Anatomy of a teen tragedy in Delco

Vanessa Dorwart was out the door in a flash.

The Interboro High School sophomore seldom went anywhere without first considering, "How do I look?" But on this late February morning, the 15-year-old got out of bed, pulled her hair into a ponytail, threw on some clothes, and zipped out.

No primping. No purse. No Burberry perfume.

It was just Vanessa, her BlackBerry, and a 11/2-mile walk to the Norwood train station.

"I'm going out real quick," she told her older sister, Frankie, 17, also home sick from school. The sky was blank and the air thick with the kind of chill you get before a winter storm. Weary souls were bracing for more snow in a paralyzing winter.

"I'm meeting up with Kelly and Gina, and I'll be back."

Vanessa, Kelly Cashwell, and Gina Gentile were a teenage triumvirate, inseparable. They liked sleepovers, dances, and Facebook, this tight trio from a cluster of towns just beyond the runways of Philadelphia International Airport.

Vanessa, 9:28 a.m.: "Kell - where the hell are u going"

Kelly, 9:28 a.m.: "heaven"

These clues, if they may be called that, came from Vanessa's cell phone. The phone she tapped on as she approached a picture-postcard park between her Glenolden home and the Norwood station, 20 minutes away.

It is impossible to know Vanessa's thoughts the morning of Feb. 25 as she set out to join the other two who had cut class. The mind of a teenager is a thing of mystery, a tempest of coming-of-age.

Even more mysterious is what could have driven the three friends to meet on the tracks. That question would leave their community thirsty for answers, loved ones writhing in regret, and people at a distance, people totally unconnected, stunned at such tragic resolve.

Kelly, 9:29 a.m.: "Never forget I love You"

Vanessa, 9:29 a.m.: "I'm going with you, where are u"

Kelly, 9:31 a.m.: "Your too late trains coming now"

Vanessa walked through blue-collar Delaware County boroughs built by 19th-century railroad dreamers as country escapes for the well-to-do, who have long since left. The bedraggled boroughs sit along the Delaware River's once-muscular industrial spine.

Vanessa, 9:33 a.m.: "Where are u?"

Kelly, 9:34 a.m.: "Can't tell you"

Vanessa was hustling toward the Amtrak line, which flows through the towns like a pounding artery. She was sharing secrets, in real time, the way teenagers today confide their impulses and deepest longings: by text. Phone to phone. One hasty, tapped-out whisper at a time.

Vanessa, 9:40 a.m.: "Babe I'm walking as fast as I can, wait for me"

Kelly, 9:41 a.m.: "hurry"

Vanessa, 9:41 a.m.: "I'm trying, I promise"

Vanessa Dorwart had sampled a lot on the way to becoming a teenager: go-karts, softball, scary movies, black hair dye, and the seat of her dad's motorcycle.

She had gotten pretty good at sports. And she was a decent student if she tried. But friends were Vanessa's lifeblood. She loved school because that's where the friends were. She had a killer set of blue eyes that wowed even her four brown-eyed siblings.

"A social butterfly," said her mom, Kimberly.

By sophomore year, Vanessa was crazy about raspberry lip balm, text-messaging, and a new circle of trust: sophomores Gina and Kelly. She had met Gina after freshman year. Gina and Kelly had been close since middle school.

The Dorwarts spoke adoringly about the three.

Ness and Gee, as Vanessa and Gina were known, had hit it off.

"I was glad Vanessa had a close friend like that," said Frankie, an Interboro junior.

Kelly was often at Vanessa's house. She was like family.

"I love Kelly," Frankie said. "I love her to death."

As often as Kelly was at Vanessa's, Vanessa was at Gina's. And with her arresting eyes, she could quiet Gina's baby nephew, Michael Anthony.

"He would just gaze into her eyes," Gina's sister Stephanie Gentile said.

The three friends weren't part of the football crowd, the marching band, or the obvious cliques that define high school. They had plenty in common for chatter in the cafeteria but shared something less frivolous, too: Each had been through a lot at home.

Kelly was new to Interboro in September and wasn't thrilled about being there.

