Jonathan Law High School students should have been going to their junior prom Friday night. Instead, the teens went to a seaside vigil for their murdered classmate.
About 200 community members and students, some wearing their prom dresses and tuxedos, gathered Friday evening at Walnut Beach in Milford, Conn., to remember 16-year-old Maren Sanchez, a junior who was murdered earlier in the day at the school after rejecting a classmate’s invitation to the dance.
Friends identified the boy as Chris Plaskon, also 16. He has been charged with murder as a juvenile, but could be charged as an adult following a court appearance Monday in New Haven.
Police did not identify the teen.
Anguished classmates funneled down to Walnut Beach around 6 p.m. — just one hour before the school’s junior prom was scheduled to start at a nearby banquet hall. The annual dance was postponed after the tragedy.
Wearing their formal wear, students cried and prayed at the local beach, the Hartford Courant reported. Friends shouted out memories of their slain classmate as they released purple balloons into the sky and yelled “Love you, Maren,” the newspaper reported.
Earlier, students covered a rock outside the school with purple spray paint and wrote the teen’s name and birthday, Aug. 26, 1997, alongside a white heart.
Another memorial service was held at the First United Church of Christ in Milford, Conn.
“She was a really good person and she didn’t deserve that,” one of Sanchez's classmates,18-year-old Crystal Johnson, told the New Haven Register.
Johnson said students selected Sanchez as their prom queen Friday.
“She had the prom queen type of personality. I just felt she deserved it," she said.
“She was friends with everyone,” said Sean Berg, another classmate, at the seaside vigil.
Sanchez was attacked, allegedly by Plaskon, around 7:15 a.m. Friday, when the boy shoved the girl down a set of stairs and started to choke her, witnesses told the Daily News.
The teen pulled out a kitchen knife he brought from home and slashed Sanchez across the neck, chest and face. She was pronounced dead at 7:43 a.m.
Plaskon was immediately taken into custody.
"She was screaming," one friend, who was inside the building at the time of the attack, told The News. "There were students in the hallway when it happened. The kids who saw it are all a wreck."
The school was placed on lockdown immediately after the attack, but the order was lifted soon after police arrived. Students and staff were dismissed from school about 9 a.m.
“The unprovoked attack on Maren this morning has unfortunately, for our family, resulted in the permanent loss of Maren Victoria Sanchez: a bright light, full of hopes and dreams, with the future at her fingertips," the girl's adult cousin, Edward Kovac, told reporters Friday afternoon. "Maren should be celebrating at her prom this evening with her friends and classmates. Instead, we are mourning her death, and we are trying as a community to understand this senseless loss of life."
Sanchez was excited for the dance, which she had helped organize. The night before she was stabbed, she had asked to be excused from her drama group so she could get her nails done for the occasion.
MICHELLE MCLOUGHLIN/REUTERS People embrace on the beach during a vigil in honor of slain student Maren Sanchez in Milford, Connecticut.
Enlarge
Peter Hvizdak/AP A rock spray-painted by students sits in memory of 16-year-old stabbing victim Maren Sanchez on Friday outside Jonathan Law High School.
Enlarge"So here is this girl with her freshly painted prom nails, painting the set, and just having a great time with her classmates talking about plans for the prom and plans for after prom and going on a double date with another one of the drama kids and her new boyfriend," the school’s drama adviser Michael Mele said.
On March 3, she posted a photo to Facebook of her wearing her prom dress.
"Yay," she wrote next to a smiley face emoticon as she modeled her floor-length, marine blue gown. "so excited!!!"
With News Wire Services
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sgoldstein@nydailynews.com
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