A still from 'A Road at Night.'
Former UW-Madison assistant basketball coach Howard Moore survived a May 2019 car crash caused by an intoxicated driver as did his son, Jerrell, who was 12 at the time. His wife, Jennifer, and 9-year-old daughter, Jaidyn, died from their injuries along with Samantha Winchester, the drunk driver who was going the wrong way late on a highway outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Not long after leaving the hospital Moore suffered a debilitating heart attack. Less than a year later the world shut down.
When people started coming out of COVID, Tim Valentyn, a Madison-based attorney and sports agent, approached John Roach about making a video to raise awareness about Moore’s plight and to raise money to support Moore’s ongoing and significant medical costs. Roach, owner of Roach Projects whose credits include co-writing the screenplay for David Lynch’s The Straight Story, quickly concluded, “it’s not a four- to five-minute video, it’s a documentary.”
Funded by UW-Madison donors George (class of 1980) and Pamela Hamel, Roach’s full-length documentary, A Road at Night, is screening April 6 at the Barrymore. Isthmus publisher Jason Joyce will lead a panel discussion after the film.
Roach says it took two years to make the film, which includes interviews with more than 30 people in about seven cities, including Los Angeles, Orlando, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis and Madison. The film draws on the recollections of Moore’s teammates (he was a Badgers basketball player from 1990 to 1995), coaches, colleagues, friends and family.
“We did the first wave of interviews with [Moore’s] teammates and we came away with the overwhelming impression that [Moore and Jennifer] were not just another couple,” says Roach. “They were remarkable people and they were beloved. They just were really outstanding people. And that just made it all worse.”
Roach says Moore was not a particularly outstanding player — he scored just 100 points while playing for the Badgers — but he was a superb teammate and leader. He was also, by all accounts, an inspiring and caring leader during two stints as an assistant basketball coach at UW-Madison.
Although all of the big sports names make it into the documentary, including UW head basketball coach Greg Gard, former head basketball coach Bo Ryan, and former athletic director Barry Alvarez, the most compelling person on screen is Vera Barnes, Jennifer’s mother, who speaks not just of the grief, but the anger she feels over the loss of her precious daughter and other family members. It is searing testimony from one trying to make sense of a senseless tragedy.
The film includes video footage of Winchester and two friends drinking in a bar before her fateful decision to drive home that night. Roach wants the documentary to serve as a cautionary tale. “I hope [viewers] take away the story of the three young women who went out for what seemed an innocent night, but at every juncture when they could have made a good decision, they didn’t.”
As a result, he says, a family paid a terrible toll — one that “these young women never intended, but that their decisions allowed to happen.”
A Road at Night is not a basketball documentary, says Roach. It’s a documentary about drunk driving.
“We tell the story of the lasting impact of these kinds of incidents on families and communities that linger long after the headlines are forgotten. Everyone who knows and loves Howard and Jen is haunted by that crash. There was hardly a person we interviewed who didn’t break down at some point.”
Roach says several Madison-area film professionals worked on the film, which “became a labor of love for everyone. It’s a poignant story. It’s a difficult story. We just tried to help.”
Roach is in talks about a streaming deal for the documentary.
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