As a freshman, she had been comfortable in the red-and-blue uniforms of Cardinal O'Hara High School. But her divorced mother, Denise Shull, raising Kelly and her brother as a single parent, could no longer afford tuition.

Shull jumped through hoops so her daughter could pick up sophomore year at Interboro. The cozy public school draws its 1,300 students from Prospect Park, Glenolden, Norwood, and Tinicum Township.

The high school is, in the words of a longtime teacher, one of the region's "best-kept secrets." Seven of 10 Interboro kids head to college. Its Buccaneers football team is a religion. Legendary Eagles walk-on Vince Papale played on its gridiron.

But for Kelly, it meant being apart from her mom. She had moved in with a family friend to be eligible to enroll. She was struggling.

Vanessa, too, had known tough times beyond school.

When she was 9, her father approached authorities about a theft ring where he worked. He later pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring to operate a chop shop and was sentenced to probation.

Paul Dorwart, a plump man who gives bear hugs, later opened his own vehicle repair shop. At sentencing in 2005, his lawyer praised him for having "done a tremendous job of supporting his family."

But no sooner had the dust settled than things turned ugly at home. In 2007, when Vanessa was 13, her parents' souring relationship led to a volley of accusations in court. A separation ensued, and Paul was awarded custody.

As sophomore year approached, Vanessa was spending less time at home and more time with friends.

"Something was up with my daughter," Kim Dorwart would later say of her second-oldest of five. "Her studies were starting to lack. Things were starting to go downhill."

Vanessa would text into the wee hours, sometimes annoying her 9-year-old sister, Paige, who shared a bed with her. Still, Vanessa could do no wrong in the fourth grader's eyes.

"Never cry over a boy. You're stronger than that," Vanessa once told Paige.

But boy trouble had hit Vanessa hard. She was broadcasting her woes in a tell-all community: Facebook.

Two months before that walk to the tracks, she wrote this:

Dec. 30, 8:13 p.m.: "i messed up."

Dec. 31, 2:29 p.m.: "She woke up with hope. But she only found tears. . .);"

Jan. 5, 9:51 p.m.: "bed, schoool. cellls gooood i loved you from the day i saw you till you broke me and even after that. i jus cant let you go ); - can't trust any guys anymore. SweetDreams "

Gina, on the other hand, was having a magical year.

She had met a boy. Billy Bradley. She was mad about him. He meant the world to her.

When Gina was little, her dad, Samuel Gentile Jr., meant the world to her, too. He nicknamed her Hoagie as a nod to her appetite, said Carlotta "Dee" Gentile, Gina's 68-year-old grandmother.

But in July 2004, in the thick of a bankruptcy saga that had been playing out for several years, Gentile, a cement contractor, shot himself in the head. He was found dead inside the Tinicum Township office where he worked.

Gina was 11. Her mother, Jacqueline, a nurse, was left to care for Gina and her five siblings.

Gina had adored her dad and took it hard, her grandmother said.

A family rift soon meant no more visits to Grandmom's. But Gina found a way to stay connected to her dad's family.

A couple of times a year she would slip out of the house and walk to Prospect Park to her grandmother's kitchen. The two would laugh as stories spilled out: Her father had been voted "most irresistible" at Interboro; he became a tradesman on a scholarship to Williamson Free School, a prestigious boarding school.

Gina was "very friendly and caring," said her aunt, Stephanie McVeigh.

By 16, Gina had come to enjoy time with friends and listening to music. Extracurriculars were not high on her list. But when she met Billy, she was "transformed." That was the way her grandmother heard it when she caught wind of the young love.

"He really cared for her," Dee Gentile said.

William J. Bradley V was a handsome teen on the verge of manhood, with deep brown eyes, brown hair, and a sweet way about him.

Billy the Kid, as his great-grandmother called him, had softer edges in a hard-edged corner of a county called Delco, where sass is part of the regional DNA.

"My opinion: Billy was probably the most respectful kid in this area," said Rich Hamilton, a diesel mechanic who lived downstairs from Billy and his mom in Prospect Park for a few months.

Mother and son had moved in last summer to one of four apartments carved out of a modest house on a street that dead-ends at railroad tracks. The unit belonged to Billy's grandmother. Neighbors held joint cookouts and enjoyed lazy moments on the steps as Amtrak trains thundered past.

