Editor’s note: This is the first in a five-part series about the life and death of former ISU student Danny Peterson and how he impacted his family, friends and the detective who pushed everything aside to solve the case.

Chris Peterson, freshman in business, had a face tattooed on his shoulder in October. Chris remembers the needle being especially irritating as the artist scraped his skin over and over to draw on the hair and detailed shading, but the result is a face drawn to lifelike exactness. The face almost appears to be Chris’ own. When he went home, he was nervous what his parents would think.

“Are you upset?” he asked Pat, his mother.

She replied with a smile. “How could I be?”

His father, Tim, was almost speechless, leaving Chris confused about what he thought. But Tim later confessed to Pat that he barely could stop himself from going out and getting the same tattoo for himself.

More strangers than usual saw the tattoo during spring break in March when it wasn’t hidden by a shirt sleeve. And sometimes someone, after a few drinks, would casually ask Chris, “Who’s that on your arm?”

“He was my brother.”

Chris sometimes couldn’t go much further in talking about Danny, his older brother by three years, a former ISU student and the closest friend he had in life. The memories come so fast that he practically chokes on them.

“When they ask you, you’re not ready,” he says. “It’s hard to talk. You’re about to cry. It’s just hard to say everything you want to possibly say.”

Under the tattoo of Danny’s face are the dates “Feb. 28, 1981” and “June 8, 2002.” The first was when Danny was born. The second is when he died in the hospital, six days after he was hit from behind while walking to a friend’s party on a warm Minnesota night. The car didn’t even slow down. Danny’s death would remain unsolved for the entire summer.

Danny “didn’t think of himself as an extraordinary person,” his parents would say at the sentencing hearing of the driver who hit him. He would not have thought almost a thousand mourners would come to his funeral and wake. Or that his face would be seen everywhere: on televisions and newspapers across Minnesota. In a picture frame hanging in the office of a detective who had never met him. On his younger brother’s arm.

Danny would not have imagined his death would leave such a void to everyone who loved him. Or that his life would inspire them so well to carry on past the tragedy.

Brothers by more than blood

The Peterson children, Mark, Laurie, Danny and Chris, grew up in Deephaven, a quiet suburb west of Minneapolis. Their home is in the kind of secluded corner where afternoons could be spent in the woods searching for baseballs hit a little too hard.

The siblings were all generally close, but Chris naturally paired better with Danny, who was closest in age. As long as Chris can remember, Danny was there for him. When Chris was a toddler, he had a speech impediment that made him almost impossible to understand and sometimes the butt of jokes. Danny, though, became his translator to the rest of the world, somehow being able to understand Chris when no one else could.

The two were often confused as twins, perhaps a physical symbol of how well they got along. Chris sometimes even wore Danny’s clothes, much to Danny’s annoyance. When Danny went to Iowa State to study operations management and transportation logistics, Chris almost envied the many new brothers that Danny had at the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.

“I would’ve never thought to come [to Iowa State] if it wasn’t for my brother,” says Chris, 19. “Every time I came I had a lot of fun. I liked the campus. I liked the people. I liked the fact that my brother was here. He was always telling me stories, and I thought it would be awesome if I was with him.”

Ben Bergherr was in Danny’s pledge class at Alpha Tau Omega, 2122 Lincoln Way. Now a senior in finance, he would have been Danny’s roommate this year. When Ben came back from a study abroad in Wales last summer, Danny waited for him at the airport along with Ben’s family. The two were inseparable. They were known for doing Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions together. Ben never did them in Wales because he felt dumb doing it alone. But Danny’s creativity and carefree enthusiasm could make any joke funny. Ben, who lived about half an hour east from Danny in Eagan, was looking forward to that summer.

“We just got along perfectly,” Ben says. “It kind of seemed we were meant to be best friends.”

Danny’s final day awake was Saturday, June 1. The night before, Danny, Ben, and another fraternity brother, Joe Kliegl, paid a visit to the University of Minnesota’s ATO chapter. The trio joked half-seriously that they had been so rowdy that they wouldn’t be welcome back. Danny was still acting a little giddy Saturday morning, as if he hadn’t fully recovered, but he still managed to get a full day in, Chris remembers. He played pool with Tim — the first time in a long time — and beat his old man. Then he went out and threw the Frisbee and football with Chris while they chatted about what they would do that evening.

“You guys should come to Fletchers,” Chris said to Danny. It was one of the last things he remembers saying to him. Fletchers is a restaurant and bar on Lake Minnetonka where Chris worked. But that night Danny, who had been home just once since turning 21, had already made plans to go to Maynards, another restaurant and bar on the lake where the over-21 crowd usually gathered.

“I wish I knew the last thing he said to me,” Chris says, his voice breaking into a sob. “You don’t think it’s going to be the last conversation you ever have.”

