The most intense waves of heartache come when Gary Pirc is at home by himself. With no distractions, and no work responsibilities to numb his grief, Pirc is left to confront the void in his life once occupied by his 4-year-old daughter.
“Whenever I’m alone in this house, that’s when it hits me,” he said. “It’s all of her pictures around me.”
Taylor Pirc was the kind of child who could coerce smiles from complete strangers, her father said. A photogenic cherub of a little girl, Tay Tay, as her family called her, was known to burst into song in restaurant booths.
Her parents were proud of her independent spirit and the fact she could perform a perfect cartwheel. On Feb. 21, Taylor added to her list of accomplishments by counting to 100 for the first time, all by herself.
It was the same day she lost her life in a traffic crash blamed on an intoxicated driver with two DUI offenses already on his record.
“It seemed for a long time like she was just next door playing,” said Cristy Pirc, Taylor’s mother. “I expected her to call and say `Mom, I’m coming home, look out the door.’ “
Sitting around their kitchen table in Joliet on a recent day, Gary and Cristy Pirc and their surviving daughter, 8-year-old Lauren, not only recounted how they lost Taylor, but also described what they are doing about it. If they get their way, a symbol of the family’s determination will soon be headed to a police squad car near you.
The Taylor Pirc Video Camera Project started in the months after the child’s death. After deciding that something positive would come from their personal tragedy, the Pircs joined local law enforcement groups and began their effort to place a video camera in one police cruiser in every department in the Chicago area.
The system provides indisputable evidence of an intoxicated driver’s behavior, she said, backing up court testimony from an officer’s memory.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” she said.
To complete the first leg of the work, offering cameras to the 30 departments in Will County, the Pirc family will need to raise $135,000. To date, they have collected $50,000 by raffling donated merchandise at suburban festivals. That amount includes a $20,000 donation from Crime Stoppers of Will County.
“If this project is why this happened to us, then we’re going to do it for the rest of our lives,” said Cristy Pirc (pronounced pierce). “I’m going to go ahead until someone tells me to stop. And even then, people who know me know that I won’t stop anyway.”
After spending a few hours at Gary’s mother’s home Feb. 21, a Sunday, Taylor and her grandmother decided to pay a mid-afternoon visit to Taylor’s great-grandmother’s home in a nearby town.
Taylor and her grandmother headed south in a four-door Oldsmobile on Larkin Avenue, Pirc said, and his mother remembers the child falling asleep in the back seat with the seat belt around her.
A split second after their car moved through the intersection of Larkin Avenue and McDonough Street, a station wagon traveling north on Larkin struck the median. The front end of the vehicle jumped the barrier curb and came down on the car Taylor was riding in.
The impact caved the roof in over Taylor’s head and split the floor board under her feet. She was killed instantly.
The driver of the car that jumped the median, 52-year-old Thomas Pomykala of Joliet, had had too much to drink, and had gotten behind the wheel.
A Will County jury on May 14 convicted Pomykala of reckless homicide in connection with Taylor’s death. Pomykala also had been convicted on drunken driving charges in 1976 and 1983.
He is serving a 14-year sentence in state prison in Shawnee.
Gary Pirc said he had a difficult time accepting Pomykala’s DUI record. “You’re trying to deal with finding out that your daughter has died, and you’re trying to figure out why,” he said. “Then you hear this.”
The Taylor Pirc Video Camera Project, organized with the help of law enforcement officials and modeled after a similar effort in Ogle County, has raised funds one $1 raffle ticket at a time over the past several months. Joliet Police Detective Dan Hulbert, a leader of the project, said the volunteers that have come forward to help include another area man, Dick Sawyer, who lost a son in a DUI wreck.
“I can’t say enough about these people,” Hulbert said. “They’ve given 150 percent all the way.”
The project has earned enough money for 10 cameras so far, Hulbert said, at a cost of about $4,500 each.
Lauren Pirc has done her part as well, reading a speech in the classrooms of Craughwell School in Joliet, where she is a 3rd grader.
“We want to stop drunk drivers from killing any more little kids,” she has told her schoolmates. “If you would like to help us, please bring some change to put in the milk jug.
A counselor at the school took Lauren’s milk jug plan to other schools in the district, and more than $1,800 in coins has been donated.
In addition to the video project, Cristy Pirc has started speaking to DUI offenders sentenced to hearing the testimonies of people whose lives have been shattered by the crime.
Pirc said she puts her sorrow away for a few minutes and gives a frank talk about choice, something she says she didn’t have on Feb. 21.
“You kind of put the grief somewhere else and deal with it later,” she said.”It’s the same thing we still do to get through the day and to be there for Lauren. That’s what we have to do.”
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Taylor Pirc Video Camera Project
Information: Contact Joliet Police Detective Dan Hulbert at 815-724-3023.
Donations: Mail to Crime Stoppers of Will County, P.O. Box 2373. Joliet, IL 60434 (earmarked for Taylor Pirc.)