Billy liked music, computers, and video games. He wanted a driver's license and maybe even a tattoo. A part-time job, he figured, would also help his mom pay the bills.

He was unafraid to show his soft side. On a January visit to his dad's house in Delaware, he sat on the floor with his 4-year-old cousin Michael and played with a miniature Hess helicopter and humvee.

"It was cute," said Tina Lopez, 32, Michael's mother and cousins with Billy's dad. "Come to find out, the following week, he passed."

On Jan. 19, Billy was riding to Gina's, scooting his 20-inch black BMX around the corner and across the street. At 12:27 p.m. a call came in to Glenolden police of a traffic accident at South Avenue and Lynwood Circle. Billy Bradley had been hit by a car. He wasn't wearing a helmet.

Cause of death: multiple injuries to the head and neck.

On Sunday, Jan. 24, at 4:26 p.m., the day before Billy's funeral, Gina wrote him a note on MySpace. She included "-1*19*2010

"He changed her life and gave her a purpose," Dee Gentile said, "and then he was taken from her."

Where Billy died, a teddy bear and balloons were strung to a street post. For weeks, the altar would remain, in the shadow of steel and stone girders of an Amtrak overpass.

The overpass forms a demarcation between Glenolden and Norwood, cutting across Chester Pike like a cleaver. All up and down the Pike, as the locals call it, are signs of wear and tear: vacant storefronts, still-kicking appliance shops with dated facades, a CD store staring down the digital age, busy funeral homes, and emptier churches whose grandest days are a memory.

Riverside manufacturing jobs and paychecks are largely gone now. So is the Pike's heyday.

"I'm glad you loved my son," William J. Bradley IV told Gina after losing his boy.

Scores of classmates at Billy's funeral watched his dad recite a poem and nearly fall to his knees.

For Vanessa, Gina, and Kelly, the next month was a wintry passage through teenage ups and downs, snow days, school dances, report cards, and classes like Spanish and health. It was hazy, sad, happy, and hard for them and others in their circle.

"God called our angle home," Gina's big sister Stephanie Gentile wrote at 3:31 p.m. Jan. 26, the day after Billy's burial.

"layin in bed-cant stop thinking . . . text. RestEasyBillBradley," Vanessa wrote at 9:33 that night.

Protracted mourning was punctuated by momentary joys, all captured and recorded in cyberspace.

Vanessa's Facebook ponderings spoke of lost love. She'd been dating a boy named John from another school, Kim Dorwart strained to recall. She had loved him "long enough," Kim said, but had quickly moved on to a new boyfriend.

Over eight days in early February, Vanessa's posts were dark, as she and others continued to grieve. She hadn't moved on.

Thursday, Feb. 4: "ihate crying. the more itry to stay strong the more weak iget on the inside," Vanessa wrote. "idont what to do. everything is getting to me . . . 6: The first of the month's three monster snowstorms arrived, 281/2 inches over two days, suspending public transit, schools, and many businesses.

Monday, Feb. 8: With people sequestered indoors during dinner, Vanessa posted a query that apparently had originated in another corner of the Facebook universe:

"IF you had to jump off a bridge ....... what would your last words be?"

Below it, she wrote:

"that tough idk" - the acronym textspeak for "I don't know."

Wednesday, Feb. 10: A second storm brought 16 inches of snow, ice pellets, and freezing rain.

Thursday, Feb. 11: "realy hate being stuck home andthinking bout bill," wrote Gina's little sister Francesca. An hour later, Stephanie Gentile sent Gina a "Watching Over You Hug" on Facebook with a small picture of a stuffed animal.

Friday, Feb. 12: School was canceled. Valentine's Day was in two days. Here's what Vanessa wrote around lunchtime: "cooool iLove crying,! everythings getting to me - whatever. ); why cant ijus hhave a good day ?! this year been so bad and it jus started . iwish we could restart 2010."

To her parents, Vanessa's mood swings just seemed like the rough-and-tumble terrain of sophomore year, that clumsy time of shedding childhood ways and stumbling into maturity.

