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Let's Stop Another Senseless Death

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By JERRY LOFSTROM

Tribune correspondent

Published: October 15, 2008

Updated: 10/16/2008 01:02 pm

PLANT CITY - The darkness of night was broken by the light of a hundred candles as family and friends gathered under a drizzling rain for a vigil honoring Brooke McDonald.

Brooke was 17 the night she was at the wrong place at the wrong time; Thomas Grieco thought a large-caliber revolver was not loaded as he pointed the gun at Brooke and pulled the trigger, Plant City police said. For Brooke, there was no warning, no omen.

"I miss my sister, and I will never stop loving her," Danielle McDonald, 19, said as pain covered her face and tears streamed down her cheeks.

Barbara McDonald, Brooke's mother, told the crowd that gathered Oct. 6 at the Walden Lake community's polo grounds that Brooke had recently accepted Jesus at Teen Challenge, a Christian residential drug-treatment program hinged on biblical principles.

"I find comfort in knowing Brooke accepted Jesus Christ and she is with the Lord in heaven," she said.

Brooke's name and photo looked so terribly out of place on the obituary page that you hoped it was an error.

When Brooke died Oct. 4, more than a life was lost. Gone were her hopes, dreams, laughter, love and all that might have been.

What family and friends need is something they know they can't get: a magic wand to take away the sorrow and confusion that linger from this tragic death.

The thing we can settle for is just a promise: that parents, the schools and the community will do everything possible to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Parents need to rededicate their commitment to nurture and safeguard their children. Plant City needs to be challenged to take an unflinching look at the teenagers in its midst, at how we teach them, support them and keep them safe.

Raising a teenager is not easy; it's no walk in the park, either, for preteens and teenagers living in today's world.

There's the age-old issues of puberty, acne, hormones, peer pressure, getting together, breaking up, deciding your future and keeping your grade-point average as high as possible.

Add to it cell phones, video games, iPods, MySpace, YouTube and more TV options than any generation in history.

Unfortunately, this vast arsenal of electronic gear has so captured the attention our children they often don't have time to communicate with their parents.

Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation with your teen, only to discover you've been muted by an iPod?

Asked what he would say to those parents raising teenagers, Mitch McDonald, Brooke's father, offered this advice: "Monitor your children and keep them away from the wrong people. Brooke was the ideal child, a straight-A student, active in school, a positive part of our family. But when she started to hang out with the wrong crowd, bad things happened."

Brooke was a runaway at the time of the shooting. Her parents didn't know where she had been living.

As I write this commentary I think of my 17-year-old daughter and how often I've failed to say no. I don't claim to be an expert on the art of raising children, but I have learned a thing or two along the way.

I have learned about the pitfalls of appeasement and the mistake I've made trying to be my teenager's best friend.

I have learned that when parents say "no" to a teenager the teen will not be happy, but they're not supposed to be happy if they don't get their way; they're supposed to be obedient.

One of my greatest gifts was to have parents who instilled in me the values of integrity, responsibility, self-respect, respect for others and morals.

Parenting isn't a skill learned alone; it's gathered up along the way in bits and pieces, sometimes even before we have our own children. Long before I became a father, I saw what it meant to be a parent from my own mother and father.

In this new age, when some children are raising themselves, I become a bit worried about our future generation. Perhaps your teenager is not raising themselves, or you don't see it that way, but a good many are.

Teenagers, it seems, are making the rules and setting the boundaries.

When kids can call the Florida Department of Children and Families on their parents simply for being properly disciplined, control has been passed into the wrong hands.

What do you think about the question of parental responsibility?

Could it have made a difference on that fateful night when Brooke McDonald died so senselessly?

Many may think, yes.

Yet, when tragedies like this happen, we all bear some responsibility.

How many more children must die before the violence and irresponsibility that permeates our society is seriously addressed by all of us?

Correspondent Jerry Lofstrom can be reached at jdlmcl@aol.com.

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