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EDEN — Grayson Dawson should be celebrating her 49th birthday today.

She won’t. Instead, she will be thinking about David Sherman, the Summerfield bicyclist she struck and killed a year ago today when she fell asleep at the wheel of her SUV.

“I’d have given anything that it could have been me and not him, because I took him away from his wife and his children and friends,” Dawson said last week from her home. It marks the first time she has spoken publicly about the accident.

In August, she was sentenced to serve at least 14 months in prison for felony hit-and-run causing a death, misdemeanor death by motor vehicle and not having an operator’s license. She was supposed to start her sentence Oct. 11, but the judge pushed that back to Nov. 15 so Dawson could undergo a medical procedure related to chronic ulcerative colitis, a bowel disorder.

Since last October, she has lost more than 50 pounds. She rarely leaves the house. She doesn’t drive. She awakens screaming.

“I think I deserve to be hung,” Dawson whispered, looking down at the ground. “I took a life and I know it was an accident, but it still happened.”

The Sherman family declined to comment. At Dawson’s sentencing, Sherman’s wife, Ann Sherman, gave the judge a statement expressing her “outrage and anger” toward Dawson for “this preventable criminal incident.”

“Due to Ms. Dawson’s malicious actions, he will not be able to live the life that he deserved.”

Dawson doesn’t remember all of the details of what happened that day.

She remembers her husband was working that Saturday at his construction business in Franklinville. She remembers visiting her daughter and spending three or four hours with her before leaving.

“This part is where I’m totally blank,” she said.

Her attorney, Locke Clifford, recites what happened next:

Dawson leaves her daughter’s house heading north to Eden. She falls asleep at the wheel — Clifford blames this on heavy medication — and veers into the other lane, hitting Sherman head-on. Dawson is on several anti-seizure and antidepressant medications, which combined with pain medication can increase the risk of sleepiness, according to drug label warnings.

She turns around, thinking she hit a deer. She can’t find anything, Clifford says, because Sherman has been thrown 40 feet from the road and his bike, split in two, lay 17 feet away in the growing dusk.

Dawson resumes her trip home.

“Since she didn’t see what she’d hit, she assumed it was a deer,” Clifford says.

She said she didn’t know something was wrong until two days later, when police and sheriff’s deputies swarmed her property, cordoning off the area around her damaged SUV.

“I had not watched the news. I didn’t know anything about a cyclist being killed on the road I had driven,” she says. “I was so sure I had hit a deer.”

She called her husband, Blake Dawson.

“I don’t know what I’ve done, but they sure are looking at my car,” she told him.

And then, after officials told her why they were there, “They just said I killed a man,” she told her husband.

“I was yelling it. I was scared to death. ... I had no clue what was going on.”

Dawson’s husband called friends to find out what to do. They said to hire Clifford, so Blake Dawson tracked him down.

Clifford was at a Yo-Yo Ma concert and lecture that night at the Greensboro Coliseum. He had the Dawsons hand the phone to an officer.

She’s in no shape to take any statement. Don’t talk to her, Clifford told the officer.

He promised to bring Grayson Dawson in once she was served with arrest warrants.

The warrants came a week later.

Rumors that Dawson hid after the accident bother her. She said she parked her damaged vehicle out front, just like always.

“If I had thought I had done something wrong, I could have washed it,” Dawson said.

She waited a week to turn herself in because charges weren’t filed until then, she said.

Before she can serve her prison sentence, Dawson will return to the hospital Wednesday for an operation she must undergo twice a year because of ulcerative colitis. The disease, which required removing parts of her colon and large intestine, have left her unable to work and reliant on disability. She was diagnosed with the illness when she was 18 or 19.

She doesn’t know what to expect in prison. Officials there won’t accept her medical records ahead of time, Clifford said.

“I’m really scared of how sick I could really get,” Dawson said. “I’ve heard horror stories about jail. I just pray they have at least a doctor there who knows about my disease.”

She’s also worried about the bathroom situation at the prison. Because of her illness, she must use the bathroom eight to 10 times a day, each time using special medical equipment.

Clifford told Dawson to have her doctor write a prescription for the equipment to give to prison officials.

Since the accident, Dawson said she has learned a lot about Sherman. She called him a talented, lovable man with “so much to offer.”

According to friends, Sherman was an avid musician who learned to play the violin as an adult. He spoke French and served as vice president for Sealy for the past 10 years.

Sherman was well-liked in the bicycling community, a sport he took up later in life.

He planned to retire in five or 10 years, to travel and spend more time with family, Ann Sherman wrote in her victim impact statement.

Dawson wants to tell Ann Sherman how sorry she is.

Dawson said she had had blackouts before because of the medicine and shouldn’t have been driving that day.

“I was just stubborn,” she said.

She wants the Sherman family to know she would never have hit someone on purpose. In a letter read at her sentencing, Dawson said she hates to think Ann Sherman believes she “intentionally drove away and left her husband to die. ... I would never have left her husband if I had known I had hit him.”

Looking back, she would have conducted herself differently that day, Dawson said last week. “I wouldn’t have gone,” she said. “I would have had my kids come pick me up, or I would have stayed here.”

She said she has no plans to drive again. Ever.

“People think, 'Aw, you will, Grayson,’” she said. “But, no, I won’t.”

She has started to write a letter to Ann Sherman several times but hasn’t finished it. It has been difficult to find the right words.

“I don’t know. I just know it’s going to take a long, long time for her to forgive me, because to this day, I haven’t forgiven myself. How could I expect her to forgive me? I can’t imagine how’s she’s feeling.

“I hope that through her church family and her friends, that somehow, some way she’s found peace.”

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com