She was a kid with plans, they said. She couldn't wait to visit her aunt in Florida over spring break, she was helping plan a Sweet Sixteen bash, and one day soon she wanted to become a nurse.

"I think that my daughter was going through [a] normal 15-year-old's pangs and growing pains," Kim Dorwart said.

Kelly, meanwhile, remained deeply upset about the turbulence in her life, her grandfather Bob Shull said.

And her good pal Gina? She was down.

She "was depressed about her boyfriend," said Gina's aunt, Stephanie McVeigh, echoing what others saw, too. But even that grief, McVeigh said, was not particularly alarming to her family.

Interboro's semiformal dance for freshmen and sophomores momentarily lifted the gloom. On Saturday, Feb. 20, the three girls and a bunch more friends gathered at Gina's to dress and do makeup.

Even McVeigh went to Glenolden from New Jersey to catch it.

"I wanted to see her all dressed up," she said of her niece. "It was girl stuff."

Kelly Cashwell, pint-sized and blond with a button nose, smiled in a spaghetti-strap dress with baby-blue and white fabric that flowed through a tight empire waist.

Gina Gentile preened in a knee-length purple dress with a shimmering bodice and razor-thin straps. She smiled as dangling earrings drew attention to dark brown hair, smoky eyes, and high cheekbones.

Vanessa Dorwart, dark hair cascading to her waist and tickling her cheeks, struck a pose in strappy stilettos and a cocktail dress borrowed from her big sister, Frankie.

Vanessa and Gina, despite recently losing boyfriends, had dates. The cafeteria was decorated in a spaceship theme.

Their smiles, outfits, and goofing were snapped and saved as Facebook photos.

The next day, Kim Dorwart noticed a change in her daughter. Paul Dorwart didn't catch it. But Kim said Vanessa's aura of happiness had disappeared.

"Mommy, I can't talk to you about this," Vanessa said as the two lay on her bed, Kim stroking her daughter's hair.

"Fine," said her mother. "Talk to your counselor."

Kim Dorwart, 36, said she had called the school and left a message for one.

At the high school, two guidance counselors were in their first year after a 34-year veteran had retired. Also, the Monday after the dance was the first day for incoming Superintendent Nancy Hacker.

Hacker later confirmed the voice-mail message, but she and other school officials would say nothing more about it publicly.

So began the week of the walk to the tracks.

On Monday night, Vanessa griped on Facebook that her dad had taken away her cell. Paul Dorwart chimed in with what seemed like a playful post: "wonder why !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Her parents sometimes took away her phone if she spent too much time on it, her mother said.

On Tuesday, the friends bantered on Facebook.

"love you girlies forever" Gina wrote at 8:30 p.m. beneath a photo of the three on Vanessa's Facebook page.

"iiLoveYouMoreCheeekss" Vanessa wrote a minute later.

"phhh,yeh if that was even possiblee" Gina shot back.

Beneath another dance photo Vanessa wrote: "ifelt like a lil barbie tho iwill say.! ahah and barbie was ready to kick them heels off and throw her fists up . . ."

"do either of yous got algerbra 2?" Kelly asked Vanessa beneath yet another snapshot.

"pha noo. im in that stupid math jawn." Vanessa replied in seconds.

But Vanessa was back in the dumps a few hours later.

9:23 p.m.: "ijus wanna be happy again. not the fake smile my real one."

10:10 p.m.: "idont wanna walk this earth if igotta do it solo, you usta be myrida. -kus iwas so high and now im so low and i dont wanna walk around on my own."

10:15 p.m.: "i miss your hugs & how you held me tight when i was scared.&you were always there for me . but, what i miss the most,is how you held me, & make me laugh thru it all. -but now you have her & i dont exist);"

It would be Vanessa's last Facebook post.

Gina's sister Stephanie was going to be meeting a Catholic priest that week about her little boy's christening. Gina was going to be 7-week-old Michael Anthony's godmother. She loved babies, her grandmother Rosalia Giordano said. She'd been waking up early to help out.

On Wednesday, Gina went to a 7 p.m. concert at Interboro called Mock Rock. The last song was dedicated to Billy.

