The Night Alicia Never Made It Home

Hersh Kapoor remembers the movie he and Alicia Betancourt saw that Friday night at the start of their junior year in high school three years ago: "Resident Evil 2." He remembers pulling out of the parking lot of the Olney 9 Cinemas at Town Center Drive just after 11 p.m. and turning left onto Sandy Spring Road. He knows he must have made a right onto Doctor Bird Road to take Betancourt home, but he can't remember doing it.

He can't remember what happened next, although he said friends who live nearby told him they heard it: the high-pitched squealing of tires, shattering glass and the dull whomp of metal crumpling against metal. Montgomery County police investigators said he'd spun out of control and hit a utility pole at 63 mph.

He can't remember what happened to Betancourt, 16, his friend who was killed instantly that night as she rode in the passenger seat of his Volkswagen Jetta. "I try, but I can't," Kapoor said. "I was apparently conscious through it. They told me I made two phone calls on my cell, just a random string of 20 digits apparently. So maybe I don't want to know."

Kapoor, now 20, telling his story in a Starbucks across the street from the cineplex where it all began, excused himself to find something to wipe his eyes.

He was a just a stupid kid, he said, driving a turbocharged car that was too powerful for him. He doesn't know what happened. He certainly never meant to hurt anyone. Now he's got to live with the fact that he did. "I've moved beyond it in a lot of ways. I go to school full time. I work. I take care of my family," Kapoor said. "But it stays with me. It's there with me forever."

In fall 2004, Kapoor's was one of a string of teen crashes in the Washington area that left 15 dead in one month. This fall, 12 have died and 17 have been injured in eight crashes involving teenagers. Kapoor knows only too well that once the headlines fade, the funerals are over and the police investigations wrap up, the ones who survived will have to figure out how to go on.

He has gone over the accident hundreds of times in his head. He knew of Alicia Betancourt at James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring. They had friends in common. He knew she was super-smart, had attended magnet programs, took advanced courses, earned top grades and was a talented artist. But it wasn't until she sat down next to him in a Web site development class in their junior year that they became friends.

On Sept. 24, Kapoor was planning to stay home and do homework. But a friend badgered him to come to a birthday party. So Kapoor called Betancourt to see if she wanted to go. He picked her up. When they got to the party, it was too crowded to get in, so they settled on a movie instead. Then he meant to take her home.

For the longest time, he thought he had. After the crash, Kapoor was flown to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. He was in a coma for days. He was restrained, he said, because he sometimes became violent and cursed. He tried to pull the breathing tube out of his throat.

In the hospital, he dreamed of being in a giant library with his orthodontist and his father telling him not to worry, that the grass would get cut. He dreamed of sitting in a parking lot surrounded by cars, talking to a friend under a colorful sunset. He dreamed he was at a party with his mother and he had something on his face. She kept telling him not to take it off. And he dreamed constantly of getting Betancourt safely home.

"I remember giving her a hug goodnight in front of her house," he said.

That dream seemed so real. He remembers when he found out it wasn't. He'd been discharged from the hospital after two weeks and told he'd never play basketball or lift weights again. He'd injured his spine: The impact of the crash flung his body forward, then his seat belt whipped it back with such force that he cracked a vertebra. He had been transferred to a rehab center to learn to walk again and recover his short-term memory.