AUSTRALIAN HIT & RUN TRAGEDY CLAIMS 6 TEENAGERS

[tropicana]

"WORDS CAN"T DESCRIBE WHAT WE ARE GOING THROUGH"
6 DEAD IN AUSTRALIA, 7 OTHERS INJURED

Mildura, Victoria Australia

(For reference, Mildura is about 180 miles north-east of Adelaide, or
375 miles north-west of Melbourne)

Sun Feb 19 2006

VICTIMS:- Shane Hirst, 16.................. Abby Hirst, 17............Stevie- Lee Weight, 15........Cassandra Manners, 16.............Cory Dowling, 16
Josephine Calvi, 16 (who died at Royal Adelaide Hospital Sunday night)

7 other teenagers injured, including a boy who remains in critical condition in the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne

CULPRIT:- Thomas Graham Towle, 34

IT WAS a spontaneous and profound display of communal suffering: 600 young people and adults gathered outside Mildura Base Hospital before dawn to grieve for five teenagers who died at the scene, including a brother and sister, killed by a hit-and-run driver.

They came in a steady flow for four hours Sunday, alerted by telephone and text messages, stricken by the news of a slaughter of three girls and two boys, aged 15 to 17, (later the 6th victim had died) on the outskirts of the Murray River town in north-western Victoria. They were not summoned but came though a sense of natural decency, each making a personal commitment to share the pain and bewilderment and to offer each other comfort.

Many were schoolmates of the victims. Abby Hirst, 17, and her brother, Shane, 16, of Irymple; Stevie-Lee Weight, 15, of Mildura South; and Cassandra Manners, 16, and Cory Dowling, 16, both from Mildura, died at the scene.

Three others, a girl aged 16 and two boys aged 15, were flown to hospitals in Adelaide and Melbourne with critical injuries. After her life support system was switched off, Josephine Calvi, 16, of Mildura, was pronounced dead, with family members present, just after 8 o'clock last night at Royal Adelaide Hospital.

A girl and boy, both 15, were in Mildura Hospital in a stable condition. Two others were treated for injuries and sent home.

The teenagers had just left a 16-year-old's birthday party at 9.40pm on Saturday and were on their way to another when the car sped into them on the dark, rural road. "He [the driver] was doing 100kmh plus, easily," said one witness, a teenager who asked not to be named. Police said the car missed one group but plowed into another, sending bodies and injured across 100 metres of road. "He didn't allow for the bend, and when he began to lose control [he] over-corrected and went straight into the group walking along the side of the road," the witness said.

While the townspeople assembled outside the hospital, police with sniffer dogs hunted through vineyards for the missing driver. He had fled, abandoning his 10-year-old daughter and four-year-old son in his station wagon at the scene of the accident on Myall Street, Cardross, a rural area on the southern edge of Mildura. A police officer said it was the worst accident he had ever attended.

Five hours later, Thomas Graham Towle, 34, of nearby Red Cliffs, telephoned police and said he wanted to surrender. He was charged with five counts of culpable driving and five counts of negligently causing serious injury and failing to remain at the scene of an accident. He was remanded to appear in Mildura Magistrates Court today.

About the same time, 3.30am, Towle's children were collected by their mother from the hospital, where they had been taken by ambulance to be treated for minor injuries and shock.

But the parents of the dead had to wait 14 hours before they could formally identify their children, whose bodies had been kept at the accident scene by police investigators until shortly before noon, when they were taken to the hospital morgue.

One by one, the families of the victims were shown the bodies. They were bereft, and they were not alone. Mildura, a city of 45,000 citizens, grieved with them.

Peter Gallagher, a relative of Cory Dowling, spoke on behalf of all the families. "You are now aware that we have lost our beautiful children overnight. In a moment of time our lives have changed forever," he said. "No words can describe what we are, and will be, going through."

