Students to honor four who are gone

The 355 graduating members of the South Eugene High School Class of 2011 will undoubtedly remember tonight’s ceremony at the Hult Center for years to come. Probably for the rest of their lives.

They just wish the official graduating class was 359.

Connor Ausland, Jack Harnsongkram, Sydney Bonzer and Sean Taggart-Murphy would all have been wearing their purple robes tonight, all walking across that stage to receive their diplomas, if not for their tragic deaths that cut short their high school days.

Taggart-Murphy, a bright, artistic boy with straight brown hair who liked to write and play his guitar, was 15 and had just finished his freshman year at South when he took a solo journey to New York City without telling anyone and died in a subway accident on June 26, 2008.

Bonzer, a tall, willowy girl who liked sports, was 16 when she took her own life in the middle of her sophomore year on Jan. 28, 2009.

Ausland, the varsity basket-ball player and 4.0 student, and Harnsongkram, the sweet-smiling outdoors program student, drowned on Feb. 5 near Yachats after a sneaker wave knocked them off a rocky arch that forms a bridge across a dangerous chasm.

All four members of the Class of 2011 will be remembered tonight, in a song by fellow classmates, in speeches, in the graduation program, in one memory after another.

But the parents of Ausland and Harnsongkram — Greg Ausland and Kathy Austin, and Saman and Sarah Harnsongkram — also want their sons to be remembered in a way that might spare others the unimaginable grief they’ve had to deal with the past four months.

They have pitched an idea to the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department for an educational safety marker in Smelt Sands State Park, near the spot where their sons lost their lives. And, in a rare case, the state is not only interested but on board to help them.

The state has a long-standing policy against erecting memorials to those who have lost their lives on the coast, said Oregon Parks and Recreation Department spokesman Chris Havel, who is working with the families to help them launch the project. The state prefers the coastline to remain as natural as possible, Havel said.

“But what this group is proposing is different,” he said.

Lots of people venture off the 804 Trail that runs north and south through the park, and down to the spot where Ausland and Harnsongkram were along with four other South students — on a retreat for the annual Mr. Axeman Pageant fundraiser — who were with them that tragic day. The natural bridge across the chasm is an inviting spot, and a warning about it makes sense, Havel said.

The energy behind the project has been Sarah Harnsongkram, said Greg Ausland.

Sarah Harnsongkram, who will attend tonight’s graduation, says otherwise. “I think it was sort of a collective idea,” she said.

The marker would consist of three vertical basalt columns and a sign made of a wavelike panel of stainless steel that would include Connor and Jack’s stories, as well as a warning of the dangers of the area and the sea’s power and suddenness. The cost of the marker is yet to be determined. The hope is that volunteers might contribute materials and labor to erect it, Sarah Harnsongkram said.

“We’re just trying to get the word out,” she said. “Everyone just wants for this to never happen again.”

The plan is to have the marker in place by Feb. 5, 2012, the one-year anniversary of Connor and Jack’s deaths.

A fund has been set up at the high school to receive donations. Two architects are helping with plans: Jack’s uncle Stewart Thompson of Otak architecture firm, which is headquartered in Lake Oswego, and Curt Wilson of Pivot Architecture in Eugene.

“It’s needed there, I think, from a safety standpoint,” Greg Ausland said. “I don’t know if our boys are the only ones who ever died there or not.”

Ausland said he’s shocked a warning has never been erected at the spot. Sarah Harnsongkram said in the weeks after her second-born son’s death, a friend of hers suggested taking a sledge hammer to the rocky bridge; another suggested dynamite.

Now, they just want to spare other parents the grief they’ve experienced, she said. “Since this happened, we have just had this huge outpouring of support,” she said. “And the marker is something we want to fit into a natural setting, but also to warn people.”

South Eugene Principal Randy Bernstein said the diplomas that Connor and Jack would have received will be presented at tonight’s ceremony. Ausland, a French immersion student in the Eugene International High School program, already had enough credits to graduate when he died, Bernstein said. And Harnsongkram was only a credit or two shy of earning his diploma, Bernstein said.

Greg Ausland said he and his wife would not attend tonight’s ceremony. Instead, they attended a ceremony last Saturday at Charlemagne at Fox Hollow French Immersion School, where Connor attended elementary school, for the 24 other students in the IHS French program. A bench was installed in the school’s garden in Connor’s name that day, Greg Ausland said, which included an etching of his son’s favorite saying, the one he had mounted near his computer at home: “Work hard to make it happen.”

“He honored that every day of his life,” Greg Ausland said.

Now Connor’s parents, and the parents of his friend, Jack, intend to do the same.