Love Her to Death

Love Her to Death

SHE WAS FIGHTING for her life. That was about all East Cocalico Township Police Department (ECTPD) Patrolman Michael Firestone knew as he sat behind the wheel of his cruiser, flipped on the lights and siren, and sped off.
 It took Firestone five minutes to get to the Roseboro residence in Reinholds, Pennsylvania, from the ECTPD in nearby Denver, after the call from Lancaster County Wide Communications had come in. “The reporting person,” Firestone was told along the way, meaning the 911 caller, “had woken up and found his wife in a swimming pool on the property.”
 And that was all Patrolman Firestone knew going into the situation. Yet that name, Roseboro … it was synonymous in this part of Lancaster County with wealth, status, good-standing. You mention the name Roseboro to any store clerk or Denver native and you’d likely hear, Don’t they own that funeral home?
 Indeed, the Roseboro family had been morticians for over a century.
 On that night, July 22, 2008, at 11:09 P.M., Firestone pulled into the Roseboro’s driveway off Creek Road, a half-tarred, half-gravel, slight uphill path heading toward a white garage off to the right. The massive home took up the entire corner lot of West Main Street (Route 897) and Creek Road. The smaller garage Firestone had pulled up in front of faced the east end of the Roseboro’s pool, the back of the home itself. This smaller garage stood about twenty to thirty feet in front of a much larger and longer coop-like structure used years ago to house turkeys when the land was a farm. On either side of the smaller garage were walkways, one heading toward the house, the other into the pool area. Looking, Firestone spotted EMT Cory Showalter, who had been called on his pager and driven from his house a half-mile down the road, beating Firestone to the scene. Showalter, a thirty-year volunteer for Reinholds Ambulance, six years with the Adamstown Fire Department, was performing CPR on a middle-aged, white female with long, flowing blonde hair, who was lying on the ground next to the pool. By trade, Showalter was a fulltime painter, and quite familiar with the layout of the Roseboro house. He knew the Roseboro family personally, having been hired by Michael Roseboro to paint part of a new addition on the house.
 “I saw,” Showalter later said, “when I got there … I saw it was Mike that was—he was kneeling beside Jan.”
 Jan Roseboro, the forty-five-year-old wife of the undertaker was on the ground. Lifeless and unresponsive.
 Firestone had an “immediate view” of the backside of the Roseboro’s house as he parked and dashed from his car toward the pool deck area.
FROM: LOVE HER TO DEATH Copyright © 2011 by M. William Phelps. All rights reserved.  Published by arrangement with Pinnacle Books an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.