Schools Mourn Students Killed in Crash

A day before graduation and the last day of classes at Buena High School, students on the brink of summer vacation impatiently awaited the final bell.

Yards away, near the school’s administrative office, math and science teacher Rob Lewis could only weep, trying to make sense of a grim reality that seemed so senseless.

Last Friday, he helped his teaching assistant, Lea Casillas, with an end-of-semester English project. On Tuesday, Lewis learned that Casillas and El Camino High School student Ana Rosa Uribe were killed when the car they were riding in plunged off the Ventura Freeway.

“It just blows me away,” Lewis said of the Monday morning accident. “I can rationalize her death by knowing that she is still living on, but I’m still in a state of shock.”

Lewis did not grieve alone Wednesday.

Teachers and students at both schools struggled to accept the deaths of the teenage girls from Ventura--one a stellar softball player with a sparkling smile and the other a budding poet.

Many teachers and students wore blue ribbons to honor the girls while others talked about how the crash has dimmed the excitement of graduation.

“I miss her energy, her smile,” said Carol Hammitt, a teacher at El Camino who worked closely with Uribe since she enrolled at the alternative school in January. “She had a lot of dreams. She wanted to be a cosmetologist and own her own hair salon and develop it into a complete day spa.”

Investigators with the California Highway Patrol said Wednesday that they were still unsure what led to the crash that killed Casillas, 16, and Uribe, 17, and critically injured the driver of the car, 18-year-old Sopheak “Sophie” Riem of Oxnard.

The three girls were heading to a friend’s high school graduation ceremony at Ventura College when the car plunged off the Ventura Freeway at the Johnson Drive overpass, CHP Officer Dave Songer said.

Riem, who remained in critical condition at Community Memorial Hospital with broken bones and internal injuries, was interviewed Wednesday by CHP investigators, Songer said. He said Riem has almost no recollection of the accident.

Songer said no decision has been made about whether to file charges against Riem.

Lewis said his relationship with Casillas was part mentor, part friend, part big brother. They talked about politics and music. He helped her think through an English paper in which she grappled with the question of whether hip-hop star Eminem was a true artist or just in it for the money.

She told Lewis about the pressures of balancing school and her hectic softball schedule. Sometimes they talked about her relationships.

“She was a happy-go-lucky kid who would not let people take advantage of her,” said Lewis, who graduated from Buena in 1990.

Hesitant at first to talk about Uribe, Hammitt soon was reciting the girl’s poetry and musing about a life snuffed out too soon.

“She came to our school looking for a way to make up credits. She was behind and she wanted to graduate from high school,” Hammitt said. “She had such a winsome smile her eyes not only twinkled, they were on fire.”