RANCHO RESORT MAINTANANCE POSITION Health Care Sierra Tucson Eating Disorders Program Coordinator General A1 Communications Cable Techs Tucson RegionMemorial to 4 Sierra Vista teens to be builtArizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.24.2008
Friends and family members of four teens who died in Sierra Vista last summer will begin building a permanent memorial to them Monday morning.
The four teens, friends who had all at one time attended Sierra Vista's Buena High School, died within six weeks of one another.
Jennifer Clark, whose son, 18-year-old Joshua Allen Clark, was the first of the four to die, said the group will begin work Monday on the concrete memorial. Clark died July 20, 2007, when his car was broadsided during a rainstorm.
A community service in remembrance of the teens will be held Monday evening on Bevers Street off Highway 92.
That is near the spot where 15-year-old Keane Moss and 19-year-old James DeAnda died when the motorized dirt bikes they were riding collided head-on.
The Cochise County Sheriff's Department said Moss, a sophomore at Buena High School, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.123, while DeAnda, a former Buena student, had a blood- alcohol level of 0.158 when the pair crashed in the middle of the night last Aug. 25.
The property where the memorial will be built is owned by Cochise County, which Clark said gave family members permission to build there. She said the memorial will consist of a concrete walkway with the four teens' names on it.
The deaths shook the city of Sierra Vista, which has a population of about 48,000. For weeks, teens rode around in cars that had "RIP" spray-painted on the back windows.
Classmates and others who knew the four teens have continued to visit the sites where they died, leaving gifts and birth-day cards over the past year.
Clark said the regular visits of the mourners gave family members the idea to build something permanent.
"It's been pretty hard for all of us. I can only imagine how it's been for the kids. We're coping as best as we can," Clark said. "All of the parents were close before this happened. We were all so close, and it's been traumatizing for our whole group."
The fourth teen to die was Tiffany Elaine LeTexier, 17, who had been Joshua Clark's girlfriend. She died two days after Moss and DeAnda, at about 2:15 a.m. last Aug. 27.
She apparently stepped into the path of an oncoming car along Arizona 92, though her death was never ruled a suicide. The driver of the car that hit her was not faulted.
LeTexier died at nearly the exact spot where her boyfriend did. That night she had been at a friend's home, mourning the loss of DeAnda and Moss. LeTexier, who had been drinking alcohol, left in the middle of the night and walked about two miles to the scene where Clark died. An autopsy showed her blood-alcohol level was 0.082.
LeTexier's mother, Pamela Jean "P.J." LeTexier, said her daughter had been distraught over Clark's death and that when DeAnda and Moss died, her grief was extreme.
LeTexier maintains her daughter's MySpace page, which has become a site where friends leave memorials.
"A lot of Tiffany's friends who are in college are coming down for the weekend," she said. "It's tragic. They had so many friends; it was a tight group. There will be quite a few people there Monday night.''
LeTexier is publicizing a strict rule for anyone planning on attending Monday's event. "There will be no alcohol," she said firmly. "I don't want to lose another child."
● Contact reporter Stephanie Innes at 573-4134 or at sinnes@azstarnet.com.
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