After the concert, around 10:30, Interboro senior Paige Sullivan, 18, received a text and rushed out of her Norwood house, according to her mother, Karen.

"Where are you going?" her mom asked, receiving little explanation in return.

Around the same time, Vanessa, who hadn't gone to Mock Rock, asked if she could leave home to meet Kelly. Her dad said no.

An hour or so later, Paige Sullivan returned home. She had met with a friend who had been upset, she told her mother, and she had helped calm her down.

What Paige didn't tell her mother then was that the meeting had happened at the train tracks in Norwood. Kelly Cashwell had been there, and so had Gina Gentile. There had been talk of suicide, her mother later learned.

Paige Sullivan did not tell police, Norwood chief Mark DelVecchio would later say. "She assumed," DelVecchio said, "they were empty threats."

Vanessa, at home with her father, continued planning her Sweet Sixteen party, a week away. Paul Dorwart would rent the Oaks Ballroom in town. Vanessa would have her guests wear black and white. She would be the only one in color - though her outfit was still a work in progress.

"Whatever you pick out, honey, we'll go out and get it," her dad promised.

Paul Dorwart had gotten her a special present, too. She was going to love it.

The next morning, with Vanessa about to leave the house, Kelly and Gina were at Interboro, where Kelly was texting her mom and Vanessa. The texts would later make their way into a police case file.

The cell-phone notes told Denise Shull that her daughter was threatening to take her life. She left work and rushed to school. Kelly and Gina walked out of Interboro around 9:30.

Police said both girls had left "with the intention of taking their lives."

Kelly texted her mother at 9:31 a.m.: "I'll look over you"

And then, at 9:38: "Dying like i've been saying I wanted to do for how long."

At the Norwood train station, a SEPTA commuter-rail ticket agent stepped outside to catch a smoke. "I saw two girls on the southbound side," Bruce Wright said. "I heard one yell, and a couple minutes later one got on a cell phone."

Gina and Kelly were sitting in a green platform shelter on the south side, police said. Vanessa arrived in minutes.

Wright saw Vanessa, finished his cigarette, and went back inside.

He didn't see what happened next. There were screams.

Kelly got a call on her cell. Her brother, Bob, a senior at Interboro, had been trying to find her. He was at the high school with a Prospect Park police officer when Kelly answered.

"Don't do it, Kelly!" he said, according to his grandfather Bob Shull. "We love you."

According to police, who later interviewed Kelly, this happened next:

At the sound of the whistle of an oncoming train, Gina stepped onto the tracks.

"Let's go," she said. "Here comes the train."

Vanessa was on the phone and immediately dropped it to join Gina.

Kelly, though, had decided after hearing from her brother that she could not - would not - join the girls on the tracks.

Aboard a crowded Washington-bound Amtrak Acela from Boston, there was a sudden, jarring noise, as if a tree branch had snapped or a sheet of ice had broken apart. People looked up from their newspapers and BlackBerrys.

Pump, pump, pump went the brakes. Three, four, five times.

The Acela stopped near Prospect Park, the next station south.

Patrolman Brook K. Heverly was first on the tracks in Norwood. Facing south through a haze of snow flurries, he spotted a man in the distance, walking his way. It was a conductor from the train.

The train's engineers, the conductor told Heverly, had seen two girls on the tracks. The girls did not move. It had happened quickly, and the engineers couldn't speak about it at that moment, he said.

On the street above and behind the ticket office, Bob Cashwell and Prospect Park Officer Phillip "Buzzy" Coffin met Kelly outside the town library. She was in shock. They took her right to the high school and surrounded her with counselors.

The Interboro principal called Vanessa's house. Frankie picked up, then called her dad at his body shop in Colwyn.

Paul Dorwart was a paint job away from tying a bow around a 2002 Chevrolet Impala he had fixed up. It was going to be Vanessa's birthday present. He called back principal Paul Gibson.

"Where is my daughter?" Paul asked.

Gibson would say only that a train had been involved.

"My whole stomach and heart just dropped," said Paul Dorwart. He called Kim before shooting down Chester Pike, hitting traffic lights at almost every corner.

He rode up and down, "until I found all the police cars and ambulances."