Three of the dead - Abby and Shane Hirst and Cory Dowling - were students at Mildura Senior College, where 600 students gathered yesterday afternoon to comfort each other, embracing as tears flowed.

The campus was converted into a crisis centre, with counsellors, psychologists and teachers on hand to give help.

John Cortese, the principal of Red Cliffs Secondary College, where Cassandra Manners and Stevie-Lee Weight were students, said of the gatherings at the hospital and campus: "Everyone was supporting each other. It was fantastic to watch. That kind of mutual support will help everyone pull through this tragedy."

And the counselling will continue Monday when students go back to school. Mr Cortese said Mildura's schools would seek a common approach to handling grief. "All the students know each other, so we need to do things the same way," he said.

Acting Inspector Michael Talbot, from the major collision investigation unit, said the accident scene was "gut-wrenching", the worst he had experienced.

"To see so many virtually dead children lying on the road is something you really don't want to see," Inspector Talbot said. "It's an absolute nightmare."

He said it was incomprehensible that the driver could flee the scene, leaving his two children in his car. "Anybody who leaves the scene of a collision and leaves people dead and dying needs to have a look at themselves [and] is treated very seriously by us, very seriously by the community," Inspector Talbot said.

He said the children were standing or walking on the side of the road, off the bitumen, waiting for taxis to take them to another party, this time for an 18-year-old schoolmate.

He said the driver lost control of his northbound car, crossed to the wrong side of the road and struck 13 teenagers.

Police said the car careered sideways for about 150 metres.

The first to the rescue was a group of teenagers whom the car missed. Colin Poulton, a former paramedic, and his 19-year-old son, Justin, saw the accident and went to help.

"People were scattered everywhere," Mr Poulton said. "Everyone was in hysterics. There were some people unconscious, and others just lying there. We did what we could to help them."

The witness, who asked not to be named, said those at the scene ran to the car and began yelling at the driver.

"They just started blasting him," he said. "Then he ran off, leaving two young kids in the car."

Last night the two 15-year-olds transferred to Melbourne were in the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, and were reported to be in a critical condition.

-justin-

[wxmann_91]

OMG! What a horrible story. Condolences and prayers to their families and friends.

[TexasStooge]

Such a terrible tragedy

Drunk drivers think they're immune to injuries, but what they don't realize (or don't care about) is that they're hurting others when involved in an accident.

In my hometown, an illegal immigrant from Mexico was driving drunk in a stolen Chevy truck veering one side of the road to the other, forcing a tanker truck driver to crash through the guard rails, fall, and explode within 1/2 a mile from the hospital, nearly missing 2 gas stations. The tanker truck driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

[tropicana]

MILDURA SAYS GOODBYE TO THE FIRST OF 6 TEENS
TEARS FOR CORY DOWLING

Thu Feb 23rd 2006

THERE were tears and laughter at Mildura's Sacred Heart Catholic Church Thursday as the city said its goodbyes to young sporting star Cory Dowling. The teen ballad, "How Could This Happen To Me" by Simple Plan greeted mourners at the 2:30pm funeral.
Fellow footballers, girls in thongs and the families of the five teenagers who died with Cory were among 2000 people united in mourning a popular youth who Father John Monaghan said would be "kicking goals in heaven".

"Like many teenagers, Cory wasn't particularly fond of school," his uncle Basil Taggert said. "Weekends were his thing, with his social calendar being the centre of his universe. If there was a party on, you would find Cory there, even if he was on crutches."
His mates had left messages on big boards at the church entrance. Scores of them gathered inside and outside the church to say goodbye to the bloke they described as "the funniest guy we knew, the life of the party".

Among them were Cory's footy teammates from the South Mildura Bulldogs. They formed a guard of honour at the church entrance and again at the cemetery for their star player.

Three of his closest teammates laid a wreath on his coffin. But their tears gave way to chuckles when family friend Craig Johnson told mourners about the big boy whom younger kids idolised because he was "always there to teach them about basketball, footy or how to get a chick or two". "Cory was … the finest boy of all."

