He’d been waiting with Emily and Maya, alternating between pacing and shaking his head, and sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. As I was being loaded into the ambulance, Marco and the others tried to console him. “I should have done something,” he kept saying. “I didn’t know what to do. What should I have done?” “You did the right thing, man,” they told him. “You went for help. What the hell were you gonna do? Get mauled, too? How was that going to help your friend?” Once John heard the helicopter approaching, he felt free to go. But he was in no shape to get behind the wheel of a car. The Girdwood friends we’d stopped to chat with earlier that night at The Sanctuary, Jaelyn and Carl, convinced him of that. Carl offered to drive his Subaru, with Jaelyn leading the way in her truck. While Jaha and Emily stuck around to answer investigators’ questions and later bum a ride back home, they headed for Girdwood with Maya crashed out in the back of the Subaru and John in the front passenger seat staring at nothing, replaying the attack over and over and over in his head.
