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Driving an SUV, a friend at his side, Melson was passing a carload of fellow teenagers about 11 Monday night on a rural stretch of Chester County road where another student at Henderson High School was killed in November 2006.
As he swung back into the right lane after crossing a double yellow line, according to police, he suddenly couldn't handle the speeding Chevy Blazer. The vehicle flipped and rolled several times.
Melson and his friend, Casey John Russo, also 16, were killed instantly in the accident along Burke Road near West Chester.
Neither boy was wearing a seat belt, West Whiteland Township police said, and the older-model Blazer had no air bags. Russo was ejected from the Blazer, which landed on its wheels, while Melson was found partly hanging out of the driver's window, officials said.
The fatalities shocked a West Chester Area School District community that a year and a half ago had struggled with the death of William Bauernschmidt Jr., 17, in an accident about 100 yards from Monday night's crash.
Just this spring, David Sharkey, the driver in that earlier crash, appeared at one of the two other district high schools - and at three middle schools - to tell students about the potentially tragic consequences of unsafe driving. He graduated from Henderson June 11.
"The level of shock and anguish" was very high in the community yesterday, school district spokesman Rob Partridge said.
Classes for the 1,000 or so students at Henderson High ended Thursday, but Partridge said school officials expect a good many to show up for grief counseling at the school today and tomorrow, from 9 a.m. to noon.
Residents along Burke Road, just south of Colwyn Terrace, said that within an hour of the crash Monday night students had begun to get word of the accident and had begun to congregate at the site.
Bill Beam, 57, said he won't forget the wails of anguish anytime soon. "It was absolutely horrific," Beam said. "There were kids on their knees with their faces in the grass, just screaming."
Beam said he started to approach the wreckage but backed off when it was clear there was nothing he could do.
"I got close enough to know that I didn't want to get any closer," he said.
The drama took on a surreal quality for Beam because he had experienced it before - when Bauernschmidt was killed in a flipped car around the same hour of the night on Nov. 21, 2006.
Contemplating both accidents, Beam shook his head.
"How can this be - fatalities on either side of the driveway?" he said.
Yesterday afternoon, the accident scene - which had been cordoned off for many hours by police - again became a site of mourning for grieving students.
Alyssa Fedor, 16; Taryn Sidebottom, 16, and Alex Coombe, 15 - all of them juniors - showed up carrying a wooden plaque.
On the plaque, they had scrawled a quote from Russo's MySpace page: "If I'm doin' something and I fall, I'm not gonna give up, cause it's a waste. If you fall, you gotta keep goin', otherwise you fell for no reason."
Russo and Melson and just finished 10th grade. Russo was enrolled in an auto-repair program at a Chester County vocational-technical school in Coatesville, and Melson was to join him there in the fall. School officials said Melson was also interested in woodworking.
Their friends described both boys as smart, funny, caring and exuberant.
Fedor said Melson was known for doing backflips whenever he could, and for not being afraid to "say what he thought."
Russo, Sidebottom said, could "light up a room in a second and was friends with everyone."
The girls said the boys had been to a party in the Indian King housing development and were probably on their way home since Melson couldn't drive after 11 p.m. with his restricted new license.
Within the Henderson High community, there were many who who knew victims of both crashes.
Kelly McCann, 27, Bauernschmidt's sister, said another brother - Ryan, 15, a sophomore at Henderson - was a close friend of Melson's.
McCann, who lives in Lionville, said Ryan was too upset to talk about the crash.
"It's very difficult to lose a brother and then a very close friend within a couple years," she said.
She and a friend decided yesterday to work to get speed bumps installed on Burke Road. She said they will circulate a petition at the second annual Billy's Legacy Golf Tournament, a July 11 event to raise money in her brother's honor for a youth center at Trinity Assembly of God church.
West Whiteland Sgt. Martin Malloy said the proximity of the two fatalities likely will prompt a police review of the roadway.
He described the stretch of road where two teen fatalities have occurred as "a small two-lane country road." It flows downhill from Peirce Middle School, in the direction Melson was traveling, and has a dip toward the end of the descent.
"We've got to look at engineering, enforcement and education," he said, adding that the last is apt to be the most productive way to prevent another tragedy. "There are hundreds of Burke Roads in Chester County and so many teen drivers; police can't be everywhere."
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