Parents Lose Second Child to Car Accident

Eight months ago, LeeAnn Pence and Larry Blacktooth were the parents of two teen-agers, struggling with the joy, the pleasures and worries that divorced parents face in raising children.

Now both their children are dead.

Tawnya Blacktooth, 14, died early Monday of injuries she suffered Friday night. Crossing a street less than a mile from her home to greet friends at a back-to-school party, she was hit by a car. Escondido police arrested the driver on a felony charge of drunk driving.

In mid-January, her brother, 17-year-old Larry Blacktooth Jr., had died in another accident police say was related to drinking. Larry Jr., who was known as “Abe,” was the passenger in an 18-year-old friend’s speeding car when it skidded across Valley Center Road in North County early on the morning of Jan. 13 and slammed into an avocado tree. He died later that day. The friend is scheduled for trial on a manslaughter charge next month.

Instead of looking ahead to a new school year, when Tawnya could have begun to put behind her the pain of her brother’s death, her parents Tuesday were preparing for another funeral--scheduling a Mass, ordering flowers, arranging for a picture to sit alongside the coffin, bringing clothes to the undertaker.

And each wrestled with a sadness deeper than any they had felt before.

Larry Blacktooth Sr. kept largely to himself. “If I cry, I’ll cry alone,” he said, sorting through family pictures in his apartment on Grand Avenue, a wind chime ringing dull tones outside the window. “If I want to cry out loud or I want to talk to Tawnya or Abe, then physically they’re not there, but spiritually I know they’re there and I find comfort in that.”

Pence was surrounded by family members and friends at her home on Esperanza Way, where both youngsters, who had resided at times with each of their parents, were living at the time of their deaths.

Tawnya, she said, had stayed home from Grant Middle School for six weeks after her brother died, and even after she went back to school had never really come to terms with Abe’s death.

“She used to play his records and just sit in her room and cry,” Pence said.

That’s what Tawnya was doing Thursday evening. On Friday she went to a party on East El Norte Parkway with friends from Grant who also would be starting as freshmen at Escondido High School in early September.

Dropping her off, Pence noticed that the partygoers were milling about near the street, so she circled back and told Tawnya to stay up by the house and away from the road.

“She told me, ‘Don’t worry about me,’ ” Pence said. Five minutes later, the mother heard sirens, and a friend called to say that Tawnya was hurt.

Tawnya, an elected student body representative at Grant, had talked about speaking out at high school against drunken driving, according to Pence. “After her brother died, she felt like she could really speak to kids and maybe have them listen, because she could tell them what it meant to lose her brother,” Pence said.

She might have made a difference, for Tawnya was a friend of extraordinary value to her peers, according to Carol Everett, the principal at Grant.

“When she came back to school, she was right there when a friend had a need,” Everett said. “She had listening skills for her friends that a lot of adults don’t have.”

Dozens of her classmates kept a vigil at Palomar Memorial Hospital until Tawnya died at 4 a.m. Monday.

Tawnya liked to design clothes, according to her father, who is a former tribal chairman of the Pala Band of Mission Indians. She liked to break dance, to swim, to ride horseback. She liked to shoot, and sometimes went hunting with her father. She did not enjoy fishing, though; that was something Blacktooth did with Abe, a high school football player and wrestler.

Tawnya and Abe had an especially close relationship as well, Pence said. “He’d come in and wake her up at night when he got home from work and they’d talk,” she said. “They were always together.”

Both parents tried Tuesday to wrestle with their grief and find some meaning in the two children’s deaths.

Pence said that the new awareness given drunk driving incidents is as important as the widespread legislative crackdown on drunk drivers.

“People have to realize how much hurt and pain they cause for everybody involved,” she said. “For so long the attitude was that they didn’t mean to hurt anybody. But I don’t think that’s true when you get behind the wheel with no regard for anyone else.”

Members of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) visited the hospital and talked with Pence and Blacktooth after the accident. “One person really can help,” said Norma Phillips, president of the San Diego County chapter of MADD. “And many times the person will turn around and help another grieving family.”

In fact, Pence and members of her family may “be eager to help in that movement, in some way to help make sense” of the teen-agers’ deaths, said Ames Pence, LeeAnn Pence’s father-in-law.

Blacktooth said he was not inclined to get involved in the lobbying group, and generally felt uncomfortable turning tragedy into a soapbox. “Maybe it would be OK if a priest did it,” he said. “But priests drink too. There are very few people today in our society who don’t drink at all.”

Yet Blacktooth said he hopes other youngsters, Tawnya’s friends, can learn a lesson from her death:

“The children that saw what happened and now know what caused that accident--maybe that will stay in their minds long enough that when they come of age and are old enough to drive, they won’t take drinking so carelessly.”