, rather than Chase Koch.
After graduation, Chase Koch decided not to move home. He wanted to cut his own path and work for a company where his family name wasn’t written on the front door. He moved to Austin, Texas, and got hired at a small consulting firm, doing marketing work. During his off hours, Chase started playing music and joined a band that played gigs around Austin. They played covers of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Widespread Panic songs, alongside some original material. It was “jam-band stuff,” as he called it, played for an audience heavily lubricated with beer.