‘They were real close friends’ Sonny Tracy, landlord

A sign that reads “Jesus Loves You” hangs underneath a second-story window of a Caribou apartment where 11 of the 14 men who died last year in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway lived.

The sign was there before the accident, and it remains there today.

Sonny Tracy, the men’s landlord, has a strong faith and doesn’t mind displaying it on the painted wooden sign that also reads, “Tracy’s Gun Shop,” a business he owns and operates in the space below the apartment.

Tracy will tell anyone who asks that he adored the men – “they were real close friends” – and that he thinks about them “all the time.” He likes to say that in an unofficial way he adopted some of them, even counseled them about staying true to their marriage vows and being careful driving home if they had a beer at night, “things like that.”

“They’d get down, just like anyone would get down if they were away from home,” said Tracy, standing in the parking lot of his store, the sign overhead, repeatedly wiping tears from his eyes with a neatly folded handkerchief. “Most of them read their Bibles at night. They loved Jesus.”

Tracy has strong feelings and fierce opinions about the accident and what caused it. He said he does not blame either Chrysler Corp., the manufacturer of the 15-passenger van the men were in, which is being sued by a Texas law firm on behalf of the men’s families, or the foreign workers’ employer, Evergreen Forestry Services of Sandpoint, Idaho.

According to Tracy, driver inexperience, carelessness and speeding caused the accident.

“The man who was driving, I love him very much. I loved him,” said Tracy, in a recent interview, “but that doesn’t make him an angel. When you have 15 people in a van, you’ve got a responsibility. You don’t act like a child.”

Tracy also points at John’s Bridge, which the van went over and which, like other bridges in the North Woods, has no guardrails. He believes the state and private landowners have a responsibility to make sure that wooden bridges on their properties have railings on them.

“To be honest with you, I wish they had a railing on the bridge,” Tracy said. “They [the state or private landowners] don’t want to hear that. They have railings here on the Maine highways on the bridges. Why can’t they have them in the woods?”

A year later, Tracy remains critical of – and hurt by – an out-of-state newspaper report last year that he says called him “a slumlord.” He agrees the apartment isn’t clean by any means after nine or more men have lived in it for an extended period of time. “They’re men.” But, he said, before any crew moves in, he hires cleaners to scrub the place from top to bottom.

Every year, Tracy said, the foreign workers “argue” over who is going to live in the apartment. He has rented the six-room apartment to up to 12 men at a time.

“Where can you stay for $4.15 a day for everything?” Tracy asked. “I’ve got cable TV in there with 30 Spanish-speaking channels. Where can you get that?”

This year, Tracy rented his second-floor apartment to numerous crews of tree thinners, all from foreign countries, who came to Maine to earn a decent wage and send it home to their families.

“By coming over here, they want the best for their families,” Tracy said. “What they make in an hour here they don’t make in a week there. They sacrificed for it.”

Tracy already has been thinking about how he will mark the one-year anniversary on Sept. 12 of the state’s worst traffic accident in terms of fatalities.

“I would like to go up there,” said Tracy, referring to John’s Bridge. “I’ll probably put some flowers up there or something. I would like to do that.”