Cory, 16, loved to party, loved his friends and his football, but most of all he loved "his idol, his best friend, his father Rex", Mr Johnson said.
Rex Dowling was inconsolable Thursday, clutching the hand of his sister Sue Taggert, who had helped him bring up his only son.

The three were very close and Cory had served up plenty of mischief to Rex and Sue over the years, Mr Taggert said, but his quick wit and smile always won them over in the end.

There were broad grins all around the church when Mr Taggert recalled Cory's ability to spend his father's money.

"He operated in a cashless society — catching taxis home from parties, knowing he had no money in his pockets, telling the driver to come around and get the money from dad the next day," he said.

Cory was also "addicted" to the internet, chatting with friends at all hours or running up huge phone bills with endless calls to girls.

But he was also a star footballer, idolised by many in his league. He had helped the Bulldogs win the under-15s premiership in 2005 and was hoping to do so again.

Instead, his beloved footy jumper adorned his coffin Thursday, before being framed and presented to his father at a wake at the Bulldogs' rooms.

"They say that night is darkest just before dawn," Father Monaghan told the mourners. "Cory has now passed from the darkness of his last night to the dawn of his new life."

On Friday, Mildura will say goodbye to Cory's friends Cassandra Manners and Abby and Shane Hirst.

On Saturday they will farewell Stevie-Lee Weight, and Josephine Calvi will be laid to rest on Monday.

-justin-

[tropicana]

Fri Feb 24 2006
Mildura, Australia
2nd of 6 teens Cassandra Manners, 16, laid to rest

HUNDREDS of mourners formed a guard of honour for Cassandra Manners, one of six Mildura teenagers killed by a car last weekend, as her casket was carried from her funeral service Friday.

St Joseph's College Stadium at Mildura held the emotional 9.30am service for the popular teenager.
The teenagers died after a station wagon skidded into a group of 13 young people outside a party at Cardross, near Mildura, in Victoria's north-west, last Saturday night.

Friends Friday lit 16 candles to celebrate the sixteen years of Cassie's life, and another five candles for the other victims.

"One can't help thinking why this had to happen to six beautiful people, who were so young and full of life," Mildura Secondary College Chaplain Colin Cole told the service.

Carmel Calvi, the mother of victim Josephine Calvi, spoke of the enduring friendship between the pair, and choked up as she read a poem her daughter had written a few years ago about her friends.

"I won't say goodbye until my very last breath," she read.

Other friends said they would never forget Cassie's "random bursts of laughter" and constant smile, present in every photograph projected during the service.

Cassie's sister Kirsten described the teenager as a dedicated student and sports fanatic, who loved playing netball, basketball and gymnastics and adored her "beloved Tigers".
Friends placed a Richmond Tigers AFL scarf on top of her coffin during the service.
"Her friends and family think the world of her," Kirsten Manners said.

Cassie was buried at Murray Pines Cemetery after the service.
Cory Dowling, 16, was the first of the six teenagers to be buried after a service at Sacred Heart Catholic Church Thursday.

-justin-

[tropicana]

COMBINED FUNERAL FOR BROTHER AND SISTER
Fri Feb 24 2006
Shane and Abby Hirst laid to rest

Mildura, Australia

More than 2,000 people packed a Mildura stadium to farewell brother and sister Shane and Abby Hirst at a 2:30pm service.
The two, aged 16 and 17 respectively, were among six local teens killed in a weekend road accident.

The double funeral was the second Friday at St Joseph's College stadium, after an earlier service for Cassandra Manners, 16.
"I'm overwhelmed by the number of people in this stadium and I'm sure Abby and Shane are smiling too," Chaplain Colin Cole told the gathering.

The tight-knit siblings were two of six teenagers killed last Saturday when a Ford station wagon skidded into a group of 13 young people outside a party in Mildura, in Victoria's north-west.
The stadium was a fitting venue for the funerals of the two sports lovers.

