For Noah, Sam and Austin: 2 car wrecks and 3 needless deaths leave Bluffton, Hilton Head shaken

They stood in a circle at the edge of the May River on Tuesday evening.

Their heads bent in prayer; arms resting on neighboring shoulders; the moment captured in a photo that would later be circulated on social media and elicit the prayers of friends and strangers.

Nearly 200 of them — from all walks of life — had gathered in the All Joy area of Bluffton.

Most were young, too young for this kind of tragedy. Too young to experience this kind of pain. But the truth came at them hard and unambiguously nonetheless.

There is a before and then there is an after, and there is no space between the two and no telling when the change from one to the other will occur.

In an instant, their friends, Sam Bougus and Noah Fedele, teenage boys from Bluffton with a lifetime in front of them and not enough of it behind them, died the night before in a car wreck just six miles away, their deaths bringing heartbreak to a community already in mourning.

Bougus and Fedele were the second and third local young men to die this way in just over a week. Eight days earlier, another car crash had taken the life of 21-year-old Austin McLoud of Hilton Head Island.

That’s three young men finished.

Three families robbed and forever wounded.

And two nearby towns learning that, yes, there is a sadness that exists beyond the devastation.

It’s a scene that plays out in different ways and daily across the country.

In 2015, more than 2,700 teenagers were killed in car wrecks across the United States, according to data from the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety. Teenage drivers are three times more likely than adult drivers to be involved in a fatal crash.

The rate is even worse for teenage boys.

And while the statistics for fatal crashes involving teens generally hold steady month over month, there is an increase in crashes that begins in May and ends in August.

A worst nightmare is a worst nightmare no matter when it happens, of course, but there is a particular cruelty in it occurring at a time when joy, wistfulness and anxiety are in peak season.

“It’s a stressful time of year, (and) there’s a lot of excitement,” Michelle Dixon, lead school counselor at Beaufort High School, told me.

There are finals to study for and parties to rush off to and lots of pressure coming from all directions.

“It’s back to back. They do all these things at the end of the year. Everyone’s feeling that rush,” Dixon said. “As a result, some careless things can happen.”

On Tuesday afternoon, I spoke with a waitress at a Bluffton restaurant.

She couldn’t hold back her tears.

She had known Sam.

They had worked together.

We talked about him and Noah and Austin.

Like most, we were left with one helpless question: Why?

“It’s almost summer,” she said weakly. “They have summer on the mind.”

Summer and prom and graduation and jobs and college and new beginnings and new understandings of life and relationships and how all of it works, along with an ever-increasing independence that is intoxicating and scary.

It happens gradually and then all at once.

And not just for young people.

Parents of teenagers bear the burden of having been that age at one time and having lived through all the perils that await us in the galaxies beyond our family’s small planets.

But parents also know there’s little choice in the deal. We are born and then we live and then we die, to paraphrase a Smiths song.

Parents can’t do much more than yell warnings at closing doors and at cars backing out of driveways. They can’t do much more than send a plea heavenward and watch as their babies leave and return, leave and return, leave and return, hating that leave and praying for that return.

“It is the most horrendous feeling that exists,” said Mia Hughey of Bluffton, whose 17-year-old son, Ben, was friends with Sam and who recently lost her 25-year-old brother in a work-related accident.

“I think a lot of parents feel it all the time, but when something like this happens …,” she said without immediately finishing the thought. “I’m always scared … teenagers think they’re invincible. You are not invincible.”

In addition to having a false sense of perpetuity, teens also lapse in and out of considering their futures.

“They’re just focused on who they are and where they are and what they want to do in that moment,” Dixon said. “... This world is revolving around them.”

In Bluffton and on Hilton Head Island, that world has stopped spinning for now.

“I do think that (losing friends like this) becomes a wakeup,” Dixon said. “No one ever thinks this can happen to them.”

The friends who gathered Tuesday evening by the May River were there to do something meaningful in Sam’s and Noah’s names and to find solace and hope in each other.

They clutched balloons of all colors, some shaped like hearts.

After they let them float upward and onward, they applauded.

“It gave me chills,” said Hughey, who lives in the neighborhood and saw the memorial. “... After they were done talking and praying and hugging and loving on each other, they played music.”

They played music for Noah.

They played music for Sam.

And it grew dark.

This story was originally published May 21, 2017 at 9:45 AM with the headline "For Noah, Sam and Austin: 2 car wrecks and 3 needless deaths leave Bluffton, Hilton Head shaken."