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  Still, Chase Koch could never beat Matt Wright. If Chase was impressive, Wright was slightly more so. Their close proximity in talent drove a friendly competition between the teammates. During those intense hours of practice, it was often Chase Koch and Matt Wright who fought the hardest against each other.

  Chase won more freedom as he excelled in school and tennis. He got a Ford Explorer and, during his sophomore year, he got his driver’s license.

  On the evening of Saturday, September 18, 1993, Chase took the car out for the evening. He planned to take a group of his friends to a shopping mall. Chase was in the driver’s seat, and, like so many teenage boys, he must have luxuriated in the freedom it gave him. He accelerated, and felt the speed and power of the Explorer.

  Chase Koch was in charge, and he was going fast.

  * * *

  That evening, a woman named Nola Foulston was out for a walk. She happened to be the prosecuting attorney for Sedgwick County, which encompassed Wichita. As she strolled along, Foulston saw a Ford Explorer driving through the neighborhood. She would later say that the Explorer was going so fast that she took notice of the car and remembered what it looked like. The car was barreling through residential streets. It is unclear if she saw the teenaged boy who was driving.

  At that moment, a twelve-year-old boy named Zachary Seibert was out for a jog. Zac, as he was known to his parents and two siblings, ran a three-mile loop from his home, about three times a week. His father, Walter, had helped him trace out the route. Walt himself had been an accomplished runner; he met Zac’s mother while he was training in Boulder, Colorado, to run in the Olympics. Zac was the couple’s oldest child and, in September of 1993, Zac was almost thirteen years old and becoming an enthusiastic runner. He often woke up before five in the morning to get in a run before school started.

  Walt taught his son to be mindful of cars. That evening, while Zac was running south through the neighborhoods near his family’s home, he stopped at the intersection on East Douglas Avenue, a four-lane road that was a major thoroughfare for crosstown traffic. He stopped at a pedestrian crosswalk beneath a traffic light, and pressed the button to activate the crossing signal. Zac had his headphones on and was listening to Kris Kross, an upbeat hip-hop group with a driving beat.

  The traffic light on Douglas turned yellow, and then red. A big van slowed down and stopped in the lane closest to Zac. The van would have obscured Zac’s view when he looked left to scan for traffic heading west on Douglas Avenue. Walt had coached Zac on looking both ways when he entered a crosswalk, so presumably Zac did so. Then he jumped into action, running out into the street.

  Chase Koch was driving the Explorer on Douglas with at least one friend in the car. They were going to a shopping mall called Towne East Square, presumably to waste away the hours of a Saturday night in the tradition of teenagers everywhere, hitting the food court, meeting up with other friends, browsing the windows.

  Chase was going fast. He was about a block away from the mall, and driving in the left lane. As he approached the crosswalk, the traffic light was red and the big van was stopped in the right-hand lane.

  Just as Chase passed the van, Zac lurched out in front of his car. There must have been less than a second for Chase to respond. The front right corner of Chase’s car struck Zac, and Chase kept driving. He went about two hundred yards until he came to a parking lot, where he turned his car around. He called 911 to report the accident from his car phone.

  Zachary Seibert was still alive when the ambulance arrived and transported him to HCA Wesley Medical Center. Someone called his father, Walt, who rushed to the hospital to be at his son’s side. When he arrived, Walt was told that Zac was still alive. Details were sparse, but it appears that everyone involved already knew that the driver of the car was the son of the richest man in town. This created an awkward, painful dynamic. Walt Seibert didn’t think much about it because he was desperate for news about his son, but he couldn’t ignore the dynamic for long.

  “At the hospital, there was a cop . . . from the Wichita Police Department that actually told me not to ‘seek a pound of gold.’ At that moment, when I don’t know if my son is living or not,” Seibert recalled. He assumed the police officer was referring to the notion that the Seiberts might sue the Koch family in order to profit from the tragedy. Seibert said such an action was inconceivable to him.

  Zac died roughly an hour after arriving at the hospital.