Shane was a star basketballer. Both of them were also determined and aggressive on the basketball court, netball court or football oval.
"Abby was a keen sportswoman and her determination on the court was a perfect foil for her easygoing nature off," said Gregor Allan from Irymple Secondary College, which Abby and her brother had both attended.

She was a good leader, a quiet achiever, kind, thoughtful and had a magical smile, he said.
Shane was a legend, a ladies man and a cheeky rascal who "copped his consequences on the chin, usually with a smile on his face".

"He happened to make the football team in 2005, and it was ironic he celebrated by not doing any school work for the rest of the year," Mr Allan said.
"He'd chose having fun and sport over school work any day.

"If you can judge people by the love people feel for them, then Shane and Abby were two of the greatest."
Relative Ricky Prouse and friend Tim Peau read out a message to the pair from their mother Kerry.

"Abby, I know you are lying there, smiling, as beautiful as ever. Shane, you are ... bigger and better than James Hird and Michael Jordan," they read.

Hundreds of people, including girls wearing black thongs and armbands, teenagers wearing T-shirts with photographs of the six on the back, students in school uniforms, and every member of Shane's Irymple Junior Football Club, formed a guard of honour as the coffins were carried away.

The teenagers were buried next to each other at Murray Pines Cemetery following a graveside service.

The pair fought like cats and dogs, but adored each other, the service heard.
"Shane and Abby are starting that (spiritual journey) together, and I think they would like that," Chaplain Colin Cole said..

A funeral for Stevie-Lee Weight, 15, will be held on Saturday and a service for 16-year-old Josephine Calvi will take place on Monday.

Thomas Graham Towle, 34, of Red Cliffs, has been remanded in custody on six counts of culpable driving causing death, four counts of negligently causing serious injury, one count of failing to stop at the scene of an accident and one count of failing to render assistance.

-justin-

[O Town]

That is just an aweful accident. And the chances he would vear off that rural road at the time he did is just devastating. Prayers for all their families and friends. I just can't imagine what they are all going through. And the fellow that hit them, I can't believe he left a 10, and 4 year old there to witness what he just did. That little girl will never ever forget this, and will never be the same.

[vbhoutex]

The whole thing is just so sad and tragic and it literally turns my stomach. Those poor children of the driver too!! I hope the mother is a better person than he was!!! Many prayers headed that way!!!!

[tropicana]

Lives Entwined
God Takes the Good But This Time He Took The Best
Sat Feb 25 2006

Mildura is mourning the loss of six teenagers killed by a car while on their way to a party. It is a grieving community where the connections run deep.
When a midnight phone call roused Redcliffs Secondary School principal John Cortese from his bed and sent him hurrying to the Mildura Base Hospital, he wasn't sure what he would find. The details were sketchy but bad. He'd steeled himself, but was still taken aback when his headlights found a crowd of hundreds of distressed teenagers gathered in the forecourt outside the hospital doors.

The bush telegraph has always been a powerful, if mysterious, communicator of rural news - good and bad. Add to that the mobile phone and the SMS and what you get is an instantaneous, screaming distress call heard and answered by every teenager within cooee. Its efficiency is unarguable, but like the telegraph of old, its accuracy is diabolically flawed. In the next few hours phone calls and texts will claim a dozen, maybe 20 kids are dead. Sue Thornton, director of nursing at the hospital, will find herself willing the network to collapse just to ease the frenzy. Parents start to arrive at the hospital too - they can't find their child, they've been told they were there, they were injured, they are not answering their phone.

It will be another 12 excruciating hours before the truth is known. Before names are put to the five bodies eventually brought into the hospital for identification. By the next day, the number of casualties is six: Abby Hirst, 17, her brother Shane, 16, Cassandra Manners, 16, Stevie-Lee Weight, 15, Cory Dowling, 16, and Josephine Calvi, 16. For many families, there is relief. For the relatives of these six, just untold grief.