Word spread instantly across town, Norwood chief DelVecchio said, "all because some kids are texting." He said Gina's mother, Jacqueline Gentile, had arrived at the scene before police even grasped what had happened and who had died.

Vanessa's mother, too, was bombarded with calls and text messages as she raced to Norwood from her job as a home health aide.

"I'm so sorry your daughter is dead."

The text was from the parent of one of Vanessa's friends.

Kim screamed and pounded her fists on the steering wheel. She called Paul. A Prospect Park police officer answered.

Where are you? The officer wanted to know. Come to the train station, he said.

When Kim pulled up, an officer ran to her car and asked who she was.

"Tell me my daughter is OK."

"I wish I could. She's not OK."

"Tell me my daughter is alive."

"I wish I could. She's not alive."

Two hours later, a bitter wind blew snow across the Norwood tracks. A police officer shooed away traffic, and journalists clustered near the station house. Several dozen men in neon-yellow jackets and plastic helmets walked north, shoulder to shoulder, on the southbound tracks. Every so often one picked something up and placed it in a large white bag.

Paul Dorwart appeared on a hill and looked down.

When school let out a bit later, students filed past as they went home. Interboro was just a few blocks away. Word had already spread.

"It was going around that they were planning it," said sophomore Samantha Brown, walking home, "but we don't know." She was not friends with the girls.

That evening, on a tidy street three miles east in Springfield Township, Tom Stolnis headed into the slushy twilight for a night shift at 30th Street Station.

The veteran Amtrak engineer was distracted by chatter when he arrived. Fellow engineers were talking about a friend, a family man named Barry, who had been operating an Acela that morning.

They mentioned a chilling detail that families did not yet know:

"How the girls came out and hugged each other before the train hit 'em," Stolnis said.

A trainee had been in the Acela cab with the engineer that day. He was being tutored by a veteran of more than 30 years, a railman with kids at home. A man who declined to be interviewed for this article.

"He's not doing well at all," chief Mark Kenny of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen said of the engineer instructor.

Across these towns, there was a feeling it had all come to an end too soon, too tragically for these two girls. Matters were made worse by a third but unrelated suicide of an Interboro senior who hanged himself a month later. Police would say Kelly had been contemplating taking her life since October. Gina and Vanessa, they said, had begun considering doing the same after Billy died. Police did not probe much further.

Hundreds of people went to the tracks the next night with small candles stuffed into cups. They stood on snow-matted grass beneath the bare canopy of a giant tree.

There were tears, hugs, and the howl of passing trains. "Should someone get a priest?" a person whispered.

Kim Dorwart fell into the arms of a friend and shrieked as she sobbed.

"I want my daughter back! I want my daughter back!"

The next day came official word that it was suicide. And what the Amtrak engineers saw from their cab - an embrace - was disclosed to the public.

"This whole community is just tormented by this," said social worker Barri Pepe, a Prospect Park resident with an 18-year-old daughter at Interboro. "We don't know what to do."

"You're dealing with the kids, and your heart goes out to them," said Prospect Park Police Chief Cliff Engel, whose station is blocks from the high school. "What do you tell them?"

The Rev. Samuel A. Verruni stood before mourners at Vanessa Dorwart's funeral with the first offer of consolation. He held up a poster that said, "Godisnowhere"

And he told everyone it contained two messages:

God is nowhere.

God is now here.

"It is up to you," he said, "to decide which way you read it."

Two days later, as youngsters blew bubbles in the playground of an adjacent day-care center, "Father Sam" took to the pulpit of St. Gabriel's Catholic Church in Norwood again. But Gina Gentile's family asked that no one from the media attend her funeral.

Billy Bradley's father was bereft at the news of the girls' deaths.

"I am sure that it is not what my son would have wanted," he said in an emotional telephone interview soon after the suicides. Words came slowly as he mustered the strength to speak.

"This is just another way of showing how cruel and senseless this world can be," he said.

On the sofa at home, the Dorwarts struggled to understand what had happened.

Frankie: "She protected me, and she loved me so much."

Kim: "My daughter is vain. She would never do something to disfigure herself. . . . My heart, my soul, being her mother tells me she did not leave this house to kill herself."

