A car crash with multiple fatalities!
Knowing their school’s problematic history, students worried.
Who would be next? Who would be the next kid to have something horrible happen?
Chapter 2
THE BUILDUP
Media efforts to tell this story in shorthand have framed Sarah Ludemann and Rachel Wade as two girls with a lot in common. But was that really the case? Sure, both had once dreamed of being a veterinarian. Beyond that, though, they came from very different places.
Sarah’s mom, Gay, was a surgical nurse. Her dad, Charlie, drove a cab. They were from New York but migrated southward to be “warm and safe.” They’d been married sixteen years when they had their only child, tomboy Sarah. Sarah lived her whole life in the same house, a single-level lime-colored stucco home.
She liked to hang out with her dad, riding beside him sometimes in his taxi, blasting the radio and singing Keith Urban songs. According to Sarah’s friend since preschool, Danielle Eyermann, “Sarah loved to sing and dance.” The friends would work out their own Britney Spears–style choreography. Sarah attended John Hopkins Middle School in St. Petersburg. Danielle said that when other girls her age already had real boyfriends, Sarah was still crushing on country singers and Tampa Bay Rays baseball players.
Sarah started high school at Tarpon Springs because it had a veterinary medicine program. But the school was more than an hour bus ride away, and she had to get up when it was still dark.
In tenth grade, Sarah and friend Amber Malinchock hung out a lot and ate at Chick-fil-A. It was there that Sarah met Joshua Camacho, who used to come out and talk to the girls when he was on break.
Joshua told them he was starting his senior year at Pinellas Park High School. Amber remembered he always reeked of French fries. One time he winked at Sarah, and that was that. She was giddy in love; her face was frozen into a dreamy smile.
Sarah decided soon thereafter to replace one dream with another. She didn’t want to be a veterinarian anymore. She wanted to get close to Joshua Camacho—so she disregarded just about everybody’s advice and transferred to Pinellas Park High.
Sarah was upset that fall when she showed up at her new school and Joshua gave her the cold shoulder. She had to prove her love for him before he would pay attention to her.
As Sarah’s friend Amber later put it, “Most people have their first love when they’re younger. She loved him. She really, really loved him.”
They say that opposites attract. That was certainly the case here. The good girl was attracted to a bad boy. He sent her photos on her cell phone: flexing, smoking fat doobs, brandishing his CAMACHO tattoo in large letters across his back.
But he wasn’t just a gangsta. He could sweet-talk, too. Sarah’s mother didn’t like it, but she understood the appeal. Was he good? Was he bad?
Sarah had been yanked off the straight and narrow, and Gay Ludemann wondered if she’d ever get back on track. Her friends said it was stupid to be attracted to a boy like that; it was like climbing out on the ledge and wondering what it would feel like to fall.
As Charlie put it, they did everything to get Sarah to “see the light.” They warned her that she’d never been with a boy before. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know about the pitfalls of relationships. But it didn’t matter what they said. Parents were so yesterday. Joshua was now.
Everything would be fine, if only it weren’t for that thorn in Sarah’s side—the little firecracker called Rachel Wade. Something was going to have to give with her.
It had been months of insults back and forth, stalking, harassment, and domestic violence. Dealing with Rachel was nerve-racking. For friends and foe alike. Rachel came off sometimes as, well, not quite stable. Her history demonstrated that….
Rachel didn’t come from a visibly broken home. Rachel’s mom, Janet, was an assistant teacher at an elementary school. Her dad, Barry, was a food-distributor truck driver.
Her seemingly normal upbringing occurred in a suburban home, painted brown, with an aboveground pool in the backyard. The youngest of two children, she’d been a happy little girl, reading about, drawing, and pretending to be a Disney princess. She had so many friends and loved attention.
Rachel’s friend Egle Nakaite said, “People sometimes thought she was prissy, but she wasn’t, once you got to know her.” Rachel was still in elementary school when she met Joshua Camacho, whose family—parents, six brothers, and a sister—had just moved to Florida from the Dominican Republic.
By high school, Rachel had no desire to be one of the goody-goody girls. She saw life as one big party. Studying was cutting into her fun time. By the time she was sixteen, she was a rebel, defying her parents’ attempts to keep her home.
“I don’t need your rules,” she hissed, eyes squinted.
“I kept telling her that nothing good ever happens after midnight,” her father, Barry, sadly recalled.
On March 9, 2005, less than two weeks after her fifteenth birthday, Rachel started a long and painful habit of running away from home. The first time, it scared her parents half to death. She had been punished, grounded. But instead of coming home after school and staying inside as she was supposed to, she didn’t come home at all. Rachel’s parents called her friends, who agreed that they’d seen Rachel at school, but not since. She didn’t go home, but she did go to school the next day, and that was where cops nabbed her, taking her right out of class and into the Juvenile Assessment Center.
Rachel pulled a switcheroo on May 27, 2005. She called 911 on her parents.
Ha! That would show them.
When the dispatcher asked what her emergency was, Rachel said her parents wouldn’t let her go out at night with her boyfriend and her friends. It was about ten o’clock when Officer John Coleman pulled up in front of the Wade household. Rachel complained to him that her parents didn’t like the guy she was dating. They thought he was too old for her, and that she wasn’t allowed to see him anymore. They said that she had to stay in her room. She was frustrated that her parents couldn’t communicate with her.
After finishing with Rachel, Officer Coleman spoke with her dad. Barry Wade said that earlier in the day, he’d gone to one of Rachel’s friends’ houses to pick her up, and he saw her walking down the street with an older boy whom they didn’t like.
Coleman tried to calm the situation down. He suggested family counseling, and recommended that another family member mediate the next time Barry and Rachel spoke.
Rachel’s parents were away and her grandmother was babysitting on July 1, 2005, when Rachel snuck out her bedroom window. Her grandma called the police, suggesting they look for her at a guy named Jake’s house. Rachel came home before she could be listed as missing; and when police spoke to Jake, he said he had not seen or heard from Rachel.
On October 12, Rachel fought with her mom and left the house. Janet called the police, who arrived to find Rachel had only gotten as far as the next block, where she’d stopped and cried. The cop took her home.
On November 17, 2005, a woman named Gail Kish called Detective Adam Geissenberger. Kish was the secretary of the freshman department at Pinellas Park High School, and Geissenberger was the PPPD investigator who normally worked the PPHS beat. Kish said there was a problem regarding a student there named Rachel Wade.
Geissenberger said he was familiar with Ms. Wade and would be right over. On the way, he recalled that he had seen Rachel just that morning in the parking lot outside school. She was with an older male, whom he recognized as Rachel’s boyfriend, Jose Hernandez (pseudonym).