But watching Zac crawl into the king-sized bed Roger had bought to replace the twin the boy had left behind, Roger told himself he wouldn’t let another father live through what he had. He considered himself a “typical, gun-loving redneck,” an unlikely foe for the country’s oldest firearms manufacturer. Roger had loved Remington since he was a little boy wielding his granddaddy’s shotgun to take down a buck. Relatively few gun owners have responded to the recall: Only 30,000 - less than 1 percent of the recalled rifles - have been fixed. Remington maintains that its Model 700s are safe, even as internal documents and outside tests have revealed problems. Because of a massive class-action settlement approved in October, owners have 18 months to get them repaired at no cost. Years after he’d lost one son to prison and the other forever, he’d discovered that Remington Arms had recalled nearly eight million Model 700s. Roger had learned too late that he was wrong: Some Remingtons do fire without warning. He followed Zac to his bedroom and stood next to the wooden gun rack that used to hold the rifle. Zac’s rifle couldn’t have accidentally fired, Roger told the jury. Roger hadn’t believed him, and after the district attorney charged the teenager with murder, Roger testified against his son. Roger had bought the Remington Model 700 rifle that Zac swore fired on its own as he stood up from the couch one evening in the summer of 2011, hitting Justin in the forehead and killing him instantly. Roger watched his son, so thin that the prison-issued prescription glasses he wore slipped down his nose, and couldn’t help but feel responsible. The couch was gone, and so was the blue recliner where Justin had last sat.
A cleaning crew had bleached the walls and replaced the carpet. Roger had done all he could to transform it after the night he called “the happening.” He’d hired a taxidermist to clean the blood and brain matter that had hung like black icicles from the deer heads he kept mounted above the sofa. He stopped at the edge of the living room, and Roger wondered if his son imagined the space as it had been. He walked through the kitchen with an ankle monitor strapped to his left leg. He was 20 now, tall enough at 6’2″ that he towered over his father. The last time the boys had lived there, they’d been 15 and 11. Inside the house, pencil marks still notched the pantry wall, reminders of the boys Zac and his younger brother, Justin, had been. Roger Stringer climbed out of his red Nissan pickup and watched as his son Zac eyed the front door. They drove four hours south through Mississippi, back down the gravel road that led to a house that once belonged to a family.
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