  * * *

  Charles Koch was more than a prominent citizen of Wichita—his company was one of the city’s economic engines. On Tuesday, September 21, 1993, subscribers of the Wichita Eagle learned that Charles Koch’s son, Chase, was driving the car involved in a horrific tragedy.

  Charles and Liz Koch took swift action to protect their son. But they also took action, just as swiftly, to expose Chase Koch to the dire consequences of his mistake. They did so in a way that was severe and that ensured Chase could never deny the reality of what he had done.

  To protect Chase, the Kochs employed Don Cordes, the bulldog attorney who was general counsel for Koch Industries at the time. Cordes became the Koch family’s spokesman, and he conveyed a narrative that minimized Chase Koch’s culpability in the accident.

  Cordes told the Wichita Eagle that Chase Koch thought the traffic light over the crosswalk was yellow as he approached it, an account that Chase had provided to authorities after the accident. Cordes said it seemed unlikely that Chase Koch was speeding, in part because there were no skid marks at the scene of the accident. “We are going on the theory that, when he swerved to the left, if he would have been going at a high rate of speed, he would have spun out of control. This is just one of those tragic things,” Cordes told the paper. “There was no drinking, no drugs. This was a straight-arrow kid. Good grades, athlete.”

  It might have been easy for Charles and Liz Koch to shield Chase behind their company lawyer. It might have even been pragmatic. They didn’t know the Seibert family, and didn’t know if the family might seek to extract its “pound of gold.”

  But the Kochs chose a different strategy. Shortly after Zachary Seibert died, Charles and Liz Koch told their son to visit Zac’s parents in their home; to be accountable for what he had done. At the time, Walter Seibert was still trying to process what happened. Elizabeth Koch accompanied Chase to the Seiberts’ home. Walt Seibert said that he wanted to talk to Chase privately and suggested that he and Chase could sit in the front seats of the Seibert family’s van. Chase agreed to it. When they closed the doors, Chase and Walt were encased together in silence. Walt Seibert could see that the sixteen-year-old next to him was distraught, and maybe terrified.

  “I just wanted him to tell me his version of what happened. He was extremely, extremely nervous. Maybe I don’t blame him, for what he went through,” Seibert said. Chase apologized, and his deep remorse seemed utterly sincere. Seibert pressed the boy for details about the accident.

  “He basically just said he didn’t know what was happening. He thought the light was yellow, and didn’t say anything about speeding,” Seibert recalled. This fact would gnaw at Seibert later, because he felt like he hadn’t gotten the whole story. County prosecutor Nola Foulston later told him that she had seen Chase’s vehicle speeding through neighborhoods before the accident. But while Chase might have fumbled his words with Seibert that day, he later admitted in open court to running the red light and accepted blame for what he had done.

  Charles, Liz, and Chase Koch attended Zachary Seibert’s funeral. A friend of the Seibert family would later tell the Wichita Eagle that it was “emotionally wrenching to watch [the Koch family] at the funeral . . . It took a lot of courage to walk in that group of people. And every eye in that church was on them.”

  Chase Koch must have felt those eyes on him. This was the kind of experience that burns into a person’s mind. Chase Koch had been careless and reckless in a way that is common among teenage boys. But in an instant, the carelessness reaped consequences that c
ould never be erased, for anyone involved.

  * * *

  Nola Foulston recused herself as prosecutor because she was a potential witness in the case. A special prosecutor named Stephen Joseph was appointed to the case, and he charged Chase Koch with misdemeanor vehicular homicide. This was a lesser charge than involuntary manslaughter, a felony that could be applied to traffic accidents where drivers acted with conscious knowledge that they were threatening human life, or acted with a total lack of concern for other people’s safety. Joseph didn’t think that the facts of the case warranted such a serious charge.

  Chase Koch plead guilty to vehicular homicide in December. In January, just as he was beginning the second half of his sophomore year in high school, Chase was sentenced to a year and a half of probation, one hundred hours of community service work, and a nightly curfew that would last ten months. He was also required to pay for Zachary Seibert’s funeral expenses and to take a defensive driving course.