Later that evening, Ben, Joe, and Brian Behrendt, another fraternity brother and now senior in marketing, arrived at the Peterson home. At about 9 p.m. they decided to head out to Maynards, which was in Excelsior, a suburb a couple miles away. Danny knew they would be drinking so he asked Pat if she could drop them off — they could walk back in the morning. On the way there, they joked about how it felt like junior high again, the last time they remember their mom driving them to a party.

“Thanks, Mom,” Danny said, the last words Pat remembers hearing from her son.

It was like any other night at the bar, Joe remembers. The friends were catching up on what happened over the past semester. Danny, like always, was a source of constant jokes and stories. He was the type of outgoing person who, Joe says, when you went out with him to a party, you would end up knowing just about everyone there by the end of the night. Ben estimates they had about eight drinks each during the three hours at the bar. They felt clearheaded, though, as the bar closed at 1 a.m. Danny, Joe and Ben decided it was too early to go home so they walked to a friend’s house for a bonfire.

A walk never forgotten

Excelsior Boulevard is a busy artery that runs east to west past the Minneapolis area. In the area where the men walked, the street is just a quiet, two-lane road that winds through a woodsy area bordered by neat houses on one side and a cemetery atop a hill on the other. The lighting is dim and there is no sidewalk, just a dirt shoulder that had puddles from earlier rain. It was short-sleeve weather.

Joe remembers walking next to Ben, and Danny was maybe a foot or two further toward the road than they were. They walked on the dirt shoulder, facing away from traffic. Joe and Ben were talking to each other when suddenly they heard and felt a car pass by with a loud thump.

“Did someone just hit a log or something?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know,” Joe said. He stopped.

“Hey, where’s DP?”

All of a sudden, Joe knew what had happened. Up ahead they saw Danny lying in the middle of the road. They ran to him and yelled his name. There was no response. Danny was on his side, there was a gash on his head, and he was making gasping sounds as though he had difficulty breathing.

Joe and Ben flagged down the first car that came by. As luck would have it, the driver was a paramedic. They rolled Danny onto his back and Joe put his shirt under Danny’s head. The paramedic called 9-1-1 and waited for help to arrive. Someone made the decision to transport Danny by helicopter instead of ambulance, a decision that kept him from dying that evening. A patrol officer asked Joe and Ben for details but the two had been so focused on Danny they didn’t get a good look at the car.

“All we could remember was seeing taillights,” Ben says.

The longest 25 minutes

At about the same time, probably before Danny was airlifted, Chris had gotten off from work and was driving home. He had to turn briefly on to Excelsior Boulevard. He pulled up to a stop sign at an intersection where Danny had walked maybe 15 minutes earlier. The sound and lights of a police cruiser rushing by startled him. When it passed, he took a left onto the road that headed home, not knowing just a couple of blocks ahead his brother lay dying on the road.

The first thing Chris did when he arrived home was wake up his parents. He always did this when coming home late so that they would know he was back home. On nice nights like this one, he would brag about the tips that he brought in. He then went up to his room, brushed his teeth and drifted off to sleep.

Less than half an hour later, Pat woke up again, this time to the sound of the phone ringing. She picked it up and heard a woman ask, “Is this the home of Danny Peterson?”

“Yes,” Pat replied. Then the woman asked who she was. Pat was now wide awake with panic.

“I’m his mother.”

The woman told her Danny had been in a serious accident and had been airlifted to the hospital.

Pat practically screamed into the phone: “Is he alive?”

“Yes. But you need to come quickly.”

Chris heard footsteps running up the stairs. The frantic pounding made him think there was a fire. His usually soft-spoken and gentle mother woke him up roughly.

“Get up. Get dressed. Danny’s been hit and he’s at the hospital.”

Chris let out a cry — he desperately wanted to know what had happened. But there wasn’t time for details and there were no other details. Tim drove them all to the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. They didn’t say much on the way there. There was little else they wanted to say, except to repeat the Lord’s Prayer over and over, during the 25-minute trip.

It had just started to rain.

About this series

This series was inspired by a Minneapolis Star-Tribune July 12 article headlined, “Who struck down Danny Peterson? A detective won’t let go,” about a Minnesota police department and its almost obsessive search for the driver who killed Danny.

The Daily learned from the Star-Tribune and the South Lake Minnetonka Police Department in February that the driver had been arrested and sentenced. This prompted the Daily to find out the complete story behind what happened to Danny.

The events surrounding his life and death are derived from the accounts of 10 of the major people involved, including Danny’s family and the detectives working his case. The Daily also visited the Peterson home and the spot where Danny’s accident took place.

Articles from Minnesota newspapers, the transcript of the sentencing hearing, the text of Danny’s eulogy and victim impact statements to the judge were also sources for this story.