GONE IN A HEARTBEAT

The scene is calm in a gravel and grass parking lot off Trinity Road, home
of the Wolfpack tailgating tradition.

A steady breeze whispers through the tree line, ruffling the feathers of
blackbirds scavenging for scraps missed by the Chuck-It Wagons and clean-up
crews.

The only remnants of a football game that just Sunday night attracted more
than a thousand tailgaters are a few sparsely scattered plastic cups and a
lone RV parked sullenly in the back row.

But a little over a year ago, the landscape was not so peaceful.

On Sept. 4, 2004, Chicago natives Kevin McCann and 2nd Lt. Brett Harman lay
dying on the grass, victims of a deadly shooting that rocked the N.C. State
community, committed by then senior in psychology Timothy Johnson.

After a two-week trial, a jury convicted Johnson of the second-degree
murder of Harman and the first-degree murder of McCann on Aug. 18 and
sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

But political science senior and former girlfriend Liana Montsinger, who
dated Johnson during the incident, remembers a time before all that.

A time when Johnson wasn't a murderer, but a great boyfriend. Not a
perpetrator of a violent home invasion, but a good brother. Not a killer,
but a devoted son.

A time that came to a halt with two shots from a .45-caliber pistol.

The Man Behind The Murderer

Tim and Liana's tale began in Jan. 2004, when a mutual friend introduced
the two at a birthday party.

The pair hit it off instantly and according to Liana, were inseparable from
the moment they first met.

"It was so fast," Liana says. "Within days we were saying 'I love you' --
and meaning it."

At that point in her life, she says she had never met someone she clicked
so well with.

"He was half of me, and I was half of him," Liana says. "Tim and Liana --
that's how people referred to us."

Tim was a devoted son -- a "good ole boy" -- who, according to Liana, even
traveled back to his hometown of Tarboro from school to give flowers to his
mom on Mother's Day.

The couple moved into an apartment together in May 2004, sharing the
residence with a mutual friend. They talked frequently about their future
together. They even got a beagle puppy, which they named Bruiser, to raise
together.

"There was no doubt in my mind that I was going to spend the rest of my
life with him," Liana says, fingering the ring Tim gave her and she refuses
to throw away. "We talked about marriage and everything -- it was going to
happen."

In the months that followed, Liana says she was living the "best summer of
my life" with Tim.

"Honestly, there wasn't a time in the relationship when things were bad,"
she says. "It was always just cloud-nine type of stuff."

It was a perfect relationship, Liana says. She would do the laundry, go
grocery shopping and Tim would make the money.

But it was how he made the money that would eventually rope the pair into a
chain of events that would ultimately scar them forever.

Living By The Sword

Underneath the glossy surface, Tim supported himself and his girlfriend by
selling drugs. He dealt cocaine and marijuana to "customers" composed
mainly of students.

Liana sold marijuana as well, although she points out that she hasn't done
so since the shooting.

Together the couple was pulling in $5,000 to $6,000 a week.

Although they both smoked weed -- "as a hobby" Liana says -- they only used
cocaine occasionally.

"I would never say it got out of hand," she says. "Cocaine is different.
It's a lot more serious and people do a lot more stupid things on it."

But the pushing didn't fit in to the long-term plan. It wasn't a permanent
thing, just something to help them get through school.

"It was just a short-term thing that he was doing," Liana says. "Both of us
knew we couldn't get by forever like that."

One day however, the couple's world came crashing down.

On Aug. 23, 2004, Liana and Tim came home to a ravaged apartment.

They found their back door swinging open, Bruiser in disarray, and
thousands of dollars in cash, drugs and personal items stolen from the house.

"Neither one of us were quite the same after that happened," she says. "Our
sense of security was just shredded."

They didn't know where to turn.

Obviously a drug-related incident, they couldn't go to the police. And they
couldn't go to friends for help either.

"We didn't trust anyone, because it could have been any one of our
friends," she says. "When you're dealing with people that are using drugs
- -- they're not going to put a friendship before their addiction."

It was at this point that Tim began carrying a gun everywhere he went -- an
attempt to replace some of that lost security.

"It wasn't to hurt -- it was to protect," she says.

While she says she didn't condone the move, she did understand it.

"It comes with the game," Liana explains. "If you're going to be selling
drugs, you're going to have to ride with the big boys."

The break-in eventually led Tim, along with his brother Tony and some
friends, to break into the home of the people they believed were
responsible for the burglary.

But they were wrong.

"When they came back they were all pumped and stuff, but it turned out that
it wasn't them," Liana says. "I was just hoping they would just come back
with all my stuff."

In the following weeks, Liana began to realize the severity of her and
Tim's situation and how dangerous their lives really were.

"You know the saying, 'You live by the sword, you die by the sword'? I
didn't want to die by the sword," she says. "I didn't want to be someone
who went down as a drug dealer. It wasn't who I was."

She describes it as a phase; one that would eventually stop.

But no one -- not Tim or Liana -- knew how abrupt that stop would be.

