Two Northview Seniors Found Dead in Car Trunk

Tracie Hawlett called home at her curfew time, about 11:30 Saturday night, to tell her mother she and a friend were lost in Ozark on the way home from a party in Headland. The next word her parents heard was the tragic news that they had been found dead on an Ozark roadside.
Witnesses said Hawlett's late-model Mazda 929 was found about 30 yards from the Herring Street-James Street intersection in downtown Ozark, just five blocks from the Dale County Jail, Sunday afternoon.
Sources near the scene said both the bodies of Hawlett and her friend, fellow Northview High School senior J.B. Beasley, were found in the trunk of the car, but the Ozark Police Department was not releasing any information about the crime on Sunday.
Investigators from both the Ozark and Dothan Police Departments, the Alabama Bureau of Investigation and the Dale County Sheriff's Department were on the scene.
Both were 17-year-old students at Northview High School, where on Tuesday they would have begun their senior year at Northview. Instead, their classmates begin the year facing yet another tragedy.
The victims were the third and fourth Northview students to die tragically in the past year. Fifteen-year-old Anthony Bryan is charged with the Feb. 26 murder of his older brother, John David, and the non-fatal shooting of his mother, Paula Bryan. Both brothers were also Northview students.
Adam Gay, a tight end for the Northview Cougars football team, died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident earlier this summer.
When students report to school Tuesday, they will have counseling available if needed, said John Michael Hornsby, Dothan City Schools manager of grants and public information.
"If students need it, we'll provide it," Hornsby said. "You always wonder why something like this happens. All we can do at this point is offer our prayers and support for friends and family."
Darlene Dezso, a therapist with Brightleaf Counseling and Recovery, said the girls' friends and classmates will need time to talk about their feelings of grief and loss. There may even be some guilt and fear, she said.
"They're going to need trauma in-briefing, because they're going to have tremendous shock on top of the impact of the trauma," Dezso said. "They need to keep talking about it with someone who can help de-brief them and separate them from what's happened, how they feel, what they're thinking and how to externalize that.
"It's so much different than your normal grief, although they have to deal with that, too."
Dezso said parents and teachers should look for signs of depression, anxiety, sadness, not being able to function normally, not being able to concentrate, isolation, fear of what's going to happen to them and even survivor guilt.
Within 20 minutes after hearing the latest distressing news Sunday night, Northview band director Tim Gilley was still trying to make sense of the tragedy. Hawlett was a second-year majorette at Northview.
"Of course, your first thoughts go out to the family and what they're going through, their feelings about the tragedy and the loss," Gilley said.
"When you think about tragedies we've suffered at the school in the past, you think it will definitely hit home with our students."
Gilley did not know Beasley, but remembers Hawlett as an "extremely pleasant girl.
"She always had a smile. She had a great sense of humor and was very fun to be around. I think all the students really liked her because of that. I never knew her to be in a bad mood.
"She always seemed happy to see you."

Two Northview Seniors Found Dead in Car Trunk

Tracie Hawlett called home at her curfew time, about 11:30 Saturday night, to tell her mother she and a friend were lost in Ozark on the way home from a party in Headland. The next word her parents heard was the tragic news that they had been found dead on an Ozark roadside.
Witnesses said Hawlett's late-model Mazda 929 was found about 30 yards from the Herring Street-James Street intersection in downtown Ozark, just five blocks from the Dale County Jail, Sunday afternoon.
Sources near the scene said both the bodies of Hawlett and her friend, fellow Northview High School senior J.B. Beasley, were found in the trunk of the car, but the Ozark Police Department was not releasing any information about the crime on Sunday.
Investigators from both the Ozark and Dothan Police Departments, the Alabama Bureau of Investigation and the Dale County Sheriff's Department were on the scene.
Both were 17-year-old students at Northview High School, where on Tuesday they would have begun their senior year at Northview. Instead, their classmates begin the year facing yet another tragedy.
The victims were the third and fourth Northview students to die tragically in the past year. Fifteen-year-old Anthony Bryan is charged with the Feb. 26 murder of his older brother, John David, and the non-fatal shooting of his mother, Paula Bryan. Both brothers were also Northview students.
Adam Gay, a tight end for the Northview Cougars football team, died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident earlier this summer.
When students report to school Tuesday, they will have counseling available if needed, said John Michael Hornsby, Dothan City Schools manager of grants and public information.
"If students need it, we'll provide it," Hornsby said. "You always wonder why something like this happens. All we can do at this point is offer our prayers and support for friends and family."
Darlene Dezso, a therapist with Brightleaf Counseling and Recovery, said the girls' friends and classmates will need time to talk about their feelings of grief and loss. There may even be some guilt and fear, she said.
"They're going to need trauma in-briefing, because they're going to have tremendous shock on top of the impact of the trauma," Dezso said. "They need to keep talking about it with someone who can help de-brief them and separate them from what's happened, how they feel, what they're thinking and how to externalize that.
"It's so much different than your normal grief, although they have to deal with that, too."
Dezso said parents and teachers should look for signs of depression, anxiety, sadness, not being able to function normally, not being able to concentrate, isolation, fear of what's going to happen to them and even survivor guilt.
Within 20 minutes after hearing the latest distressing news Sunday night, Northview band director Tim Gilley was still trying to make sense of the tragedy. Hawlett was a second-year majorette at Northview.
"Of course, your first thoughts go out to the family and what they're going through, their feelings about the tragedy and the loss," Gilley said.
"When you think about tragedies we've suffered at the school in the past, you think it will definitely hit home with our students."
Gilley did not know Beasley, but remembers Hawlett as an "extremely pleasant girl.
"She always had a smile. She had a great sense of humor and was very fun to be around. I think all the students really liked her because of that. I never knew her to be in a bad mood.
"She always seemed happy to see you."

