Slain Marine from Yorba Linda remembered

The death of Rick Centanni of Yorba Linda was announced Friday over the intercom at Esperanza High School in Anaheim.

Class of 2008. Member of the football team. Marine lance corporal killed earlier this week by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Just 19.

A secretary put Centanni’s yearbook, the one in which his photo shows off his broad shoulders and wide smile, out at the front desk. Students, she knew, were sure to ask to see it.

This isn’t the first time this has happened at Esperanza. Or the second. Centanni is the third Esperanza graduate killed in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2004.

“He came out for the team as a junior and I could see from the very first day that he had great enthusiasm for the game, for being part of a team. He loved every part of it,” said Jim Pendleton, an English teacher and assistant football coach for the Esperanza Aztecs.

“It didn’t surprise me when he went into the military because it was the ultimate expression of teamwork and camaraderie.”

Centanni, he said, helped persuade three teammates to enlist with him in the military. One entered the Army. Two others joined him in the Marine Corps.

One of them, Kyle Martin, was in a vehicle behind Centanni’s and saw the explosion, which also killed Marine Reserve Sgt. Maj. Robert Cottle, 45, a SWAT officer for the Los Angeles Police Department, who, coincidentally, also hailed from Yorba Linda.

Pendleton looked tired Friday. One of his sons recently finished his second tour in Iraq, safe and sound. But another of his former players was killed there in 2004 and the Aztecs wore a sticker on their helmets the following year: JB, for Army Pfc. Joel Brattain, 21, who left behind a newlywed, his high school sweetheart.

Centanni wore a helmet with that sticker.

“With the volunteer military, I don’t think the war has the same effect on young people today -- until something like this happens,” Pendleton said.

Over in the boys’ locker room, a bunch of sophomores were getting ready for their physical education class.

“It was somber,” Alex Hizon, 16, said of the mood in class when Centanni’s death was announced. “People didn’t even have to tell us to be quiet. It hit home. My brother’s at the Naval Academy.”

“My cousin’s going into the Marines,” added Sean Bennett, 16. “I think about that.”

Nearby, another youth, bigger than the others, said he intended to join the Marines too.

“I don’t have any other opportunities,” he said.

Did Centanni’s death make him rethink those plans?

“You can die driving home from school. You can die from a heart attack from all the McDonald’s you eat,” he said. “It’s just as easy dying here as it is there.”

“But it’s still a tragedy. It’s a loss of life,” his friend, another 16-year-old, countered. “But I understand where you’re coming from.”

Over in the weight room, athletic equipment manager Ron Thompson said Centanni was an exemplary young man.

“He was one of my favorites,” said Thompson, who said Centanni’s No. 30 jersey won’t be worn next year. “Good kid. One of those kids who said ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir.’ Very courteous.”

Not every kid is, he said. Just the other day, for instance, there was a group of track athletes warming up for a meet. They stopped running when the national anthem began at the baseball game at an adjoining field. But they started running again before it ended.

“I lectured them for a good 10 minutes,” Thompson said. “I told them, ‘Do you know you have friends over there who are fighting so you can be on the track team? How about showing a little respect?’ ”

Outside on the school quad, there were posters for a lunchtime concert held earlier this week by a Temecula-based band named War Stories.

C.J. Abraham, a 17-year-old junior, sat where the band had played and talked about whether Centanni’s death would play a role in his still-forming thoughts about trying to get into West Point or the Air Force Academy.

“I haven’t decided. To go to school and work that hard and then to get killed after all that effort . . .,” he said. “I’m in the school band and there’s two girls in the color guard and both of their brothers joined (the military) because of this guy. It hit them pretty hard.”

Behind him on the quad, high school seniors picked up pre-ordered boxes of graduation announcements -- printed proof that they are about to become adults.

mike.anton@latimes.com