'A Really Bad Decision'

Tony was the instigator.

It was the younger brother that had been driving recklessly through the
parking lot, prompting Brett Harman and Kevin McCann to attempt to slow him
down. It was Tony who sought the pair out a second time -- itching to
complete the altercation -- and led them back to the tailgating site.

And according to Liana, she and Tim were not even going to let him come
tailgating at first.

"When he gets a little bit of alcohol in him, he's just a wild man," Liana
says. "He took things way too far this time."

When Tony led the pair, along with some other tailgaters, back to Tim and
Liana's tailgating site, she says the group's intentions were very clear.

"I saw these guys beating Tony up -- they were trying to hurt Tony bad,"
Liana says. "They had Tony on the ground and they were on top of him,
slugging him."

Both Tim and Tony were nowhere near the size of Brett and Kevin, so in a
mental state inebriated by cocaine, marijuana, 12 beers and seven to 10
shots of rum, Tim went to his car for "the next resort" -- a .45-caliber
handgun he had purchased from a friend the night before.

Although Liana tried to stop him from pulling the firearm out of the car,
her friend pulled her away and prevented her from seeing what happened next.

"I'm never going to forget the sound of the shots," Liana says. "My first
instinct was 'He's shooting in the air to scare them away.' I honestly
didn't think he would pull the trigger and point it at someone."

She looked up to see Brett and Kevin on the ground, a crowd scattering and
the love of her life running away from the scene with his brother.

Liana walked around the tailgate area, alone and in shock. Tim eventually
picked her up as the sun was setting.

At a friend's house with Tim, his hair cut and dyed, she says she didn't
know what to do.

"Later that night I remember him just crying in my arms and telling me that
he's so sorry and he didn't mean to do it. There was nothing we could do --
what was done was done," Liana explains. "No matter how sorry he was, he
couldn't put the life back into those boys -- and I couldn't do anything to
help him."

Later that night, the police came to arrest Tim and Tony as well as a few
other individuals as accessories.

As Tim was pulled outside by police, Liana recalls her last words to him.

"The last thing I said to him was, 'I love you baby,'" Liana says. "I
haven't talked to him since."

To Liana, Tim is not a killer, but rather someone who made a horrible mistake.

"He's nothing remotely close to being a murderer," she says. "He just made
a bad decision -- a really bad decision. And he did it for his brother."

Although she recognizes it was ultimately Tim's decision and doesn't
directly blame Tony, Liana says his presence was a factor.

"I know if Tony hadn't come, Tim would be with me now."

Keeping The Faith

Liana was never charged in the double shooting, but regardless, the trauma
hit her hard.

"I've been on an up-and-down-hill roller coaster for most of my college
career and this is just the topper. I plummeted after this," Liana says.
"Once you hit the bottom, you can't go down any further."

She withdrew from classes and at the insistence at her lawyer, moved back
in with her parents in Charlotte.

Unable to contact Tim and most of her friends in Raleigh, she dealt with
bouts of extreme depression, post traumatic stress disorder and loneliness.

To get through it all, she looked to her faith for support.

"I definitely turn to God a lot when I'm feeling really down and when I
don't have anywhere to turn," Liana says. "As soon as the murder happened,
the first thing I did was pray and put it in God's hands."

It was this faith that brought her back to her feet and made her realize
"the Lord had another plan" for her.

"The path I was on with Tim wasn't taking us anywhere nice," she says. "We
both needed to make changes in our lives, and it's sad that it took
something like this to open our eyes."

She also got solace from Bruiser, now more than a year old.

"If it weren't for him, there would have been many nights where I would
have cried and had nothing to hold onto," she says. "He has been a blessing."

She still goes through counseling to deal with stress, panic attacks and
flashbacks that have become less frequent as time wears on.

"It can really hinder someone's life because only time can heal something
like that," Liana says. "There's not a magic pill you can take to be cured
of it."

She still keeps most of the things Tim gave her throughout their time
together -- flowers, letters, the stuffed dog he gave her the first time he
told her he loved her -- and there are things she won't ever be able to let go.

She still loves him, but she knows there is nothing either one of them can
do about it.

It's this lack of an ending that's most painful for Liana.

"I went from the most intense love I've ever felt for someone, to pain and
abandonment," Liana says. "I haven't had any closure at all, it's almost
like he just died."

On Tuesday however, she received permission from her attorney to write Tim
a letter. It will be the first real contact she's had with him since the
shooting.

"I don't even know where to begin," she says. "I could write two paragraphs
or I could write my first novel."

For now, Liana is attempting to move on with her life. She has begun dating
again and enrolled full-time in class for the fall. She is even active in
Campus Crusade and is set to graduate in May.

Although she may one day heal, the shootings, as well as Tim, will never
fully be erased from her memory.

"Every time I think about college I'm going to think about Tim and what we
went through. That was one of the biggest events of my life," Liana says.
"I know I'm only 21, but it's kind of hard to top that. The things that Tim
taught me -- they were life lessons."