Everyone at “the compound,” the headquarters of Skydive Chicago, agrees with Todd Fey that Saturday, June 7, 2003, was a nice day for hurling yourself out of an airplane. “Winds were very light,” recalls the 42-year-old marine parachutist and skydiving instructor, who has more than 2,200 jumps under his belt. To this day Fey isn’t sure how or why, in the course of a routine jump under ideal conditions, he got caught up in the chain of events that led to the death of Skydive Chicago’s founder and leader, Roger Nelson.
At about 3,000 feet, Fey and his partner completed their routine, separated, and pulled their rip cords. “You don’t want to open your parachute close to anybody,” says Fey. Like Nelson, they were using Velocity parachutes–small, high-performance canopies designed to handle steep turns at high speeds. Both chutes deployed perfectly.
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Blinded by nylon and with his own canopy largely deflated, Fey somehow managed to regain tension in his steering handles. Fey reckons he hit the ground at 50 miles an hour, and that the interval between the aerial collision and the final impact was three seconds at most. “I just lay there trying not to move, because I really thought my back was broke. At that point I thought I was the only one hurt–I was facing away from Roger. At some point while people were attending to me and medical technicians started to show up, I recognized that there was someone else. I didn’t know how bad.”
The injured men were taken to Ottawa Hospital. Fey had a fractured foot and ankle and torn ligaments in both knees. Nelson was evacuated to Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, where he died of multiple internal injuries. He was Skydive Chicago’s 14th fatality in ten years.
A petite blond, Missy is president of SDC. Lanky, spike-haired Rook succeeded his father as SDC’s program director. Both are multiple medalists and world-record holders. Missy made her first tandem jump with her father at age five, Rook at four. “My dad was that type of person,” says Missy. “He took me hang gliding when I was three. I asked my mom, ‘Why did you let me go?’ and she was like, ‘Yeah, like I could have told your father no. Ha!’” (Missy’s mother, Jeannie, was divorced from Roger and lives in the southwest.)
The trauma of watching his brother die notwithstanding, Roger went on to establish his own drop zone in Sandwich, Illinois, in ’82 and continued to organize the annual Freak Brothers conventions. Then in ’86 federal prosecutors charged that he’d been the ringleader of a smuggling network since ’76, and that he and 16 coconspirators were responsible for transporting millions of dollars’ worth of marijuana and cocaine from Belize, Jamaica, and Colombia into the Chicago area.
Nelson was released in ’93. Skydive Sandwich having folded in his absence, he set about building a bigger, better drop zone, Skydive Chicago. According to Glenn Bangs, president of the United States Parachuting Association, Nelson’s return to skydiving created a stir of controversy in the community. “One camp was like, ‘He served his debt to society,’ and the other was, ‘Oh no, we have a convicted felon.’”
