A lesson unlearned on Mercer Island

Whatever lessons the Mercer Island High School Class of 2002 took into the world, Laura Wallace should have been one of them.

Laura — who would have graduated this month in a grand ceremony at Safeco Field — was killed in March 2001 when she flipped her Mercedes-Benz along Island Crest Way. Her blood-alcohol level was 0.15 percent, nearly double the legal limit.

News travels fast on the island. Within 30 minutes of the accident, a student was banging on the back door of the high school to let everyone know.

The next day, the halls were sobered by shock. The sobriety didn't last.

"They got over it quick," Associate Principal Craig Olson told me last week when I stopped in to explore the legacy of a popular student's death. "Almost too quick."

One teacher said kids were drinking at Laura's memorial service.

And just seven months later, a student athlete chosen to represent Mercer Island High on a poster trumpeting "great sportsmanship" had been cited for driving under the influence.

The girl was behind the wheel the night she was busted because her date's license was suspended after his own DUI.

Teachers took the posters down. "I can't put them up as role models," one told me.

The volatile mix of kids, booze, boredom and cars is not unique to Mercer Island. But money and entitlement have a way of reducing state laws to a checkbook nuisance.

Mercer Island is a place where it's not uncommon for kids to keep lawyers on their cellphone speed dial, where one set of parents spent $1,300 on alcohol for their kid's prom party last spring.

School officials toss drinking statistics around like so many box scores.

"How many DUI and MIPs (minors in possession) did we have this year?" Principal Paul Highsmith called out to an assistant when I asked.

The answer was casual: "In the teens and 20s."

The school holds special don't-drink-and-drive assemblies for sophomores about to get their licenses, and for seniors "who think they are immortal," Highsmith said. More than half of those eligible skip.

So while school officials battle a cavalier attitude, kids say they battle pressure from peers and parents.

The grade-point average at Mercer Island High last year was above 3.0 in all grades.

"Kids are really pressured to accomplish things," said Tiffany Lee, 16. "Drinking, for them, is an outlet."

And parents, too often, are a way out of the consequences.

"It's what is modeled," Highsmith said. "When are the parents going to drink less at home? When is the community going to stand up and say enough is enough?"

Laura Wallace was a vivacious young woman who rode horses and volunteered at Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center. Her friend Kirsten Soelling wants her remembered that way — not as the face of teen drinking.

And, as Soelling, 18, heads into the world, what lesson from Laura will she take?

"The overwhelming message is that we lost her."

Nicole Brodeur is at 206-464-2334, or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. Her column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.

Her parents never bailed her out.