Gabe Kirkwood

*"Blood is blood, and your's spills just as much as mine." - Gabe Kirkwood*

**Gabe Kirkwood** is a retired ambulance and taxi driver native to the small town of Westbridge, Massachusetts. His son is Dr. Paul Kirkwood, the chief resident and physician at Ashford Falls Community General Hospital in Ashford Falls, New York.

Not much is known about the early years of his life. He seems to have lived in the area of Boston his entire life, and has barely mentioned having much of family, except his father who he described as a drunk and gambler, but according to Paul's mother, Gabe's father was a religous man and contractor who did charity work for the church. It is known that Gabe entered the United States Army after high school and served at Camp Blanding Army Base in Starke, Florida and Fort Campbell in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, mostly in the motor pool, while trying to apply for officer training. During his military tenure, he met and dated a military nurse named Katherine Haynes, but after getting rejected five times for officer training, he departed the Army, marrying Katherine and moving home to Westbridge, buying a home in Fall River where his son, Paul, was born.

After the Army, Gabe briefly worked as a taxi driver and later became an ambulance driver to be closer to Katherine, who became a nurse at St. Eligius Hospital in Boston. While he recalled the marriage as loving and romantic, Katherine grew tired of Paul's mood swings and disappearances and divorced him. Gabe considered the divorce traumatic for him, calling it worse than getting rejected by the Army. He started drinking and gambling and years later, needed help from a drinking buddy to get a job as a cab driver and place his life back on track.

Several years later with his life on the amends, Gabe attempted to get back in touch with his family by tracking down Katherine through her sister, Helen, only to learn she had since remarried. He then turned his attention to Paul, now the chief physician of major surgery at Ashford Falls Community General Hospital in Ashford Falls, New York. Traveling to visit him, Gabe presented himself as clean and sober, willing to renew ties with his son. However, due to mistrust or dissension, Paul remained hesitant to the idea, particularly since Gabe needed money to pay off the last of his gambling debts. To renew his bond with Paul, Gabe even befriended Helen Caldwell, a nurse Paul was smitten with, to put in a good word for him and help him.

Intermittantly between 1988 and 1990, Gabe continued visiting Paul, now dating Dr. Angel Harker, and trying to act like the kind of father he thought he wanted. At the time, Angel was feuding with heiress Rachel Hedison, who had stirred up an old malpractice suit in order to split up Paul and Angel. At the time, Gabe had briefly flirted with Rachel's aunt. Naomi Hedison, and used her to meet Rachel, offering her what money he had received from Paul as a loan to stop the case from going to trial, eventually going to Angel to warn her about Rachel. Rachel then hired Louis Riley to scare Gabe out of town and keep him from getting involved. At the Ashford Arms Hotel where Gabe was staying, Gabe had called Paul complaining of chest pains, but Angel turned up instead to tend to him when Riley showed up at the scene. Driven by his own attraction to Rachel, Riley attempted to kill Gabe but Angel got in the way and took the bullet instead. Riley then knocked Gabe out cold and planted his gun, wiped of fingerprints on him. To cover up her duplicity, Rachel paid off a local itinerant to claim Gabe had fired the gun that killed Angel, and he was sent to jail at Riker's Island in New York City.

While in jail, Gabe reached out to Paul one more time, who put him in touch with a lawyer named Jerrold Waverly in nearby Troy, New York. Waverly also brought in Sabrina Collins, another lawyer, to assist in the preparations, but as Gabe was relaxing in prison, an inmate named Bud Mason came up behind him and flipped him off a walkway, dropping him to his death three stories below.