It will be many years - a generation, maybe two, say the local elders - before the echoes of that distress call stop reverberating through the district of Sunraysia, where lives are as entwined as the vast tangled hectares of grapevines that sustain and surround them.

To understand why, you must look at the map. Here, geography is destiny. Distance and desert define Mildura and the towns clustered around it, following the pipes and channels that pump life into the dryness from the artery of the Murray River. In many ways, it is a community like no other, with connections as deep and impenetrable and as vital as the river that feeds it.

To get to Mildura from Melbourne you fly for an hour over an elaborate ochre patchwork of tenuous farming livelihood. Or you drive for nearly seven hours. Adelaide is about four-and-a-half hours away. To Sydney you're talking 10 hours if you push it. Sunraysia - the broad band of irrigated country of which Mildura is the hub - sits at the junction of three states.

You have to understand that this is an oasis, explains the region's most senior policeman, Superintendent Inghard Ehrenberg. "Yes, it's linked to the outside world. There's an enormous amount of road traffic - on the Calder Highway, on the Sturt Highway, the main road between Australia's eastern seaboard and Adelaide and Perth." The airport is about the busiest in regional Australia - shifting 130,000 passengers a year. "It is a bustling, thriving centre of commerce and industry. But the personal connections, I believe, are driven by the fact it is an oasis," Ehrenberg says.

Sue Thornton agrees - she's been here 11 years, married a local doctor, had kids, found herself enmeshed. Mildura reminds her of Dubai, where she spent some of her early working years - isolated, self-sustaining, inescapable.

And in such a place, Ehrenberg says, "there are very few degrees of separation between any individuals".

This became painfully evident to many of his officers on Saturday night (Feb 18) and Sunday morning (Feb 19) , when they were called to the devastating incident that claimed the lives of six teenagers en route from one party to another. Wiped out by a car as they stood on a lonely road stretched between the vines. For many of the police, ambulance officers and SES workers at the scene, there was the certainty that they knew these kids, even if they did not yet know their names.

"Many of our members have been here a long time," Ehrenberg says. "They are community stalwarts in many capacities . . . Everyone plays sport together, kids go to school together. And that's not just police - it's all the emergency services." Such ties are usually cherished - they's why many people make their lives here - but at moments like this, suddenly the insulating anonymity of a big city posting must seem attractive.

Mildura may have all the accoutrements of a city, but beneath its skin it still possesses the soul of a country town. It has fine restaurants, sidewalk cafes, vibrant arts. The public schools, the hospital, the library, the swimming pool and the civic buildings would be the envy of many big city communities. City people who transfer here for a year invariably decide to stay - it's a lifestyle too good to leave. The result is a burgeoning population of 60,000, maybe 100,000 if you embrace all the satellites. Such numbers make a nonsense of the truism almost worn out this week - that everyone knows everyone - but you're not far from the mark if you say that everyone who has been here a couple of years knows someone touched by this tragedy.

Sue Thornton knew one of the casualties as the daughter of the man building her houseboat. The girl was also the niece of the editor of the local paper. Mayor Eddie Warhurst knows many of the families from his 12 years as principal at Redcliffs. Geoff Thompson, area manager for the local ambulance service and a local boy, has kids a few years behind these ones, but was keenly aware that many of his team would go home from the scene with news that would break the hearts of their own teenagers. The younger sister of one of those lost goes to school with the son of the man driving the car that killed her. The girl serving meals to the Melbourne media pack is quietly grieving for one friend and asks nervously about the prospects of another, seriously injured.

The links are more than social. The isolation of Mildura means the ties are economic, cultural, genetic. They pervade everything, from the rich earth up. "Primary industry underpins everything in this community - primary industry and the river that serves it," the mayor says.

"We really have country that if you can get water to it, it can grow anything. You have the diversity of irrigated horticultural crops - wine grapes, dried fruit, table grapes, citrus - and then surrounded by dry land farming, all the way out through the Mallee and into the middle."

