Editor's Note: This is part 3 of a four-part series on the plane crash of May 23, 2014, that took four lives, including three Aldo Leopold Charter School students and the pilot.
By Mary Alice Murphy
After the anguish—audible and silent, external and internal—Aldo Leopold Charter School personnel and the parents of the three students who died in a plane crash on May 23, 2014, as well as the family of the pilot, Dr. Peter Hochla, who also died, began a long road to recovery from grief.
The first organized activity, after the first gathering the evening of the crash, was a memorial for the three students—Michael Sebastian Mahl, 16, Ella Sala Myers, 16, and Ella Jaz Kirk, 14—organized by the school.
You can read a comprehensive article on the memorial at this link: http://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/16129-memorial-for-the-two-ellas-and-michael-victims-of-a-tragic-plane-crash . The memorial took place Sunday, June 1, 2014, at the Western New Mexico University Fine Arts Theatre to a packed house. Attendees learned about the accomplishments of the three students in various ways—in the pride of the parents who spoke about their son and daughters, in the ways fellow students described the three, in words, in music, poetry, and film.
