A near-fatal attack seven years ago forever changed life for TC Maslin ’05

by ROY KESEY

photographs by THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES

Though he hides it well, TC Maslin ’05’s best life would not include talking to a writer right now. He’s generous with his time and responses partly because this is what it means to be a good soldier: during the past several weeks, Maslin’s endured interview after interview to promote Love You Hard, the memoir his wife, Abby, recently published about his odyssey, which is also hers, and their family’s. But Maslin himself is something of an introvert, disinclined to share secrets with strangers.

And who would want to be repeatedly asked about the worst thing that’s ever happened to them?

Especially if it was something done by total strangers — “Just kids,” Maslin says now — on purpose.

He’s been living with the excruciating consequences for going on seven years, but can’t remember the event that caused them. Our identity is a construct of the events that have happened to us and our responses to them. Maslin’s ability to recall the central inflection point for his body and mind was lost, most likely forever, in August 2012.

He’d been walking home alone from a baseball game — the Nationals beat the Mets, 6-4, that Friday night, Morse crushing an outside fastball for a grand slam in the fourth, Harper ripping a two-run homer to right-center in the fifth, Detwiler getting the win. The temperature was still in the mid-70s; there was a light breeze, an overcast sky. Just after midnight, as Maslin passed through a park on his way to the Capitol Hill apartment he shared with his wife and toddler son, he was assaulted and robbed by three young men, one of whom shattered Maslin’s skull with, of all things, a baseball bat.

The men stole his phone, bank card and keys, but that only begins to describe his losses. Maslin wasn’t found for eight hours, and spent the next six days in a coma; even now he struggles with chronic pain (“I wake up every morning feeling 80 years old”), and numbness down one side of his body. Long runs were part of his daily routine; after the attack, it was almost a year before he could get around without a cane. Playing music was once his sustenance — as an environmental studies major at Bucknell he played electric guitar for a funk-inflected hip-hop band called Flow Down Street Six, whose one album, The Synthesis, is still on Spotify — but his right hand can no longer strum.

And that is to say nothing of time lost. There were years he could have spent fully enjoying the company of his family and building his career as an energy analyst. Instead, following a series of brain surgeries, he had to teach his body to speak and write and walk and drive again.

In casual conversation these days, the only way you’d know he’d lost any language ability is that long words sometimes come out with the pronunciation of a single syllable just off plumb. But reaching this point required more than a thousand hours of intensive rebuilding at a series of U.S. and Canadian facilities, where he learned to bring back his words. Some of the exercises were straight out of an English as a Foreign Language classroom: For example, he would listen to NPR for a five-minute stretch, write a quick summary of what he’d heard, then listen again to check his work.

Jack entertains his parents, TC and Abby Maslin, in their Capitol Hill home.

As he labored to recover a language that wasn’t foreign to him but might as well have been, he received powerful support from old friends, including his Bucknell bandmates and Duke classmates from his grad-school days. His neighbors and extended family never stopped asking how they could help. And most central to his recovery has been his wife, Abby. At first she simply handled everything — parenting, finances, cooking, coordinating TC’s appointments and procedures — but was able to return to her job teaching literacy at Brent Elementary in the fall of 2013.

Maslin’s focus is shorter term than it once was. He is back at work advising several Fortune Global 500 companies regarding changes in the market for renewable energy, though he tires more quickly than before, and takes copious notes to address his occasional trouble processing what he hears. He is the primary caregiver at home, handling meals and laundry and dog duty, as well as answering the irrepressible questions of son Jack, now 8, and staging dance parties with daughter Rosie, 3. He dreams of finding a way to play music again. He runs two or three times per week, recently finished a half-marathon and is contemplating training for something longer.

A year ago, TC and Abby moved back to the Capitol Hill neighborhood where they lived before the attack. The park where TC’s life changed forever is not far from their new house. Occasionally, they take their kids there to play. He reiterates that he doesn’t remember the attack, which brings us back to the issue of memory and its role in forming who we are. What do you do when so much of yours, and the identity it sustains, is missing?

TC nods and smiles again.

“I’ve had to triangulate,” he says.

Maslin clarifies in a subsequent email: everyone in his life has their own perspective on the things he doesn’t remember — the attack itself, and the trial (which resulted in a 23-year sentence for one assailant, three years for another and acquittal for the third, who’d testified against his co-defendants), as well as much of the first year of his recovery, and even large swaths of time before the assault.

His family and friends understandably displayed a wide range of reactions to what happened, particularly in the first few weeks when he was in the ICU. Some spoke with varying degrees of aggression as they tried to process the violence TC had suffered. His mother and stepfather were deeply shaken, but quickly focused on caring for TC and helping to look after Jack. Those who’d joined him at the Nationals game that night in 2012 — his brother and a few close friends — felt guilty for not having accompanied him home, though he doesn’t blame them in any way. Other friends “tried to find a way to ‘solve’ everything with acts of service” — bringing food, cleaning the Maslins’ house, providing child care.

Maslin has processed all their input in an attempt to build his own version of the truth of that night and its consequences. “In a weird way,” he says, “I think that their reactions — if you aggregate them all — show me how I would have reacted if I had been present.” He bears no animosity towards his attackers, has even contemplated writing to them in the hope of getting them to reflect on the damage that split-second decisions can cause. And now he shakes his head, and the past is gone, and the interview is done; he makes his way out into the scattered sunlight of a windy April afternoon, past a man at the Metro entrance playing jazz trombone.