There are things I dwell on throughout the week and lately there’s one I can’t seem to escape: the fatal teen accident in Bainbridge.

Right now I’m imagining a 17-year-old kid staring at the floor of a concrete jail cell, tormenting himself with so much self disdain it nearly rivals the public’s bitterness. That’s what I’d be doing if I were him.

I don’t sympathize with him, I only pity his desperate and futile circumstance. He was the kid who went to a party in the woods with a group of his high school friends. Drinking and doing all the things I can’t say I never did until he unknowingly decided to do what would define him for the rest of his life.

With the slip of a key, his negligence sealed the doom of a young girl who willingly climbed into the car next to him. Another will be disfigured her whole life and the other three dodged similar fates on the wings of modern medicine, emergency heroics and little else.

He, as it always ironically seems to be the case, survived the crash relatively unharmed and in far better shape than any other occupant. I do know that the same idiotic, drunk and free-spirited kid who climbed into that van never again climbed out. But at least he’s alive at all.