Shortly after midnight on Easter, a popular 17-year-old football player leaped to his death from the Ben Franklin Bridge after leading police on a car chase. The boy had been at a party.
A week or so later, Mayor Tish Colombi and School Superintendent Joe O'Brien received an envelope of unsettling photos - Haddonfield high schoolers so proud of their partying, so unconcerned with reprisal, that they put hundreds of images on the Internet.
My favorite? It's a tie between the boy posing next to an artfully arranged pyramid of beer, and the girl who strapped a bottle of Captain Morgan to her chest with a belt for easy access, like a gun in a holster.
"I was blown away by the boldness," Colombi tells me.
So the local leader known for her tailored red suits started airing the town's dirty laundry.
'Reeling out of control'
"To make people sit up and listen, you have to shake them," she figures.
"In 22 years as an elected official, I've never done anything like this, but I fear we're reeling out of control."
Lest you think Colombi is pious, perfect or a prude, know this: "I picked my kids up from the police station, too," she conceded.
Once, in the 1980s, her son slipped his house key to friends so they could have the run of the place while the family was down the Shore.
He was on to something. The latest rage involves friends letting friends get wild in an empty home.
Parents don't even need to be gone long. Some parties start the second they go out to eat. Thanks to cell phones and instant messaging, 60 kids can show up in 10 minutes.
"Word gets out fast," explains Haddonfield Commissioner Neal Rochford, who experienced it himself. "They swarm."
"They're not out just to have a couple of beers and get silly," he adds. "They're out to get annihilated."
Sobering up
At the mayor's roundtable - a first-ever gathering of town leaders and parents that Colombi called last month - she placed ashtrays in front of her guests.
