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Letters of condolence. File folders stuffed with insurance
policies and investment accounts. The contents of a
husband’s golf club locker that a 34-year-old widow can’t
yet bear to sift through. And resting on a desk, lost in
this muddle, a child’s drawing.
The sketch, on white paper, depicts a bright summer
sun and blue sky over a golf course. One man, in red
pants, stands triumphantly near a flagstick, having felled
another man, prone below him. The victor’s fists are
accompanied by comic-like interjections: pow! bam!
There’s an overturned white truck in the background,
wheels up.
And above this colorful scene, written in crisp black
uppercase letters, is daddy: my hero.
The picture captures not a fiction, really, but a heart-
breaking inversion of the truth—the manifestation of
a 7-year-old mind probing for order in a world turned
upside down. Beau Siller put colored pencil to paper
one day after his father, Gene, was shot dead last sum-
mer on the 10th green at Pinetree Country Club, in
Kennesaw, Ga., under a bright summer sun and a blue
sky. Inside the bed of the truck—which existed in real
life but hadn’t been overturned, as Beau drew—were the
lifeless bodies of two other men, absolute strangers to
everyone at Pinetree.
On July 3, 2021, one world spilled into another when
the violence of the illegal drug trade pierced the
afternoon calm of a golf club and that club’s head PGA
professional, 46-year-old Gene Siller, sped toward untold
danger. His fate was the tragic terminus of a life spent
devoting himself to a family and a sport and a club, of fol-
lowing his heart, of always being the first one to answer
a call for help. Even when danger idled 400 yards away. CO
URTE
SY
OFTHE^ SILLER
FAMILY^ (
2 )