Before she began her third-period Spanish literature class Monday morning, Joyce Amatucci pulled Christian Cruz’s test out from a pile of papers she was about to pass back to her students.
Cruz, a 17-year-old junior at Springbrook High School, was killed less than eight hours earlier when the driver of the Toyota Corolla he had been riding in on Bonifant Road lost control and smashed into a tree. Three other Springbrook students and another who attends Blake High School were taken to hospitals and released, police said.
“I didn’t want to be standing there with [it] because everybody would know whose paper it was still in my hand,” Amatucci said.
A family friend who answered the phone at Cruz’s home, on the 600 block of Beacon Road in Silver Spring, said the family had moved to the U.S. from El Salvador 22 years ago.
Police did not identify who was driving or whether Cruz or the other students were wearing seat belts. They said the teens were probably speeding. It is illegal in Maryland for anyone under age 18 with a provisional license to drive after midnight. Police would not say whether Cruz, who had celebrated his birthday two Saturdays earlier, had a license.
Kevin Hodgson, a senior at Blake who said he was friends with Cruz and one of the vehicle’s other occupants, said the car belonged to one of the other teens’ mothers and that they had gone out joyriding. Hodgson said he was told that a mutual friend held Cruz as he died after being thrown from the vehicle.
While Cruz was described as a quiet, unassuming student at Springbrook, he called himself “Rockstar” and collected more than 200 friends on MySpace, the popular Internet networking site. Some of those friends, including Hodgson, changed their Internet profiles to honor Cruz’s memory Monday.
“He was the only one that didn’t make it out, and I know he didn’t deserve that,” Hodgson said.
