Standing up for the truth
I know what Beverly Beckham would be writing this morning if her column still graced the pages of the Boston Herald.
She would have gravitated instinctively to the makeshift memorial outside Burlington High School, its presence as predictable as the grief counselors, the tearful teenagers, and the poignant words spelled out along the chain link fence: ''We Love You, Jessica, Our Sunshine."
Jessica Connolly of Burlington is dead, killed when the car driven by her 16-year-old boyfriend collided with a Ford Explorer on a Woburn street corner. Dead, too, is Lipica Pradhan, killed in Wenham just two days earlier when an out-of-control sport utility vehicle allegedly driven by an unlicensed teenager slammed into the 37-year-old mother as she weeded the garden in her front yard.
The deaths of Jessica and Lipica were not accidents, Beckham would have written; they were preventable tragedies. We do our children no favors when we explain their behavior with that canard about youth and indestructibility. I know that is what she would have written because she wrote it every chance she got, and, sadly, there is never a shortage of opportunities to comment on senseless car crashes caused by reckless teenagers.
What made Beckham's columns different, why they will be missed by so many of us now that the Herald's financial woes have precipitated her early retirement, was the gentleness behind her outrage. She could make us feel as deeply for the young drivers and their parents as for the victims and theirs, even as she refused to let the drivers off the hook for speeding or drinking or driving with friends in violation of the terms of a junior operator's license.
This is what she wrote last year after a 17-year-old boy in Gloucester, driving too fast with a license that had been suspended for prior speeding violations, lost control of his Jeep Grand Cherokee: ''No one wants to make things worse -- not family, not friends, not even, believe it or not, reporters. So when a teenager drives too fast and smashes his car into a tree, killing himself and his girlfriend and nearly killing another friend, the crash is reported with kid gloves. People try not to judge and not to blame. Words are weighed, tone is softened. And truth unintentionally, but inevitably, is compromised."
The ''dead man's curve" where that Gloucester crash occurred was no more responsible for those fatalities than the hairpin turn in Wenham where unlicensed Nekita Miranda-Edwards of Beverly allegedly lost control of a borrowed Chevy Blazer and killed Lipica Pradhan last Saturday.
''This is a tragedy, but it is not an accident," Beckham wrote of the earlier crash. ''An accident is unexpected. An accident is ice falling off a roof and killing someone. An accident is what happened on the Saw Mill Parkway in New York three weeks ago when a tree, hollowed by winter, fell onto the road, a driver veered, his van tipped, and he and his wife were killed."
No tree fell on Monday in front of the Saturn allegedly being driven by a 16-year-old Woburn boy who had had his license for only a few days when he invited Jessica Connolly to share the front seat. Police said he crossed a solid yellow line in a fatal attempt to pass another car, full of his high school buddies. He was driving in violation of the state law that wisely prohibits junior operators from carrying friends as passengers until they have gained some experience.
''Friends build altars on the spots where kids have died, bringing flowers and stuffed animals and letters," Beckham wrote last year. She could have been describing the scene outside Burlington High School yesterday, where candles burned in front of pictures of a smiling girl who should be headed into her sophomore year. ''What's the point? What's learned? What changes? Nothing. And nothing will ever change if all people do is hug each other, ask why, and neglect to stand up and say why."
I could not have said it better myself.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 