By Scott Brinton
I covered the Bellmore-JFK High School Homecoming parade in the fall of 2004, photographing the revelers and floats as they headed from the Bellmore Long Island Rail Road station off Sunrise Highway to the Bellmore Avenue school. It was a sunny day, full of carefree teenagers.
I could never have imagined then that day would haunt me still.
All journalists who’ve been in the profession a while have stories they can’t shake. You might think you had locked them away at the back of your brain, but they reappear without warning, leaving you in a state of disbelief or sadness or anger. Thinking back on that Homecoming parade leaves me feeling all three.
Covering the recent West Hempstead Stop & Shop shooting, in which 49-year-old Ray Wishropp, a father of seven from Valley Stream, was killed and two others were injured, sent the memories of that parade streaming back.
That day, I snapped photos of Carol Kestenbaum, a 17-year-old JFK senior, as she drove the Homecoming king and queen in her white convertible. A little more than two years later, Kestenbaum was shot dead while studying education at the University of Arizona. She had warned a friend that the young man she was dating seemed unhinged.
The 22-year-old found out about the warning, killed Kestenbaum and her best friend, Nicole Schiffman, another Kennedy High graduate who was studying journalism at the University of Maryland, and then took his own life. Schiffman had come for the weekend to celebrate Kestenbaum’s 20th birthday.
They were among the tens of thousands of Americans who have died in a perpetual cycle of gun violence in this nation. I held back tears when I covered their funerals on a cold winter day in 2007. They were buried side by side at New Montefiore Cemetery in West Babylon.
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