Deathbed words leave hit-and-run mystery

RALEIGH -- William Joseph Ross, a construction supervisor and avid outdoorsman, spent Halloween evening in his northern Wake County backyard with his dog, tending a small fire, drinking Bud Light, and talking by Nextel radio with a friend.

About 9:45 p.m., Ross heard a truck pull into his dirt-and-gravel driveway. He told the friend to hold on. Soon he returned to the radio. "I've been hit," Ross said. The Nextel went dead.

Minutes later, a passer-by spotted Ross lying beside the road and called 911. Before Ross died the next day at WakeMed, he told a state trooper that he had been struck in his driveway by a white box truck or panel van with black lettering on the side that read, "The Perfect Store."

"That was the best we could get from the guy," Sgt. Jorge Brewer of the Highway Patrol said this week. "He was barely conscious."

The patrol never found the truck and has made no arrests.

"Of course there were no witnesses, no wrecked vehicle," Brewer said. "We are hoping somebody, somewhere saw something and will come forward to help us."

Ross, 41, had lived in Wake County for less than two years. In spring 2007, about two years after a divorce, he moved from Kingston, Mass., to the rental house at 11814 Possum Track Road. He landed a job with the Barnes Group, a Triangle construction company.

Ronnie Adams, a Barnes Group project manager, oversaw several of Ross' projects. He called Ross "a proactive manager who picked up on issues before they became problems."

"He did his job, and he did his job well," Adams said. "He was as good of a man as I've ever worked around."

After Ross' death, his father, Joseph Ross, came to North Carolina from Plymouth, Mass., to clean out his son's belongings. The elder Ross, a retired engineer, began his own investigation, though he has turned up very little.

Truck seen at landfill?

His Internet search for "The Perfect Store" found only references to a book by that title about the beginnings of eBay.

When he took some of his son's trash to a landfill on Durant Road, he ran into an attendant who told him she was sure she had seen the truck there and remembered its unusual lettering.

Joseph Ross suspects there was illegal drug activity at the house on Possum Track Road before his son moved in.

"Billy was concerned because lowlifes kept banging on his door looking for drugs," Joseph Ross said. "I wonder if there's a tie-in? Billy wasn't into drugs."

The Wake Sheriff's Office said it had no record of service calls involving drugs at the residence, however.

Joseph Ross also spoke to the friend who had been talking with his son by Nextel on Halloween night. The friend, whom Joseph Ross knows only as Teresa, told him that during the Nextel conversation, his son said, "Hold on. There's a truck pulling up in my yard."

"A few minutes later he got back on the Nextel and said, 'I've been hit,' " Joseph Ross said.

Efforts by The News & Observer to identify and reach Teresa were not successful.

Father and son

Joseph Ross said he and his son were close. William, a stocky, athletic youngster, played Little League baseball and high school hockey as he was growing up in Massachusetts. Joseph Ross coached his son's Little League teams, and when William Ross turned 13, he became his father's assistant coach.

"After he turned 13, he couldn't play. He wanted to help and give back. He ended up helping me coach for three years," Joseph Ross said. "It was kind of nice having him there. What better coach than someone your own age?"

The father and son often went hunting and fishing together in New Hampshire and Maine.

"It was something that he loved," Ross said, choking up as he remembered a phone call from his son. "You know, when he took his young son hunting, he called me afterward and he said, 'You know Dad, now I know what it takes to be a dad. Now I know how you felt when you took me out.' "

After graduating from high school, William Ross went to work in construction. He became a stone and brick mason, married in his early 20s and had two children: a daughter, now 23, and a son, 16.

Joseph Ross, 68, had been thinking about visiting his son this spring to do "some North Carolina fishing."

Now, he's frustrated about the lack of answers. Surely, he thinks, someone has seen the truck that killed his son.

"I just can't understand the whole thing," he said. "I'm a parent, this is my child, and I just don't know how this nut can be resolved. It's unbelievable."