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East Bay Graduates Transcend Tragic Year

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 8, 2008

To the students of East Bay High School, it sometimes seemed as if tragedy were picking them off this year in ways both randomly cruel and crazily unfair.

Two fatal car accidents. A suicide. A popular honors graduate dead after dancing with friends in Orlando. Two friends shot at a bus stop, a classmate charged. A senior raped and beaten while dropping off books at a library.

In the final "Are you serious?" moment, just days before his graduation, the school's personable quarterback died after slamming his car into the back of a tractor-trailer.

If adolescence is a time of revving emotions, senior year is when it all shifts into high gear. Poised at the end and the beginning of it all, the soon-to-be adults embrace a heady mix of passionate loves, leaps of independence, bittersweet nostalgia, riotous joy.

Soon enough, they will learn that life isn't fair, that good people die, that safety can be an illusion.

The 296 graduates of East Bay High School learned before their time. They say it has made them stronger.

Donna Koehn

DETAILS, Metro, Page 2

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