  Walter Seibert said he was satisfied with the sentence and believed that justice had been served. But decades later, Seibert was still bothered by his conversation with Chase Koch in the van. He felt that Chase tried to evade responsibility. “He was with three other teenagers in the car. So they were screwing off. They were fucking around, driving at too high a speed,” Seibert said. “He didn’t tell me about going through a red light. He didn’t tell me about not seeing the light. The thing is, he was so, so obviously nervous. I can’t honestly totally blame him. But the bottom line is, he still killed my son. And he didn’t own up to anything he did.”

  Seibert was not aware of it, but Chase Koch would never be able to escape what he had done. As he grew older and rose through the ranks of Koch Industries, Chase Koch rarely mentioned the accident. But he lived with it every day of his life. “I wish I could take it all back,” Chase Koch said about the accident. “I can’t forgive myself for what I did. And I don’t expect anyone else to.”

  The accident permanently removed an element of innocence from Chase Koch’s life. There was before the accident, and there was after. In the time after, the memory of what happened never went away. “I take full responsibility for what happened,” Chase said. “And I think the reality is that I’m going to live with this the rest of my life.”

  * * *

  During the second half of his high school career, Chase Koch once again found his place on the tennis court. His high school career record was 110 wins and 14 losses. All of those losses were against his teammate Matt Wright.

  When Chase Koch was a senior, Coach Hawley suggested that he play doubles with Matthew Wright at the state championship. Hawley believed that Chase richly deserved a state title, and he could get it by playing with Wright. Chase told Hawley he’d think about it over a weekend. When he came back on Monday, Chase said that he didn’t want to do it. Winning a state title didn’t seem as important as being measured on his own merits.

  * * *

  After Chase Koch’s senior year of high school, an emergency meeting was called among managers at Koch Industries’ oil refinery in Corpus Christi. A manager had just been informed that Charles Koch’s son would be coming to work there for the summer. This set off something close to a panic. One of the employees at the meeting that day was Brenden O’Neill, the engineer who would later earn millions trading derivatives for Koch.

  “It was kind of funny,” O’Neill recalled of the meeting about Chase’s arrival. “It was like. ‘What are we going to do?’ ‘We’re going to take care of him and keep him busy and give him some stuff to do.’ ”

  O’Neill didn’t find the situation funny for long. He was informed that Chase Koch would work directly under him. This required a painfully tense balancing act. Managers felt that Chase had to be pushed, but also had to be treated well. The job had to be hard, but not grueling. O’Neill was in charge of managing this contradiction day to day. O’Neill was given one key warning from his boss: “Don’t let him get hurt.”

  When Chase arrived, he wasn’t what O’Neill had expected. He was tall, quiet, and completely unpretentious. “He wasn’t a workaholic at eighteen, I’ll put it that way,” O’Neill recalled. “He didn’t act like, ‘Hey, I’m going to take over the company someday.’ ”

  Early in the summer, Chase told a story that put O’Neill at ease. Chase said that before he came to Corpus Christi, his father had called him into his office and then called the plant manager on the phone while Chase was listening: “Charles calls up the plant manager and says, ‘If Chase screws up, I want you to fire him on the spot. And if you don’t have the balls to do it, I’ll do it myself,’ ” O’Neill said. “Chase told me that. The plant manager didn’t tell me that.”

  O’Neill found Chase Koch to be a surprisingly normal teenager. Chase wanted to make friends and spent a lot of time working on his car, installing a souped-up stereo and speaker system during his free time. O’Neill gave Chase jobs that kept him away from the cracking units and refinery towers, where flammable chemicals flowed at high pressure. Chase analyzed spreadsheets of data from the refinery operations and helped O’Neill and his colleagues analyze the units’ performance. It was the Goldilocks job—just educational enough without exposing Chase to too much danger.

