They had talked about the trip for months.
They washed cars, held bake sales and sold candy bars to raise the money to go.
The trip cost each of them about $1,500, a hefty sum for teenagers growing up in a town of 5,000 people slung beneath the Allegheny Mountains in rural north-central Pennsylvania.
But it was the trip everyone in the Montoursville High School French Club planned as the crowning event of their high school years, eight days and seven nights in France and Switzerland.
Amanda Karschner saved her earnings from a part-time job at Cellini’s Sub Shop, where she somehow managed to squeeze in two nights of work a week between track practice and basketball practice and all her other school activities.
Like the others, she was smart, athletic and popular, one of those kids with a big paragraph under her name in the high school yearbook.
Just after noon Wednesday, 13 girls and three boys, along with their French teacher, her husband and three other chaperones, set off in a bus for John F. Kennedy International Airport, on their way to Paris.
Sixteen hours later, their parents would follow them to New York, also on buses, but filled with tears and dread.
And, as night wore into day, the townsfolk of Montoursville, who had bought the cookies and candy and had their cars washed even when they weren’t all that dirty, would start giving their money again—to a memorial fund for the students’ families.
I’m guessing Slick Willy never bothered to visit that memorial for a photo op.
Scumbag in Chief.
Thanks for putting a face on what continues to be a major tragedy for so many. Not only in the event but the botched investiation.