I've told this story three times. Once to my wife the night I got home, sitting at the

kitchen table in Eureka, with mud still caked on my boots and a bandage on my neck that was

soaking through with blood. Once to a claims adjuster from the company's insurance carrier, who recorded the

conversation on a handheld device and asked me to sign a release form when we were finished,

and once to a sheriff's deputy from Del Norte County, who drove down to Eureka specifically to take

my statement, and then told me, when I was done talking, that my account didn't match the physical evidence

and that I should think carefully about whether I wanted it on the record.

I didn't change my statement.

I signed it.

The deputy folded it into a Manila envelope and told me he'd be in touch.

That was 14 months ago.

He never called.

This is the fourth time. I'm writing it down because I can't

keep carrying it in my head. It's too heavy. It's affecting my work, my marriage, my sleep. I wake up at

three in the morning and lie there in the dark and listen to the house settle and my wife breathe.

And I replay what happened in the

Bluff Creek drainage in May of 2022, and I cannot make it make sense. But it happened, all of it.

I have the scar on the back of my neck and a 17-page incident report filed with Pacific Meridian

timber and a dead man's family that will never know

what actually killed him. My name is Kevin Brower. I'm 38 years old. I've worked as a timber

cruiser for Pacific Meridian out of their Eureka office for nine years. Before that I did two years

with a smaller outfit in Roseburg, Oregon, and before that I got

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