  O’Neill very rarely saw Chase get agitated, let alone lose his temper. One of the few instances this happened remained vivid in O’Neill’s mind decades later. As they were working in the office one day, an employee from the payroll department came in looking for “Charles Koch,” probably referring to a directory that listed Chase’s full name: Charles Chase Koch.

  Chase knew that the payroll employee was referring to him. “I could tell that he was, like, visibly offended that he called him Charles,” O’Neill observed. Chase’s response was swift and terse. “My name’s not Charles. It’s Chase.”

  * * *

  Fred Koch went to MIT. Charles Koch followed in his footsteps and attended MIT for both his undergraduate and multiple graduate degrees. David Koch went to MIT. Bill Koch went to MIT.

  Chase Koch went to Texas A&M. Chase majored in marketing. He didn’t play tennis, and he lived, for the first time, outside the small circuit of the Koch family compound, the Wichita Country Club, and the Wichita Collegiate School campus. When he moved to College Station, Texas, Chase lived in a place where the Koch name didn’t mean anything. For the first time in his life, he could be Chase, rather than Chase Koch.

  After graduation, Chase Koch decided not to move home. He wanted to cut his own path and work for a company where his family name wasn’t written on the front door. He moved to Austin, Texas, and got hired at a small consulting firm, doing marketing work. During his off hours, Chase started playing music and joined a band that played gigs around Austin. They played covers of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Widespread Panic songs, alongside some original material. It was “jam-band stuff,” as he called it, played for an audience heavily lubricated with beer.

  This was a happy life for a while, but a sense of uneasiness began to creep in. He was living like an ordinary, workaday white-collar guy. But in his world, this life could be considered a failure. The mythology of his father hung over him. His dad earned multiple degrees from MIT and became CEO of Koch Industries in his early thirties. Compared to this, it looked like Chase Koch was stagnating, even failing.

  In 2003, Chase Koch traveled to New York to watch the US Open with his family. When the game was rained out, Chase joined his father and their family friend Leslie Rudd for lunch. When they sat down, Rudd started asking Chase how he was enjoying Austin. How was the marketing gig? How was life? Was Chase happy? Charles Koch sat silently and watched. Chase tried to act disinterested and dodge the questions. Things were fine. The job was good. Austin was great.

  Rudd did not relent. He pressed Chase—why didn’t Chase come back to Wichita and work for the family business? Why was he wasting time down in Texas playing in a band? Then Rudd put on the hard sell. Chase should give a hard look at coming back to the fa
mily company.

  “What I said to him was: ‘Chase, it’s a fabulous company. Your dad’s a great CEO,’ ” Rudd said. “ ‘It’s fine if you want to turn it down, but you’ve got to earn the right to turn it down. You’ve got to go—find out what it’s about, work there, and then decide. You can’t just say no hypothetically.’ ”

  Chase looked over at his father, who seemed to be acting studiously disinterested in Rudd’s line of questioning. Rudd insisted later that Charles Koch didn’t put him up to the job of convincing Chase to return. Rudd said he cared about Chase and gave him advice that he would have given to his own son.

  The conversation changed Chase Koch’s life. He quit his job in Austin, quit the band, and came back home to Wichita. Soon after he returned, Chase Koch attended a meeting with his father and Steve Feilmeier, Koch Industries’ chief financial officer. Charles Koch and Feilmeier explained that Chase Koch would take a series of jobs that were something like a training course. He would receive the equivalent of an MBA degree during his first years at the company. But the MBA degree was specifically tailored to Koch’s way of doing business. Chase Koch’s real education about the family company had begun.

  * * *

  Chase Koch began a rotation of high-level jobs that exposed him to the strategic pillars of Koch Industries’ modern business. It was telling what Chase Koch did not learn. He was not sent to the oil refineries, or to a pipeline farm, or to a natural gas processing plant. Charles Koch didn’t necessarily want to teach his son about the energy industry. Instead, Charles Koch selected a series of jobs that reflected what Koch Industries had become over the last decade and how it planned to carry on into the future.