The secondary industries - the packing houses and processors - feed directly off the crops. The thriving tourism industry also capitalises on the landscape and the river and the sunshine. Supporting it all is the service industry that has evolved to educate and nourish and care for the population, in the last generation providing jobs in trades and professions away from the land, but still ultimately dependent on it.

Many of the people living off these industries are battlers, says Anglican priest Colin Tett. They live maybe 20 minutes, half an hour away from Mildura's motel-lined green boulevards, on dusty roads threaded through vineyards far from the wide band of the river where the tourists take their paddle boat rides. Their houses are modest cottages from a variety of eras, all a little tired from too much time in the sun.

Their communities are built up around the blocks released here in various soldier settlements, Tett says.

"The consequence is that many have been here several generations. Each town - Redcliffs, Irymple, Cardross - has its own character, they have a strong sense of identity. Each block was created at a specific size, enough for one man to keep a family. But only to ever make a living. No one got rich working on a block. Now people do other things, but most locals are tied into the grapes at one stage or another."

The immigrants brought here to plant and harvest the crops - from Italy and the old Yugoslavia 50 and 60 years ago, from Tonga and India and a few from Vietnam more recently - together with the Aboriginal communities also drawn here, before memory, by the river, give the place richness and, inevitably, some frisson.

The enduring family structures of these cultures provide another binding thread in the close fabric of this community. When Josephine Calvi is buried on Monday, Mildura parish priest Father Tom Brophy confidently predicts that several thousand people will attend.

At the end of the funeral will be a ritual brought to the region by her forebears from Calabria, whose language is still spoken by the old people. Every one of the guests will line up to give their condolences to the bereaved family in the form of a kiss on both cheeks. These formalities will go on as long as the family can endure, and may take several hours, but it is tradition, and isolation has helped preserve it.

Brophy was here as a young priest in the 1970s, and returned four years ago. He found a community vastly changed in size - it is growing at a rate of about 120 building approvals a month, one of the 10 fastest developing regional communities in Australia - but still underpinned by the dynamics of sport and family and fruit. It was still a hard place to be invisible.

This is the essence of its appeal to many people. To know and be known. To be part of a whole. It's why the houses of the bereaved have been crowded with visitors every day of the past week. Why work crews from the city council dropped by to tidy up the gardens. Why the glaziers installing new stained glass windows in the Catholic church - a job that was supposed to close the church all this week - miraculously finished the massive task in half the time, ready for Cory Dowling's funeral last Thursday. "That's the strength of this community. In the giving, you receive," Brophy says.

Like many locals, he's been struck by the depth of the reaction across the region to the deaths. There's almost a Princess Diana-esque dimension to it, he says. The same sense of shock that people so unlikely to die are struck down, the same unavoidable confrontation with their own mortality.

"What we're sharing is our vulnerability and our fragility," he says. "People identify with one another more than at any other time."

His new church windows include images capturing glimpses of the community - a waterwheel, a pumphouse, a water tower. There's also a more generic Christian image that in this place has special resonance - bunches of grapes. Many of the people crowded into Tom Brophy's church on Thursday were not regular churchgoers. But everyone who claims to be a local is inevitably the fruit of the vine.

"It is a community of interest," says Vernon Knight, a local councillor and the director of Mallee Family Care. He's also been struck by depth of the local reaction to the tragedy.

There is a sombreness hanging over the city, he says, a sadness that has left it strangely quiet. He's never known anything like it.

"If this had happened in Melbourne, I think Melbourne would have been shocked and aggrieved. But it would have been nothing like what has happened here." The connectedness that is the region's strength in this instance has compounded its grief, he says.

He thinks the sadness is amplified by other troubles resonating in the district. Prices for the fruit crops and the grapes are depressed across the board. The scandal engulfing wheat exporter AWB is not just a political event here, but a real threat to the farmers beyond the reach of the irrigation. The proposed toxic waste dump looms as another ominous cloud, one the community was rallying to fight this week when the crash pushed it off the political agenda.

