Quartz Hill High Honor Student Dies

Kathryn Marie Ward was going to be a salutatorian at the Quartz Hill High School graduation later this month. The 18-year-old honor student with a 3.98 grade point average was then going on to college, with the $5,000 she had earned working in a department store in the Antelope Valley mall.

Instead, her heart beats today in another teen-ager. Her mother, Sharon Ward, said the family had abided by Kathryn’s wishes that her organs be donated to others.

“I know her heart went to a 15-year-old girl,” the mother said.

Ward died Tuesday in a traffic crash that Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies blamed on a suspected drunk driver whose license was still revoked after an earlier drunk-driving conviction. She was the second Quartz Hill senior to die from highway crash injuries in five days.

Ward, who ranked near the top of her class of 475, was driving home Memorial Day when her Ford Fiesta was hit head-on by a pickup truck driven by Scott Davis of Lancaster, sheriff’s deputies said.

Davis, 22, who suffered a five-inch head gash, was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving. He was arraigned Wednesday in Antelope Municipal Court in Lancaster on charges of felony vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence. Results of a blood test to determine his alcohol level are not expected to be completed for several weeks, deputies said.

When she learned of the accident, Kathryn Ward’s best friend, True Ann Pawluk, 17, also a Quartz Hill student, said: “I was in shock. I hung up the phone and I just screamed.”

Ward, who worked as a tutor for the school district, was one of two salutatorians set to speak at graduation ceremonies at the Antelope Acres school June 16.

Active in sports, including varsity basketball, she majored in biology and science and planned to begin premed studies in the fall at UC Santa Barbara.

Ward had spent part of the holiday visiting her boyfriend, Mike Nelson. As was the custom, she was to call him to let him know that she had arrived home safely. But he never got the call.

Alarmed, he and another of Ward’s friends retraced her route when they came upon the grisly scene in the remote desert.

Quartz Hill students last week mourned the death of another classmate, Lance Christopher Snodgrass, 17, killed May 25 in an accident involving three other seniors.