A family’s pain

Ralph McKenzie still expects his son, Mark, to come skidding into hunting camp in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains. “Where’s the beer? What you got to eat? Seen any elk?” A year has passed since Mark’s death, but the stories his friends and family tell make it sound like it was yesterday when he sat around the campfire with them drinking beer. His favorite place, the hunting camp, is where Mark’s family chose to spread his ashes and place a memorial. That’s where they were last Fourth of July weekend when someone tracked them down to deliver the news that 8-year-old

Shasta Groene had been found alive.

It was a bittersweet message. The fact that Shasta was found alone didn’t bode well for her 9-year-old brother, Dylan, who they later learned had been killed. Both children had been kidnapped from the family home where Mark McKenzie, his fiancé Brenda Matthews Groene and her 13-year-old son, Slade, were slain.

That night at camp, Mark’s friends and family drank so much that they said it would have done him proud. The next day, they spread his ashes.

The mothers of Mark and Brenda were watching TV a year ago Tuesday when they saw the couple’s white cinderblock home on the screen and heard three people had been killed in a home on Frontage Road in Wolf Lodge.

Mark’s mother, Lee McKenzie Wood, drove to the scene but couldn’t get close to the house.

“They said there were three people dead in the house,” she said. “I told them, no there’s five people. There should be three kids, two adults.”

Darlene Torres, Brenda’s mother, said she didn’t know which members of the family had been killed until police came knocking at 2 a.m.

“It was the most horrible way to find out,” Torres said.

For the past year, the family members say they have felt every emotion imaginable: Horror, pain, anger, intense depression. But on Saturday they were able to laugh a little, despite a few tears, as they remembered the family members they lost.

Mark and Brenda, who knew each other their whole lives, became a couple when Shasta was a toddler. They were planning to marry in September. Brenda was considering a morning wedding followed by a barbecue in the afternoon.

She loved to throw parties and no matter how many people showed up for dinner, Brenda’s family said she could throw together a meal to feed them all.

“She never made anything from a box,” Torres said. “It was all from scratch. Even her salsa.”

Brenda spent a lot of time working in her yard and planting flowers. She was planning to put in a garden and had already asked for help with the canning.

Nena Donnenwirth, Brenda’s cousin and best friend, said the two went shopping at a nursery the week Brenda was killed. Brenda spent $70 on plants, including a lilac that had two shoots coming up so they would each have a start.

At times there were nine people living in the small house – Brenda, Mark, her five kids and grandchildren, too. McKenzie commuted daily to Spokane and worked 60-hour weeks at Spokane Stainless Products.

Torres said Mark was like a father to Brenda’s children and the sole provider for the family. He worked hard, Torres said, so Brenda could stay home with the kids.

The house didn’t have a dishwasher, and the washer and dryer didn’t always work, Torres said. The family had to flush the toilet by pouring water inside it.

One time the house flooded and the family lived in a school bus. Brenda was pregnant with Shasta at the time.

No matter how scarce money was or how hard the times, Brenda took good care of the kids and always had dinner on the table, Torres said.

Most important, “they were always happy,” said Steve McKenzie, Mark’s brother.

Authorities initially said the crimes didn’t appear to be random. The media examined every detail of Brenda and Mark’s lives and that of their friends and families.

“The most frustrating part was to have to fight for their honor when it shouldn’t have been that way in the first place,” Torres said.

Much media coverage has focused on the kidnapping of Dylan and Shasta, and Dylan’s subsequent killing. The family said they believe other victims in the tragedy have been forgotten.

Slade Groene was only 13 when he was killed.

Less than two months earlier, the family had gathered at the home to celebrate his birthday. Brenda made a “wonderful salmon dinner,” Torres recalled.

“She always made a Jell-O cake for everybody’s birthday,” Torres said. “It was her own special way of making it.”

But for this birthday, Slade wanted cheesecake and Brenda got it for him.

“Slade was just getting to the age where you could do real fun things with him,” Steve McKenzie said. “You could take him hunting. You could take him hiking. And he could keep up.”

He liked to take Shasta and Dylan for rides on a four-wheeler on the 5 acres surrounding their home, Torres said.

Torres came up with the idea of launching balloons into the sky this year on what would have been Slade’s birthday. The entire family and friends gathered outside the home, now a crime scene.

She said some people might not understand how the family could ever go back there.

“That’s where their home was,” Torres said. “That’s where all of us would have been for his birthday.”

Mark was born there – in a home that his father, as a young man, had helped build. The home has been in the family for 56 years.

“It was a gathering place, a safe place,” said Ken Francis, Mark’s best friend and hunting buddy.

Once Mark died, Francis and another friend had a set of elk antlers tattooed on their shoulders with Mark’s name. It’s another way, Francis said, that Mark can be with him come hunting season.

Even if Mark isn’t there physically, he will be in that way. And in the stories that flow as freely as the beer around a smoky campfire.