"In socio-economic terms, this is a very challenged region," Knight says. "Now there's a sense of 'God, what's next?' "

What is certainly next will be a long, painful, collective movement through the stages of grief, Colin Tett says. "Every parent with a 15-year-old kid will be feeling guilty about being pleased it is not their kid." There will be sadness for teachers at the empty seats in their classrooms. Sadness for friends when their teams recruit to cover the sudden vacancies. And a numbed incomprehension at the pain of a parent who must bury a child. A much talked about story in the Sunraysia Daily this week - which has sold out every day, with the entire Monday edition reprinted to meet demand - included an essay from a woman who had been widowed twice urging people not to be frightened by grief, not to run away.

Much of the grief will be tackled in the classrooms and schoolyards, in particular at Mildura Senior College, where all six of the casualties were students. And again, this task will be both easier and harder because of the knowledge the teachers share of their students, and of their lives outside the classrooms.

Principal Dennis Norton has been thrust into the most difficult of roles. He is spokesman and carer for 800 grieving students, but as five of these young people had been at his school for barely three weeks - having just graduated to the senior college from one of the local feeder schools - he hadn't met most of them. Now their memories, and the trauma of their deaths, will have a profound impact on the personalities and even the VCE prospects of these students. Right now, the demands of curriculum have suddenly lost their priority. He was supposed to oversee commencement ceremonies this week, not be officiating at funerals.

For a minute, discussing all this in his office mid-afternoon on Tuesday, Norton is gone - lost in mid-sentence. He rises and goes to the window. Eyes red with fatigue, his shirt and tie a little dishevelled - looking more comfortable but much less fresh than he appeared when he was interviewed on national television before 7am - he is suddenly visibly lifted. "Hear that?" He tilts his head and smiles.

It's laughter. Kids' laughter. There was none of that yesterday, he says. Yesterday - the first day back at school - hundreds of kids were absent, many were traumatised, and many were simply mute, unsure of the etiquette of grief. Is it OK to talk, to be loud?

He sits down again and observes that he knows this is far from the end of the grief. Indeed he thinks the worst will be weeks and months away, after the adrenalin of shock fades. But it is perhaps the beginning of dealing with the sadness and the lessons it has thrust on his students, too early, about the fragility of life.

Norton, his colleague John Cortese from Redcliffs and the two other local principals were all at Mildura Base Hospital by about 2am on Sunday, figuring out what they must do. As one of the teachers at Redcliffs observed - "this is not what they taught us to do in teachers' college". How would they manage? "The advice we give the staff is that they have one mouth and two ears," Norton says. "That should give you an idea." By Monday morning the staff at all the schools were briefed, counselling programs set up, reinforcements called in and letters on their way home to parents with advice on what to do to support their children.

John Cortese's concerns right now are with the students, but his sympathies in the very long term are with the parents.

He's a country boy himself, and has spent most of his teaching life in country schools. The friends of the lost children will, in time, go on to build their own lives and families, he says. "In reality, even with this, they are still invincible in their own minds. They will move on."

But for parents in a rural community who have lost a child, the milestones celebrated by their children's friends - every 18th birthday, graduation, wedding, newborn - will be an unavoidable reminder of their own loss. "In places like Mildura and Redcliffs, the parents will see all that." It's the beauty and the burden of life in such a community.

"In 50 years," Cortese says, "they'll still be talking about this accident."

-justin-

[tropicana]

FIFTH OF 6 YOUNG PEOPLE LAID TO REST
STEVIE-LEE WEIGHT, 15, REMEMBERED AS A COMPASSIONATE LOYAL FRIEND

Sat Feb 25 2006
Mildura Australia

Breaking his silence, Graham Thomas Towle, the father of the alleged hit and run driver, Towle's father, revealed his son was not coping well in custody.
And his youngest grandchild, Thomas, 4, is suffering nightmares about the car crash that sent shockwaves through Mildura.

