He met his wife Estelle at the University of Michigan, and they hung out together until their graduation, which occurred concurrently. They got engaged six months after their graduation. She too was an accounting major and wanted to take the CPA exam along with Tony. Two years later they got married. It lasted for nineteen wonderful years and four great children.
Tony never cheated on Estelle because, he said, “I would never do anything to ruin this marriage.”
As his father-in-law Jorey used to say, “When you got the chicken at home, why settle for chicken shit?”
Estelle had died three years earlier in Chicago, where they both had accounting jobs with different employers. She battled uterine cancer for four tough years, undergoing chemotherapy, hair loss, weight loss, and worst of all, her loss of friends who stupidly feared her cancer was contagious. They weren’t stupid, just stupidly superstitious, because they knew better. They just didn’t want to hang out with her because it reminded them of their own mortality.
Tony felt abandoned by Estelle’s death, a feeling that haunted him for three months. He was angry with her for dying and leaving him alone and their kids without a mother. Tony swore his kids would not grow up in the slums of Chicago as he had. He researched numerous web sites for the right location and settled on Sedona, Arizona, because it seemed so much safer and warmer. They didn’t have a ghetto and there was plenty of activities for the kids. He also was able to obtain an accounting job right after moving there, but first he registered each of the four kids in their respective schools.
Tony’s children took the loss of their mother extremely hard. Their grades declined and his son started hanging out with the wrong crowd while living in Chicago. That, too, was a positive reason to move his family to Sedona where everything changed for his kids. They now aced their school grades and three of them tried out for sports, while the youngest learned to ride horses. She loved equines and decided she would become a horse trainer when she grew up.
After Estelle’s death, Tony took graduate school courses while working in Sedona. He then earned his master’s degree and became a CPA for a major accounting firm. After working there for five years, he decided to start his own firm. This had to be in a bigger city than Sedona, so he opened an office in Scottsdale. Within two years he was earning six-figures annually. Thanks to owning his own company, he was able to lease a new Volvo each year and write it off on his corporate taxes. His company provided him fully paid family health benefits and a well-structured 401K. His accounting firm soon became the largest such company in town with seven accountants, two bookkeepers and a receptionist occupying the entire twenty-sixth floor of the Andrews Building in Scottsdale.
Being the owner of the company, he could leave a little early most days to get home in time for his kids to arrive. Four days a week, he cooked for the brood; on the other three days, he took them out to local eateries. He let the kids pick the one location out of perhaps twelve in town that provided scrumptious dessert choices for the end of a dinner meal. Tony never partook of any desserts because he wanted to remain lean when he met with a client. He had read that people who stayed fit are better liked and trusted than obese people.
A few days later, Tony came home to shower and change after working out at the local community center. As he entered his front door, he heard shots fired. He dropped to the front porch while trying to turn his house key to open the front door and get to safety. Once inside, he kicked back at the front door with his heel to close it behind him. He stood up, walked over to the living room, and gradually opened the drapes of his window to peer outside, trying to see who might have been shooting at him, but he saw no one. He didn’t see a car passing either. Luckily, his kids were in school.
Immediately, Tony called 911. “My name is Tony Pilaris, I live at 213 St. Germaine Road and someone just shot at me while I was opening the front door of my house.”
“Were you hurt?” asked the dispatcher?
“No, I wasn’t hit.”
“Did you see anyone shooting at you?”
“No, I didn’t,” Tony replied.
“Then how do you know you were shot at?”
“Because, I felt the bullets, go right past my head and heard them land in the wall next to my front door,” he replied somewhat annoyed.
The dispatcher asked him again, “Are you sure you didn’t see anyone walk by or drive by your home?”
“No, I didn’t, otherwise I would have said so in the first place,” Tony replied, now really annoyed. “Please get the police over here right away.”
“Sorry sir,” the dispatcher responded. “I have to ask these questions. The officers are on their way.”
The police arrived soon after his call and searched the property, finding two .45 caliber bullet holes on the outer wall of his home with the bullets still intact, but no shell casings, which presumably fell inside of the shooter’s vehicle.
One officer put on latex gloves and dug out the bullets from the building and placed them in a plastic bag. Since Tony couldn’t name a person or a reason as to why someone wanted to shoot him, the cops wrote it up in their incident report as probably an accident caused by someone trying out their new gun and shooting up in the air somewhere in the woods near his home. They explained he could pick up a copy of their report at the police station the next day.
Tony did just that and it infuriated him. He found it astonishing that