Gift of Bible Lives On

The letter addressed to Ella Foy Riley arrived a week before Christmas and what would have been her 76th birthday.
Nati Marie Saenz was writing from Elsa, Texas to tell Riley how she valued the Bible the kind woman gave her for her seventh birthday, the day her family moved from Abbeville to Texas in 1987. It wasn’t until Riley’s family called her after receiving the letter that the girl, now 17, learned her older friend had been murdered in her home on May 21, 1990.
But the letter, which expressed the inspiration the girl has drawn from the Bible and the woman who gave it to her, made a positive impact on Riley’s family during the holiday season.
“I had been going through a depressed time,” said Pat Jones, Riley’s daughter who found her mother’s body early that Tuesday morning in the spring of 1990.
“But when I got that letter, it was the most uplifting thing to think that Mother had meant that much to her. That’s what Christmas is all about, what celebrating Christ is all about. Reading that letter made me feel really close to Mother.”
Saenz, who hopes to visit Riley’s family sometime in 1999, wanted to tell Riley her Bible helped get her through her own trials, such as the period when she suffered brain seizures after undergoing surgery for a tumor in 1995.
Fortunately, she is now seizure-free and is quite active in her church, where she teaches Bible classes for eighth-grade and first-grade children.
“I want you to know that I treasure that Bible with all my heart,” Saenz wrote Riley in the letter. “I’m sorry for not writing to you for all these years, but I want you to know that I have never forgotten you, and never will . . .
“I always remember you, not only for your kindness, but also for your friendship . . . I’m 17-years-old and a junior in high school, and I’m living a great life because I have the Lord and those wonderful memories of you in my life. I hope you get to read this letter and know how much I admired you and appreciated your kindness.”
Although she had lost contact with Riley in the decade since her family moved west, Saenz said a TV movie aired during Christmas motivated her to write. Then, on the day after Christmas and Riley’s birthday, she received the letter from Jones’ brother Wayne that included the sad news.
“I thought of her like my grandmother, and I was very excited when I got the letter,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in south Texas. “My family thought I was joking when I was reading it to them out loud. We were all shocked, and I couldn’t believe what I was reading.”
Jones was surprised to hear Saenz’s career goals. Since Riley’s murder, Jones has become active in Victims of Crime and Leniency (She serves as president of the Southeast Alabama VOCAL chapter.) as the family has suffered through the prosecution of the two men who killed her mother.
Willie McNair, the Abbeville man who had done lawn work for Riley before the murder, confessed of the crime and was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death, and is now at Atmore Correctional Facility.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the sentence, and a Montgomery County jury sentenced McNair to life without parole, but Circuit Judge Edward Jackson overruled the decision and reinstated the death penalty.
Seven of McNair’s 10 death penalty appeals have been exhausted.
The other man implicated in the murder, Olin Grimsley, was only convicted of robbery charges and sentenced to life, which he is serving at Kilby Correctional Facility in Montgomery.
Of course, Saenz knew none of this when she began considering a career in criminal justice. She plans to begin pursuing her degree at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio after high school graduation in 2000.
Although hearing of her friend’s death has provided more inspiration for a career in criminal prosecution, Saenz said her mind has been set in this direction for most of her life.
“Since I was a little girl, that’s all I wanted to be,” Saenz said.