It wasn't. The next day the ITALIC "Orlando Sentinel"] ran the headline, "Pro golfer may be charged in fatality," with comments from a Florida Highway Patrol trooper who said police had "very good" witnesses who said that though the two cars never touched they "were engaged with each other." "What they were doing, whether one was mad — we don't know yet," the trooper said. "They were both old enough to know better."
"I heard about it on the morning news," says Tour veteran John Cook, an Isleworth member and friend of Atwal's who was also playing in that nine-hole match with Atwal and Woods. "I couldn't believe it. I looked at my wife and said, 'I was with him literally 10 minutes before this happened.'" Cook says he also was surprised by how the local media treated the story. "They jumped all over it without knowing any of the facts," Cook says.
The facts were muddier still 9,000 miles away in Atwal's native India. "People thought that I was dead, because [the reports] said that I was involved in a fatal crash," Atwal says. "That was the headline, so people thought I had died."
By the time Atwal rejoined the Nationwide Tour three weeks later in California, players and pundits alike were still buzzing about the accident, trying to decipher fact from fiction. "There was chatter and times when other players talked about it behind his back," says Jerry Foltz, a Nationwide Tour analyst for the Golf Channel. "But that was the least of his worries."
What Atwal contended was a tragic mishap had triggered a high-profile police investigation — Were they racing? Was anyone at fault? — that left the golfer in an awkward, defenseless limbo. "Everyone wanted to know [what had happened], and I couldn't really talk about it," Atwal says. "First of all I wasn't going to get any lawyers and then I did. With the investigation the way it was going, I didn't know how it was going to work out. My lawyers told me not to talk about it until it was over.
"So I couldn't really tell anyone my side of the story, which I felt really bad about because people were trying to portray me as someone who was out there trying to street race. I have a family with two kids and obviously Mr. Park had his family. There's no way we're the typical profile of street racers. That story just seemed all wrong, but I couldn't say anything about it." Atwal couldn't even send flowers to the Park family on advice of his lawyers.
When the Florida Highway Patrol finally issued its report in January — nearly 11 months after the accident — it concluded that Atwal and Park were indeed racing and recommended that the state attorney's office charge Atwal with vehicular homicide, which in Florida carries up to a 30-year prison sentence. Three weeks later, after weighing the facts, the attorney general's office balked, deeming that there was not enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Atwal caused Park to drive off the road. "The Vehicular Homicide statute by its language requires that the reckless driving of the accused be the cause of the death of the victim," wrote Assistant State Attorney Robert Eagan. "That element, cause, is lacking." His office would not press charges.
When Atwal heard the news, he was alone in a hotel room on the other side of the world. "My wife called," Atwal recalls. "She was in America at that time and I was in Indonesia and she told me about it, and I was like, 'Wow.' Even though you know you're going to be fine, you always think about your family more than anything else. That's basically what my thing concern was at that point. You think about your kids, your wife. I was always wondering that if I do have to go to court, 'What will I go through?'"
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