ST. LOUIS (AP) – A tiny southern Illinois school’s senior class president and another popular classmate were electrocuted when they accidentally moved an aluminum irrigation pipe into an overhead power line while trying to free a raccoon inside the tube, a coroner said Friday.
Thursday night’s deaths of student officer Nick Bledsoe, 19, and Justin Eldridge, 18, by Friday had numbed students and staffers at Okawville Junior-Senior High School, where counselors scrambled to help those grieving the tragedy described by the 550-student school system’s chief as “a freak thing I can’t even begin to describe.”
“Both students were what I consider the embodiment of the spirit and what this small community stands for – they are hard-working, fun-loving, genuine kids,” Superintendent Scott Fuhrhop added by telephone from Okawville, a Washington County village of just 1,400 people some 40 miles southeast of St. Louis.
In a senior class of just roughly four dozen students, “they were two of the most genuine people you’d ever want to meet.”
Mark Styninger, the county’s coroner, said Bledsoe and Eldridge were working on a farm Thursday night — by Fuhrhop’s account, spreading manure — when they spotted a raccoon slink into the 30-foot irrigation pipe. The two teens picked up the pipe to try to get the animal out of it when the pipe touched the power line.
Styninger said he pronounced the two dead about an hour later at a hospital, where they had been flown by helicopter.
Autopsies were planned, and funeral arrangements were pending.
As with tragedies played out in many tiny towns, word swept through the area. Fuhrhop said one of the first emergency responders to the scene — the district’s grade-school principal — called the victims’ principal, who then relayed the details to Fuhrhop, all within about a half-hour.
“When I heard it, I thought surely someone had their story mixed up. You’re just like, ‘Why? How? You just shake your head,” the superintendent said. “We knew right then that today was going to be a difficult day.”
Fuhrhop remembered both students as outspoken yet respectful, never shy about offering their two cents about matters including cafeteria food. “They got their point across,” the superintendent said.
Like Bledsoe a lover of the outdoors, Eldridge was a member of the local bass-fishing and trap-shooting teams. During a day last year honoring Future Farmers of America, Fuhrhop said, Eldridge and one of the superintendent’s daughters shared a tractor they rode to school.
At the start of school Friday, Fuhrhop described the mood as “just total devastation” that carried through a vigil in the gym, then another one among the victims’ classmates.
“I don’t think I saw any dry eyes when I came in,” Fuhrhop said. “I just cannot imagine what our student body is going through. Most of these kids have never experienced a death, and when you lose two popular, fun-loving leaders of the school, it’s beyond words.”
Fuhrhop said the German-influenced town, which he described as “like living in Mayberry, safe and wonderful,” would huddle together and press on.
“There’s not a right answer or wrong answer of what to do,” he said. “But we will survive and go on.”