Tiny Town In Iowa Tries To Cope With Tragic Killing Of Mr. Ed Thomas

The tiny town of Parkersburg, Iowa, Thursday is trying to understand what, for now, is incomprehensible. Mid-morning Wednesday, a former Aplington-Parkersburg High School football player, twenty-four year Mark Becker, walked into the school’s weight-room – a red, well worn shed, down a bit from the school, a substitute while the school rebuilds what was destroyed in a tornado that tore through Parkersburg - passed a number of current students, and shot the football coach, fifty-eight year old Ed Thomas several times, before killing him, then walked out. Becker was later arrested outside his parent’s home.

Thomas, who coached Becker, according to all reports, was Parkersburg. He was more than the high school football coach, more than the town, likely more than he ever knew. As word spread of his death, it seems, according to reports that all just sort of stopped. Everyone cried: men, women, teenagers, all anxious for an answer. After the tornado touched down last summer, it was Thomas, most insist, who saved the town, who worked to rebuild and restore what was lost, finding along the way what was never there to begin with too, a sense of civic and personal pride. In thirty-seven seasons, Thomas won two-hundred and ninety-two games and two state titles, impressive, and made more so when you realize the school has never had more than three hundred students enrolled at any one time. I doubt the story is about football, though. It never is.