You Could Die!

To the casual passerby, the posse of five might appear to be pelting past on skateboards, but the group’s long, surfboard-like devices on fat wheels identified them as longboarders, and calling a longboard a skateboard would be like equating a cheetah with a tiger.

Stuart Anderson and four others rolled across the Third Avenue Bridge to the Bronx. It was a chilly Sunday evening in 2013, but it wasn’t just the October cold that weighed on their spirits. They were in mourning.

Finally, they arrived at the place where “it” had happened—Melrose Avenue in the Bronx. The spot where a school bus had crushed their friend, twenty-one-year-old Genielle Laboriel, while she was riding her longboard home.

Stuart was a longboarding instructor, a mentor to Genielle and young riders like her. She was the first student he had lost, and he came with a handful of white candles. Genielle’s family and friends had set up a small memorial on the sidewalk, a cardboard box holding flowers and candles. Stuart placed his candles alongside the others and lit them. A chain-link fence stood behind the memorial and the group rested their boards on it. Once again, they reminisced and tried to piece together the mishap.

“She was going at regular pushing speed. It was level ground, not a hill,” Anderson said. Regular pushing speed is eight to ten miles per hour. On such a flat road, there was no reason for Genielle to be speeding, they all agreed, let alone colliding with a school bus. “Except if she had earphones in.” But Genielle’s mother had recalled that her daughter’s pet rabbit, Storm, had chewed her earphones the day before the accident. “There’s no way she could’ve had earphones in.”

At the 42nd Precinct in the Bronx, just about a block away from Genielle’s collision, the Community Affairs Officer at the time, Matthew D. Rey, said the incident was nothing more than a “tragic accident.” As with most tragedies, though, we grasp for meaning, for something more.

Read more at the Delacorte Review.

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