Frankie: "Maybe if she didn't have friends who were feeling the same way . . ." Her voice trailed off. "If it was just her, then I don't think she would have went though with it."

"She wouldn't leave me," said Frankie, breaking into tears and hugging her mom.

Kim Dorwart spoke with Kelly by phone the day of the suicides. but the girl didn't say much. She was in a hospital and would be under medical care for several weeks for emotional trauma. Relations between the two families have grown strained since then.

Most members of Kelly's and Gina's families declined to be interviewed after the deaths were declared suicides.

So did school officials. Hacker, the district superintendent, declined to take any questions.

"My attention and that of our staff is now directed to the needs of students and families, not to continuing to respond to questions from the press," Hacker wrote in an e-mail. ". . . Our preference is to be left alone to attend to the important work that we have to do internally."

Facebook became a virtual Wailing Wall the day of the deaths and remained so for weeks.

Stephanie Gentile, 1:57 p.m.: "God took my baby sister. WHY?"

Sal Gentile, a brother, 3:54 p.m.: "I love u Gina, i know ur wit Dad now n i always love u R.I.P"

Bob Cashwell, 9:59 p.m.: "lost 2 friends and way to close to loosing my only sister rest easy ladies u wont hurt anymore"

On Feb. 26, Bob Cashwell's aunt, Jean Marie Shull-Moronese, praised Kelly's big brother.

10:11 a.m.: ". . . always remember bob you saved your sister:)"

Cyberspace would become a repository for all manner of emotion, mournful, accusatory, sad, even vile, over the next two months.

Elsewhere, there were recriminations that rumors of the pact had spread among students but had not been shared with family.

"People knew," Kim Dorwart said, "and this shouldn't have happened."

On March 22, Gibson, the principal, called Vanessa's mother for the first time since she had left a message for a counselor. He said the counselor was "new and distraught over what happened," Kim Dorwart said.

After Vanessa's viewing, an interfaith caucus of ministers across the boroughs formed a triage team. They invited students to First Presbyterian Church of Glenolden.

The Rev. John L. Van Druff said he had opened the doors of the 170-year-old church with the blessing of overwhelmed school officials. A handful of students overcame initial suspicions and walked in to talk.

Teenagers, he concluded, are under enormous peer pressure at school.

"One of the things I think we should be talking to teens about isn't the why-ness, but, 'Is it OK for me to share this secret about my best friend, and I've been sworn to secrecy?' " Van Druff said a month later. "The friend needs to say, 'Yes, you're in deep trouble. I hear you. I feel for you. I care for you. We need to talk to somebody.' "

It is typical for teenagers contemplating suicide to share the secret strictly among peers.

"They'll talk to their friends more than they'll talk to their parent," said Alan L. Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology in Washington, which is studying train suicides for the Federal Railroad Administration.

Even Kim Dorwart understands this to some degree.

"You can't mention anything because then you are labeled, you are bullied," she said. "If you're going down to the counselor's office, then it is all over the Internet within five seconds. Everybody in school knows."

There are 33,000 suicides a year in the United States. Among teenagers, boys are four times more likely than girls to kill themselves. It's even more unusual for girls to die the way Gina and Vanessa did.

Indeed, only about 300 people commit "suicide by train" each year, said Berman. Also rare, he added, are pacts.

Generally suicide pacts involve people who are in relationships, quasi-romantic or otherwise. At least one member of a pact tends to be "submissive," as Berman and other experts put it.

Signs of suicide are often missed, but seldom missing. Sometimes they are specific: "I'm going to kill myself," Berman said.

Other times, "they're more veiled: 'Life sucks. I'm outta here,' " he said.

"That kind of a message, someone has to be able to listen to with a third ear . . . and take it seriously and approach and talk and find out more and, if concerned, get the young person the help."

A good place to start peeping is Twitter and Facebook, the digital confessionals where teenagers - and even parents - spend a lot of time.

"When a kid is in trouble, surveillance is necessary," said Karriem Salaam, a psychiatrist for adolescents at Friends Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia. "You have to be as intrusive as you can as quickly as you can."

Often, social networking sites are "a venue for public humiliation," he said.

