A Father Recalls a Day Now Far From Ordinary

But that moment never came.

Today, Troy Crites and other relatives and friends will remember the dark-haired teen -- who sang in the church choir and used to run cross-country at Wootton High School -- at a memorial Mass at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Gaithersburg. She and her friend were found in a car in Loudoun County at the West Virginia line, dead, police suspect, from carbon monoxide poisoning.

But even as Crites plans to take his daughter's ashes to their resting place -- inside a granite cemetery bench in the shade of an oak -- he said he does not fully understand how the moment arrived, how two teenage girls chose to take their lives.

The girls had been friends for a couple of years but were especially close during the past year. Rachel Smith had been his daughter's "guardian angel," he said, and helped her pull through after a suicide attempt in March. She had been cutting herself and underwent treatment and medication, he said.

Recently, she had made plans for the future, he said, looking to become a nurse or to work with animals.

"That's why this seems so out of place," he said, his face appearing weary, in the three-story Gaithersburg townhouse he shared with the teenager. He said that even her psychiatrists were surprised by her death.

Yet, along with the promise of getting better, he said, was the weight of the past.

At the time of his daughter's suicide attempt, Crites said, he was separating from her stepmother after more than eight years, which was difficult for the teen. Rachel's birth mother, Kathryn Cornelius, had lived in Italy for most of Rachel's life -- writing, calling, visiting -- but living on another continent.

Everyone tried to come together to help, Crites said.

Two months later, Rachel received the Catholic sacraments of Communion and confirmation, a decision she had made for herself, her mother said in an interview yesterday. Two months after that, her mother treated her to a trip with her to Paris. Then there was a big family get-together in Florida.

The last time she talked to her daughter, Cornelius said, was five days before she disappeared. Her voice was upbeat during a two-hour conversation, she said, and "she was cuddly and sweet and talking about how she was going to sing the Mass."

The search for the missing Rachels started the next weekend -- and the longer they were gone, the greater the efforts.