A car crash, and a trail of broken lives

Stuart, Florida is a quiet town on the Atlantic Coast a hundred-miles north of Miami. In  that community of 140,000, Tim and Beth Stone were raising their 14-year-old daughter, Sarah.

Beth Stone, Sarah's mother: She was very outgoing, very busy, and always on the move, whether it was gymnastics or dance or piano lessons. Girl scouts. She always had something going on.

Such a little whirlwind that her friends and classmates called her “Sarah Superstar.”

Tim Stone, Sarah's father: She did like the spotlight.

Tim Stone: One of her other nicknames was “Front and center.” But I think more than she liked attention on herself, she liked to give attention to others.

On Monday, June 17, 2002 Sarah asked if she could have a sleepover at her friend’s —14-year-old Jennifer McKinney.

Jennifer’s cousin, 13-year-old Alexandra, was over on her annual summer vacation from Europe where her mother, Marcella, worked for the United Nations.

Even though they lived an ocean apart, Jennifer and Alexandra were like sisters. They traveled together on vacations— Paris, Geneva, Disney World—and visited each other every school break they could.

Marcella, Alexandra Quaroni's mother: We would arrive here in Florida, Alexandra would go directly to Jennifer’s house and they would spend the entire summer together.

And Sarah, who was also always up for anything and everything, fit right in to round out a trio on that sunny Florida summer day.

Beth Stone: They were out playing all day. They went to the pool, they went to the miniature golf. They raced go-carts. It was a full day of activities and fun.

And they were going to end the day with a movie at the mall. Marcella, thinking the day had already been jam-packed, had been reluctant to let Alexandra go that night.

Marcella: My sister said “Let them go Marcella,” with her uncle, my brother Ted, “Let them go.” I didn’t want to be the Wicked Witch of the West or whatever, so I let them go.

The movie didn’t let out until after 11 p.m. Jennifer’s uncle, Ted, piled the girls into the backseat of his rented Cadillac to drive them all home.

Jennifer’s uncle never knew what hit him as the Firebird struck him broadside. The impact was so violent, it spun the Cadillac several times before coming to rest on the other side of the road. The uncle survived.

Jennifer had been thrown from the car, alive, but barely.

In the back seat Jennifer’s cousin Alexandra.

A policeman knocked on the door where Marcella was staying with her other brother. 

Marcella: He said there has been an accident with the children. My brother yelled, he screamed. I was like nothing. I just said "There’s a mistake." I said "My kid, my child, my daughter is with my brother." And he said, "Your daughter is dead."   

The Stones got that same horrific knock from a chaplain for the sheriff’s office.

Tim Stone: He looked at us and he said, “You know, these are the hardest words for me to tell a parent. And he just simply said, “Your daughter Sarah Stone was killed tonight in a car accident.”

Jennifer McKinney, Alexandra’s cousin, would recover from the painful, almost fatal, injuries inflicted on her by the other driver— a boy, ironically, she and her cousin Alexandra had known most of their lives.

Marcella: Stephen Bromstrup, which is my sister’s best friends’ son. I said, “I can’t believe it.” I said, “I can’t believe it.” They were neighbors. My sister and her husband and the Bromstrups lived right next to each other. They had a business together. And we used to go there. We knew them. We knew them.                                         

And now Marcella would have to tell her husband that their little girl was dead and at the hands of family friends they’d known seemingly forever.

Marcella: I said, “Darling there’s something that’s happened.” “What?” “Alex is dead.” “What?” It was the worst thing, the worst words that came out of my mouth—“Alex is dead.” “What do you mean she’s dead?”

In another home, across town, another set of parents, the Bromstrups, mother and father of Stephen, the teenage driver had also become all but fetal in their despair.

Suzy Bromstrup: All three of us slept together. We stayed together and didn’t leave each other’s side.

Funerals for the young girls were held by their grieving families. But the Bromstrups didn’t attend the services even though their lives with the McKinneys and their niece Alexandra had been intertwined for years. Paul Bromstrup had even introduced the McKinneys.

Paul Bromstrup: We wanted to go to the funeral but we were afraid that we may upset the people and I didn’t want to do that. We’d already crushed these people’s lives and to do anything else to make it any worse, I just didn’t want that to happen.

The local newspaper ran extensive coverage of the tragedy of the families involved.

The community was abuzz with superheated opinions about what punishment Stephen Bromstrup deserved.  The parents of the dead and injured girls pushed for a stiff penalty.

Marcella: This was no accident. I can understand, I can understand if you’re driving and your tire explodes and you hit somebody and kill somebody. I can understand that’s an accident. But this was no accident.  

A year after the fatal crash, Stephen Bromstrup entered a plea of no contest to two counts of vehicular homicide. In the end, he received a sentence of 7 years in prison. Tougher than some people expected, but it wasn’t the end of things for his mother and father.

They became pariahs— whispered about.

Paul Bromstrup: We were afraid to go out. We didn’t go out unless we had to. We didn’t know what was being said. But there was always words. Like you could see that people were talking and our picture was in the paper so often that it was obvious that we couldn’t hide at all.

Tim and Beth Stone, meanwhile, the parents of Sarah, were starting to focus their anger not only on the Bromstrups and their perceived failure with their boy Stephen but on another set of parents altogether: the O’Briens— John and Barbara— mother and father of the girl who threw the backyard party. It was a teenage get-together the Stones now believed set in motion a sequence of lethal events, ending in their daughter’s death.

Tim Stone: When you lose a child, the first thing you want to know is why. And how did it happen? What could have been done to have prevented it?

They pieced together a rough outline of events.

Jennifer O’Brien, a school friend of Stephen, had given her father a grill for Father’s Day, and the next day, invited 19 friends over for a cookout.  The Stones knew that after the wreck Stephen Bromstrup was found to have alcohol in his system.

Had there been underage drinking at the party at the O’Brien’s?

Tim Stone: An interview with the party host had suggested that there was not. We later found out that was not the case.

Were those party-givers, the O’Briens, the teenage girl’s parents, partly responsible for the deaths that followed even though it was Stephen driving the car?

Tim Stone: They had knowledge that there was drinking at their house. They were the only adults that night or the last adults that could have made a difference.

The Stones had settled with Stephen’s parents, the Bromstrups. Now they were taking to court another set of parents altogether.

The Stones were suing John and Barbara O’Brien for, in effect, failing as parents.

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