Facebook pages for Gina, Vanessa, and Billy Bradley were attacked by hackers after the girls' deaths. Websites became rancorous forums where scribes using pseudonyms lobbed insults over what had happened at the tracks, and who - if anyone - was to blame.

"This whole Facebook thing is ridiculous," said Kim Dorwart. "No one needs to be defended. They are both gone. They were friends. They didn't take sides. Why should we?"

But taking sides was what some people did after Kelly Cashwell's family invited a local newspaper into its home for an interview.

As though defending herself from criticism, in the April 11 article in the Delaware County Daily Times, Kelly said she had done nothing wrong, saying she had not intended to kill herself the day in question. In that same article, her mother, Denise Shull, said she had, indeed, received text messages from her daughter the morning of the suicides that had scared her.

In the aftermath, community pressure was intense on the family, Shull said.

"Please be sensitive," Shull was quoted as saying, "or just leave my daughter alone."

After the article was published, reader comments turned angry and aggressive. One person even posted a link to a criminal-records database.

A few days later, at a fund-raiser to help cover the family's medical expenses, Kelly's grandfather said he was doing everything in his power to watch over Kelly, now 16, who lives with him in Folcroft. But he worried that perceptions about her in the community could counteract her efforts to heal from the trauma of that day.

"I can see the difference," Bob Shull said last week. "She's coming along real good. I don't want to see setbacks in her life."

Kelly is being tutored at home and receiving therapy. Her mother and brother live there, too. And Bob Shull - a determined and doting grandfather, who gets emotional when he thinks about all that has happened - is saving every spare dime from his job to send Kelly back to Cardinal O'Hara in the fall.

"I ask her every day: Is everything all right?" said Shull, 66.

Every day he tells Kelly he loves her to "infinity." If he forgets to drop that last word, Kelly is quick to catch the oversight.

"Pop-pop? Pop-pop?" she'll say with a smile. "Infinity?"

It makes Bob Shull smile, too.

Yes, he says. "Infinity."

It may seem like a throwback, but such a simple exchange is the remedy that Interboro's spiritual leaders are offering to help prevent another such tragedy in their towns.

As their response to the suicides and the aftermath, clergy members as a group plan to ask parents and children to do something old-school come Friday:

Do not text-message.

Do not e-mail.

Do not go to Facebook.

Say, "I love you."

Hug your kids.

Four days later, those same clergy will be at the high school, where if all goes as planned, Interboro parents will turn out for a two-hour session organized by school officials on the topic of teen suicide.

"In light of the recent deaths of Interboro students, our goal is to help parents to learn about the many sources of support available locally and in the county to support families and children," Hacker, the superintendent, wrote in a letter announcing the event.

Mental-health professionals, clergy, and others will talk about how to recognize depression or trouble in children.

"Please join us," Hacker wrote, "to learn more about what we can all do to help our children cope better!"

After Vanessa died, Paul Dorwart continued to log on to his daughter's Facebook page when he had trouble sleeping. He would talk to her there. Write her notes.

He kept paying her cell-phone bill, too. "No one else will have that phone number," he said. And he hung on to the car that would have been Vanessa's on her birthday.

Friends and a cousin finished an all-black paint job on the Chevy Impala after Vanessa died, with this note above the bumper: "In loving memory of Vanessa."

Paul Dorwart began using the car once a week.

Every Sunday, he pulls it out of the garage for a drive west to Marple Township, coming to rest only at the cemetery of SS. Peter and Paul - site of Vanessa's grave.

"I'll definitely go," Paul said, "every Sunday forever."

Feeling Blue

Suicide Prevention Council

1-800-273-8255

www.feelingblue.org

Contact Greater Philadelphia

610-649-5250; 215-355-6000

www.contactgreater

philadelphia.org

Project REACH

610-352-4703

http://projectreach.

holcombprevention.org

American Association

of Suicidology

http://suicidology.org

Survivors of Suicide

215-545-2242

http://phillysos.tripod.com

American Foundation

for Suicide Prevention

1-888-333-2377

www.afsp.org

Staying Alive Walk, June 6

856-795-5073

www.contacthelplines.org

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