By Brendan Loy
Yesterday and today mark the 10th anniversary of a pair of tragedies that anyone who was at Newington High School at the time remembers well: the unrelated deaths, on consecutive days, of junior Bob Aniello and freshman Jen Partridge. Back in 1997, I made a memorial website for Bob and Jen, which is still online.
Bob (or "BoB," as he was widely known) was a classmate of mine, and a friend. He lived in Hartford but was bused to school in Newington, which was unusual because he was white; most of the "Project Concern" kids, like most Hartford residents generally, were black or Hispanic. Bob once joked that he could cross the street in Hartford without looking, and traffic would stop for him, because people "don't want to kill the last white kid in Hartford." :)
Me and Bob at an NHS football game.
Alas, Bob wasn't impervious to his own demons. He committed suicide on Tuesday night, November 18, 1997 -- a total shock to everyone who knew him. The school was in stunned mourning all day Wednesday after the news broke... and then things got even worse. That afternoon, Jen -- who I didn't know personally, but who shared a lot of mutual friends with Bob -- was hit by a car while riding her bike, and killed.
Needless to say, it was a terrible, terrible week at NHS. The deaths were bookended by a pair of nonfatal car accidents involving NHS kids, one of them quite serious and involving two close friends of mine (one of whom was also very close to Bob), another less serious but on school grounds Friday morning, mere minutes before the principal was to address the school about the week's tragedies. There were also unverified rumors of other tragedies -- e.g., a janitor suffering a heart attack -- and fears of "copycat" suicides. It felt like the whole world was crashing down around us; people were talking about the school being "cursed." A week that had begun with normal high-school concerns -- I remember my friend Angela off-handedly saying on Monday morning that she hoped she could "survive this week," meaning get all her work done -- ended with the trauma of Bob's wake after school on Friday, and his memorial service that night.
Hard to believe it's been ten years since all that happened. I vividly recall that Wednesday morning, November 19, 1997; I was in Dr. Pilotte's chemistry class when someone asked me if I'd heard about Bob, and I said no, and they told me he'd killed himself the night before. I spent much of the rest of the class staring, in numb disbelief, at a poster of a frog on Dr. Pilotte's desk. (I always hated that frog, for the rest of the school year.) I remember getting home from school that day, my dad asking me how my day had been, and responding, "Terrible." I didn't even know how to put it into words. And then I also vividly remember the phone call later that night, around 10:30 PM, with the rumor that somebody else had died (we didn't yet know who), and watching the 11 o'clock news as WFSB's Dennis House reported that an NHS freshman had been hit by a car. But which freshman? I didn't find out until the next morning.
Over the weekend, as I was sorting through a box of old photos from both high school and college, it occurred to me that when I look back on my NHS and USC experiences, I tend to mentally compartmentalize them into "before" and "after" periods, in each case defined by a tragic event in the fall of my junior year. College, of course, is split into pre-9/11 and post-9/11. But just as profoundly, high school is split into pre-11/18 and post-11/18.
It's cliché to say it, but I lost a bit of my innocence that week, and nothing ever seemed quite the same afterwards, because sudden, tragic deaths of friends and loved ones had become a real possibility, not just something that happens on TV or in the movies, or to other people. Ten years ago, it happened to all of us at NHS. (And it's happened far too often since. As my dad wrote after a similar string of tragedies two Novembers ago, "Bob Aniello. Jen Partridge. Christina Guyon. Sarah LeFoll. Brendan Horan. Coach Richard Hastings. Master Police Officer Pete Lavery. NHS Resource Officer Ciara McDermott." Also Elizabeth Carlson, Chris Kotch and Joe Michalski. And, more recently, Daniel Gorski, Jon Calderone, Nick Tine, Tim Hazelton, and Kerri Donlin. Terrible tragedies all. So many young people, taken too soon -- four of them from my graduating class alone, Bob included.)
Anyway... rest in peace, BoB and Jen.
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