Grieving for Tyler Binsted continues one year later

Maybe it was one of those inexplicable, intuitive bonds between twins.

Perhaps it was a premonition of the horrible news that lay immediately ahead.

Then again, it could have been nothing more than a coincidence.

Whatever the case, all Seth Binsted knew was that he was halfway around the world, and something just didn't feel right.

Studying abroad during his sophomore year, the James Madison University student was exploring the architecturally rich Spanish city of Granada last March 28 when a peculiar stomach pain began distracting him. Whether it was related to food, nerves or something else, Binsted couldn't tell, but he recalled a persistent unsettled feeling.

Eventually, Binsted checked his cell phone and saw that his parents wanted him to call their house just west of the Shenandoah Valley community of Mount Jackson. Immediately.

His call was greeted with news that would serve as a benchmark in the life of someone who was still a few weeks short of his 20th birthday.

Tyler, his twin and the person with whom Seth had shared so much, was dead -- murdered a day earlier during a robbery in Richmond, where he was a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University.

As Richmond homicide detectives launched an investigation of the 12th of the city's 36 killings in 2008, Seth Binsted began a trip home -- a journey that would take several days to reach his family in their darkest hour.

It marked the start of a grieving process that continues one year later, a process filled with reflection, pain, questions and fear.

As each day passes, Seth Binsted is afraid of what he might forget, what little snapshot of his rich childhood with his brother will evaporate and never return. The twins grew up with their older sister, Kasey, but the two boys were naturally linked and grew especially close.

"Time carries you away from Tyler. You're at the mercy of something. You're at the mercy of your ability to remember Tyler. And it's kind of a helpless feeling," his brother said. "I mean, all that you have now are memories. So it goes without saying that things are forgotten. And every day you ask yourself what are the things that you've forgotten -- because there are things that aren't there anymore. There are things that are gone.

"So I think, in a way, time doesn't act as a healing property. It's more of an erosion."

Tyler Binsted's slaying struck a chord with many people in the Richmond and VCU communities, who cited several facets of the case as particularly senseless and troubling:

-Binsted, a promising sculpture student, lost his life during a trip with his girlfriend to Byrd Park in search of a small piece of sod for a school art project.

-The robbers, seeking money for drugs, had already gotten the only item of relative monetary value they could find -- the keys to a college student's 14-year-old Honda sedan -- when Binsted was shot in the back as he and his girlfriend walked away from them.

-Binsted had tried to calmly talk the robbers into allowing the crime to end on a peaceful note.

As it turned out, he had some experience in such matters, according to his father, Tom Binsted.

"I told Tyler one time, 'I worry about Seth and I worry about Kasey, but you know, I don't worry about you,'" he said. "I'm not sure why I told him that, but I just felt that at the time.

"I remember Tyler joking with me about being robbed at knifepoint when he first went to Richmond. It caused some concern, but just the fact that he got out of it without being injured indicated to me that he knew how to handle those situations."

But this time, it was not a father-son conversation that could be easily dismissed. This time, a Shenandoah County sheriff's deputy was knocking on the door of the family's restored farmhouse in Mount Jackson.

Tom Binsted, a Marine Corps veteran who fought in the Vietnam War and now works as a steamfitter, was at a job in Manassas -- a two-hour drive from Mount Jackson -- when his cell phone rang.

He could hear his wife, Paula, crying in the background as the deputy explained that Tyler was dead and asked if there was someone who could stay with Paula until Tom made it home.

Over the next few days, Tom Binsted tried to balance dealing with his grief with taking care of logistics.

Seth had to get home from Spain.

Kasey had to get home from Missoula, Mont., where she was a student at the University of Montana.

Tom and Paula had to meet with police, a funeral director and well-wishers.

"The saddest part of this whole thing is that he had so much potential," Tom Binsted said. "And we'll never have an opportunity to see him live up to that potential. It's hard telling where that boy could have gone."

. . .

It was cloudy and cool on the afternoon of Sunday, March 30, for the first of the formal goodbyes to Tyler Binsted.

Shenandoah County, population about 40,000, is in a quiet agricultural region that sits along the edge of the George Washington National Forest and the West Virginia border. Because the county has no large funeral homes, theaters or churches, a memorial service was arranged at the next-best place.

But Stonewall Jackson High School, even with a 2004 renovation that included the addition of air-conditioning in classrooms, still has no auditorium, so the school gymnasium was pressed into service. A piano was rolled in, a large curtain was set up behind the casket, a microphone was placed nearby on a podium for anyone who wanted to share their thoughts, and the large crowd sat in the bleachers on the gym's home-team side.

"It was probably very healthy to have everybody be able to come together like this," said Karen Whetzel, who was one of Binsted's elementary school teachers and eventually became his high school principal.

Like many in the county, Whetzel knew Tyler as one of the Binsted twins, a caring young man who had distinguished himself as an excellent student, a gifted violinist and a key player on a high school soccer team that nearly won a state championship in Virginia's smallest classification.

A different perspective came from the group of people from VCU who made the three-hour bus ride from Richmond for the service.

That contingent included Amy Hauft, chairwoman of the department of sculpture and extended media. She recalled being struck by how many people at the 33,000-student Richmond school knew nothing of Binsted's soccer past, and some weren't even aware he had a brother, let alone a twin.

"It was so interesting," Hauft said, "because we thought of him as this very promising young artist.

"It really brought home the whole idea of when your parents let you go away to college, you make yourself. And he was. He was so thoroughly imagining what he could be."

A small funeral followed the next day at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Jerome, about a 20-minute drive from the family home.

Tyler Jay Binsted was buried in the church graveyard, 11 days before what would have been his 20th birthday.

TOMORROW: Justice for Tyler

Contact Joe Macenka at (804) 649-6804 or .