‘He was just a minute from home’

It’s easy for Tawana Bruce to pinpoint where her life changed forever.

There’s still a jagged mark on the curb in the gentle curve of Museum Boulevard as it slips into Riverside.

The post for the sign showing the way to Botanica, Cowtown and the Art Museum is upright again and sports a new coat of black paint to hide the scrapes and scratches, but a closer look offers a hint.

“It’s still bent,” Bruce said, from the force of the impact when her boyfriend’s motorcycle clipped the curb on July 6, flew through the air and collided with the sign.

John Frazier was thrown from his 1974 RevTech motorcycle and died from internal injuries on his way to the hospital.

Bruce went from planning a wedding to planning a funeral. The couple had planned to marry on Labor Day.

Standing next to where the crash occurred, Bruce pulled out the wedding rings they planned to exchange and studied them, the diamonds sparkling in the summer sunlight.

“You hear that happens to other people … and here it happened to me,” she said, sadness etching her voice. “It’s still unbelievable.”

She turned her gaze to the scarred curb and the museums sign.

“He was just a minute from home,” she said. “Not even a minute.”

Roar of the pipes

Frazier – he always emphasized the “z” when he spelled it aloud – loved to work with his hands.

He spent his 60th birthday in November rebuilding Bruce’s bedroom closet in Riverside, because it kept falling apart.

Fussing with his beloved RevTech motorcycle was perhaps his favorite hobby.

“He was always working on it and fixing it,” Bruce said.

That was the bike he rode “if I want to go fast and hard,” he told Bruce. For more leisurely rides, such as at a family reunion in his hometown of Hill City on Memorial Day, he and Bruce used his 2002 Harley-Davidson Screaming Eagle Road King.

Frazier loved the RevTech’s kick starter and long exhaust pipes, which made the flashy bike loud. You had to hit the kick starter hard with your foot to get the bike to start, and if you hit it wrong, you could break an ankle.

“I could hear the roar of his pipes and knowing he was coming – but not that day,” Bruce said. “I knew something was off. I knew something was wrong.”

Normally, if Frazier was working late, he would call or text Bruce and let her know. That didn’t happen on the first Wednesday of July.

At 5:34 p.m., she sent him a text: “The pizza’s here. Where are you?”

When Frazier didn’t immediately reply, Bruce figured he was riding home on his RevTech. She was right.

Witnesses told police Frazier was riding west on Museum Boulevard when he passed a black truck. The driver of the truck noticed the chain on the motorcycle had broken.

Frazier looked down at the broken chain as he was riding, and the bike drifted to the right, striking the curb.

The motorcycle then slammed into the sign pole, throwing Frazier onto the sidewalk several feet away.

Bruce heard the sirens just a few minutes later, a sickening feeling growing inside her.

“I was thinking: ‘He’s not home. That doesn’t sound good,’ ” Bruce said.

Her house was so close to the crash scene that she could have seen it if she had walked out of the house and down an alley. She told her brother she wanted to go to the store to pick up some plates, but in truth, she wanted to find out what was going on so she could quell her fears.

“When I got here, I saw his helmet and motorcycle sitting there” in the grass between the street and the river, Bruce said. “But I couldn’t see John.”

He was already gone, whisked away in an ambulance. She never got a chance to say goodbye.

Broken chain

Police have said there is no indication speed contributed to the crash. Frazier’s death was the result of a broken chain, a few seconds of distraction and a curve in the street.

In her mind, Bruce can still see the loose chain on the curb.

“When you’re turning on that curve, you can’t look down,” she said. “That’s a dangerous curve. It’s kind of scared me a couple of times, riding around that curve.”

Frazier put that chain on the RevTech himself about six months ago, Bruce said, carefully following the instructions to make sure he got it right. When she studied the chain after the crash, Bruce said, it looked like two links had been pulled apart.

“It didn’t make sense,” she said.

She has talked to some of the witnesses of the crash. There’s one more, a woman, whom she said she would like to talk to some day.

She wants to know more about Frazier’s final moments and about the crash that took him from her.

“For closure, I guess,” she said.

The couple had talked about getting married in Savannah, on the Georgia coast, where her brother lives. But they changed their minds and decided to keep it simple and close to home.

As far as Frazier was concerned, “if it was just me, him, the preacher and God, that’s all we need,” Bruce said.

The Labor Day wedding turned into a memorial service on July 13. In a nod to two of Frazier’s great loves, mourners were encouraged to wear Harley-Davidson apparel to the service, where they were treated to Rolling Stones music. So many people came that the crowd spilled outside, Bruce said.

Holding on to memories

For several weeks after Frazier’s death, Bruce couldn’t bring herself to use Museum Boulevard. Two weeks ago, she moved out of her house in Riverside. The proximity to where he died was just too much to take, she said.

Instead, she holds on to memories that make her smile.

He liked his coffee black and strong – “as strong as you could get it,” Bruce said.

He enjoyed cooking.

“That man could cook anything,” Bruce said lovingly.

He loved his family, and he loved God. With his long, flowing silver hair, people who first met him often thought he was a rough-and-tumble hippie biker, Bruce said. The reality was something different.

“He had a very soft side,” Bruce said.

When he began going to St. Mark United Methodist Church with Bruce, someone told them: “You guys look like rock stars,” so they earned the nickname “the rock star couple.”

And he loved his motorcycles.

“He told me ‘If I want excitement, I get on the RevTech,’ ” Bruce said. “It was quite a machine. He loved it. I don’t think he would have gone any other way than riding his motorcycle.”

But that doesn’t make things any easier for Bruce. They met two years ago when Frazier came to Mayberry Magnet Middle School for a meeting about his teenage son. They quickly fell in love.

“You could just feel the love when they got together,” Kelsey Martin said of her mother and Frazier. “I couldn’t have picked a better mate for her to spend the rest of her life with.”

‘That’s where I’ll be’

In what turned out to be his final phone message to her, Frazier said something that has offered Bruce comfort in these pain-filled days.

“Look to your left, look to your right. That’s where I am. That’s where I’ll be.”

He started to laugh, Bruce said, then said “I love you” and ended the call. Despite those assurances, however, Bruce acknowledges she has struggled.

She went to Kansas City with some girlfriends one recent weekend in an effort to lift her spirits, but it wasn’t working.

“I was really down,” Bruce said. “I was really missing John.”

She remembered his voice mail and said, “Give me a sign you are really with me.” And not just any sign – specifically a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

As they walked out of the building they were in, Bruce spotted something at the nearest intersection: a motorcycle.

It wasn’t just any motorcycle, either: It was a gleaming, peach-colored Harley-Davidson.

“The pipes were so loud on that thing,” Bruce said.

They waved the rider over to a parking lot for a closer look, but Bruce already knew Frazier had answered her plea.

“He knew how I liked those elaborate Harley-Davidsons,” she said. “He knew I loved things loud. That was the loudest, brightest Harley-Davidson you could have ever seen.

“I know he’s around.”

This story was originally published August 21, 2016 at 3:48 PM with the headline "‘He was just a minute from home’."