As crash victim Stevie-Lee Weight was laid to rest Saturday, Graham Towle said his son Thomas, 34, had been a promising boxer in his youth and dreamed of farming his own fruit block.
He said his son was struggling to cope on remand, and that his grandson, Thomas Towle Jr, could not comprehend the tragedy.

"He's missing his dad. He's having nightmares," he said. "He wakes up screaming, 'My dad's dead, my dad's dead'.
"The last thing he saw were bodies on the ground."

Thomas Towle, 34, is facing six charges of culpable driving for his alleged role in the 9.50pm crash on Myall Rd, Cardross, last Saturday.
Saturday, the fifth of the six young people who died in the crash was farewelled in Mildura.
More than 2500 mourners spilled from the Sacred Heart Church on Eleventh St to pay their respects to Stevie-Lee Weight, 15.

She was remembered as a talented netball player, a loving daughter and a compassionate, loyal friend.
Mourners heard how she dreamed of becoming a professional photographer and how she loved shopping.
"I never knew there were so many shops in Mildura until I went shopping with Stevie-Lee," one of her close friends told the congregation.

Her grandfather, Maurie Wedlake, was always anxious to show off his granddaughter.
When he took her shopping as a little girl, he would park his car as far from the store as possible in the hope they might bump into someone.
Stevie-Lee's mother, Jenny-May, clutching a photograph of her lost little girl, had to be supported as she left the church with husband Stephen and younger daughters Millie-Rae and Monica-Rose.

The teenager's schoolmates and teachers wore red and white armbands, united in their sorrow.
Teenage boys wept in the embrace of their parents and friends.

By now, the mourners knew the routine.
On Friday, they attended the funerals of siblings Shane, 16, and Abby Hirst, 17, and the separate service for Cassandra Manners, 16.
The previous day, Cory Dowling, 16, was buried.

Monday, Josie Calvi, 16, will be farewelled at 10am during a service at the St Joesph's College stadium.

Emergency service personnel and senior police attended each service.
District inspector Haydn Downes said local police had performed well.

Saturday night, young revellers at the Lock Rock concert paused to pay tribute to their mates. Thousands attended the event, raising their glow sticks to salute their friends. And six fireworks were launched, one for each victim.

Graham Towle extended his sympathies to the victims, saying he knew some of them.
Mr Towle said he broke down when he heard Cory Dowling was one of those who lost their lives.
"I knew Cory personally and being that close, it hurts," Mr Towle said.

-justin-

[tropicana]

FINAL FUNERAL HELD IN MILDURA
Monday February 27, 2006 - 3:38PM

Mildura, Australia
Josephine Calvi dreamed of travelling the world, before she died in a car smash in Victoria's north-west, thousands of mourners heard Monday.

Around 3,000 people attended Monday's service at St Joseph's College Stadium in Mildura to farewell the 16-year-old who was one of the victims killed when a car crashed into a group of youngsters on February 18.

It was the fifth and final funeral held in Mildura after the crash which claimed six lives.
Funerals for Cory Dowling, 16, Stevie-Lee Weight, 15, Cassandra Manners, 16, Shane Hirst, 16, and his sister Abby Hirst, 17 were held between Thursday and Saturday - including a joint service for the Hirst siblings.

Josephine's aunt, Mary, told the packed auditorium the Calvi family was devastated by the loss of the sport-loving teenager.
Reading out the names of the five other teenagers killed in the crash, she said: "We know you did not go alone".

"Josie had big plans - finish VCE, uni then travel the world - Josie had it all mapped out," Mary told the mourners.
Josephine died at the Royal Adelaide Hospital the night after the crash.

The five other victims were killed instantly when an out-of-control car ran into a group of teenagers who were waiting on the road verge at Cadross, near Mildura.
The teenagers were heading for a party and they were waiting for a taxi.

-justin-