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1990s, Erika was not a socially active teenager, as most of her friends were. At parties, for example, Erika was the girl in the corner by herself: shy and standoffish. She had boyfriends, sure. But not many. When there was booze around, Erika was afraid to indulge. The first one, in other words, to step up and say, “We shouldn’t be doing that.”
    There was one afternoon in high school when a friend tapped Erika on the back, trying to get her attention. She was standing by her locker. The bell had rung. It was that frantic three minutes in the hallway before the next bell and you were reprimanded for being late to class.
    Erika turned. “What?”
    “Can we copy your homework?” the friend asked. Erika was the smart one of the bunch. She never had much trouble with the curriculum. Getting honor grades seemed effortless.
    “No,” Erika said. She was adamantly against anyone looking at her work and using it. She had done the labor of the homework. She had stayed up late and paid the price. She couldn’t stand lazy classmates.
    “Come on, Erika.”
    “No!”
    And that was it.
    But when Erika went to class, her friends, if they needed her homework to cover themselves, broke into her locker instead and took it, anyway. Realizing this, Erika, of course, could do nothing.
    And this is how Erika Grace’s life would continue: she’d say no to things, get into a tug-of-war, and then eventually give in to them or do nothing to stop them from happening.
    Back then, Erika had kinky brunette hair. Hundreds of coils of naturally tightly wound hair that other girls might have paid lots of money to have done at a salon. She was attractive in a simple, unadorned, librarian type of way. As far as confidence, Erika knew she was good on the basketball court and displayed poise and attitude. When it came to school and socializing, though, she was intimidated. Because of this, she was always “hard on herself,” a friend later claimed.
    “I think maybe because of how hard her parents were on her. They were supportive, definitely supportive, but Erika, as an only child, was always pushed very hard.”
    As far as following the kids into bad behavior, “I could tell,” another friend recalled, “that she really only drank [alcohol] in high school to fit in. When we went on trips . . . and would sneak alcohol into our rooms, she wouldn’t participate.”
    Levelheaded Erika.
    Afraid of the consequences.
    Scared of how one mistake might affect her future.
    But more than anything else, afraid to let down the two most important people in her life—her parents—and of not living up to the standards expected of her. In many ways, Erika Grace was a parent’s dream child. Born in the image of goodness and wholesomeness, with a father who could give her anything she wanted. Erika yearned to impress her parents. She desired to be the person they had taught her to be: caring and honest, hardworking, and able to take care of herself.
    “I’m surprised she wasn’t voted most likely to succeed, in high school,” Kristin Heinbaugh said.
     
     
    As Mitch Grace put it later, a hard-work ethic was in the Grace bloodline; Mitch didn’t expect any more from his daughter than she could give, on or off the basketball court.
    “I was a construction foreman at age twenty,” Mitch told this author, “job superintendent at twenty-one, and started my own business at twenty-two.”
    Regarding the notion of being hard on Erika and pushing her, Mitch believed he was just being a dad.
    “Have you ever worked for anyone in an authority position who was not authoritative? . . . I learned to be a take-charge-type person. I am not a good follower. I would not be a good assistant coach. So, yes, I was probably too bossy about basketball issues [with Erika], because, without realizing it then, if I would just ask, ‘Do you want to play in this or that?’ I now feel she wanted to, but if I mentioned it, she probably felt that I wanted her to. . . .”
    In