Three Fairfax County teenagers killed on their way to Texas video game fest

Three Fairfax County teenagers heading to a video-game festival in Texas were killed early Friday in a three-vehicle crash that was caused by a man driving in the wrong direction, authorities said.

Holly Novak, Kyle Mathers and Dale Neibaur, all 2014 graduates of Herndon High School, were in an SUV that crashed in Greenville, northeast of Dallas, according to a spokesman with the Texas Department of Public Safety. The SUV was struck head-on by a 78-year-old driver and then hit from behind by a tractor-trailer, said the department’s spokesman, Kyle Bradford.

Authorities said the 78-year-old man, Kenneth Frazier, also died. Two other teens in the SUV were injured and hospitalized, authorities said. They said the driver of the tractor-trailer was not injured.

In Virginia, friends and family mourned the three teens, who were known as caring and energetic. All were in the school’s marching band, and they shared a love of science fiction. One friend affectionately remembered them as “nerdy-funny.”

Kathleen Jacoby, the band’s director, said that the three graduates were the best of friends — “inseparable” — and that the idea of them setting off on a road trip together, headed toward a video-game convention, made perfect sense.

Holly Novak, 18, was also killed in the car crash in Texas. (Courtesy of Fairfax County Public Schools)

“That sounds exactly like them. I bet you they had costumes ready to go,” she said.

Jacoby remembered the leading roles all three played in the close-knit band. “So many people have said to me, ‘Kyle was the first person who ever said “Hello” to me,’ ‘Dale’s the one who sat with me at lunch,’ ‘Holly gave me rides everywhere.’ ”

Leann Poirier, 21, a former Herndon High band major, recalled the trio for their contagious enthusiasm. “Their excitement and passion really set a tone for everybody in the program,” she said.

Jacoby said that Novak, 18, was quiet, a bookish flute player who wasn’t embarrassed to dress up as a Harry Potter character and who earned the highest grade in Jacoby’s Advanced Placement music-theory class.

When Novak served as drum major, she called the drummers her ducklings. “She took care of everything and everyone,” Jacoby said. “She was the mother duck, and she always took care of her ducklings.” That extended to coming up with a new catalogueing system for the music library, a task that meant hours of organizing more than 6,000 pieces of music.

Mathers, 19, was given to bursts of enthusiasm that generated new ideas for the band. He came up with the idea of a smaller pep band that could travel to sports games, Jacoby said, and then recruited instrumentalists to fill it.

He also thought of starting a Relay for Life team to benefit the American Cancer Society.

Kyle Mathers, 19, left, and Dale Neibaur, 19, were killed in a car accident in Texas on August 7. (Courtesy of Fairfax County Public Schools)

His friends seized on that as an opportunity for one of their beloved pranks: They called it “flocking.” Overnight, they would descend on someone’s yard with dozens of plastic flamingos, then request a donation to Relay for Life to remove the tacky plastic ornaments.

Of Mathers’s take-charge attitude and fiery eagerness, Jacoby said, “He could have been an emcee anywhere — on a radio, or a talk show.”

Jacoby praised Neibaur, 19, for his dedication to improvement. He took both of the band classes that were offered during the school day, when most students took one. “He just wanted to make everything he touched better than it was,” she said.

He stood out to her from day one, when she went to talk to eighth-graders about the band that they could join the next year. “He was just going on and on about how he couldn’t wait to get to high school,” Jacoby remembered.

John Trapp, who played in the band at Herndon High and is now a section leader of Montana State University’s band, said he spent much of this summer playing Minecraft with his high school friends. He chatted with them via Skype from his room in Bozeman, Mont., while they played the video game simultaneously.

“Just for hours, we played and talked,” he said. They sometimes reminisced about their high school pranks, like piling a tower of chairs in the band room with Mathers sitting on top, or duct-taping Mathers to a beam — at Mathers’s suggestion — one afternoon.

“They were just a bunch of people that had a lot of fun in high school,” he said.

Their families could not immediately be reached to comment.

Jacoby said that all three remained in the Herndon area after high school. Novak and Mathers were taking classes at Northern Virginia Community College, and Neibaur was working at a Red Robin restaurant.

That meant they still visited Jacoby’s office regularly to talk about the music they were listening to and the books they were reading. And they showed up with posters to cheer on the current band members.

“They were just the heart and soul of our program,” she said.

Clarence Williams contributed to this report.