MONROE — Myka Campbell wore pink heels to school.
She loved makeup, shopping, clothes and, most of all, shoes.
But there was more to the 17-year-old Everett girl than her well-made appearance.
Driven to graduate from Marysville Mountain View High School, Campbell overcame a difficult past and personal issues that were beyond her control, said Dawn Bechtholdt, principal at the alternative school. Using money she earned working at Taco Time, Campbell enrolled in summer school and was finally on track to graduate next spring.
Tuesday would have been her last day of summer class.
She died Monday night.
“This is a real hard student to lose,” Bechtholdt said. “Of course every young person is hard to lose, but every so often in our small learning environment, there are just students who stick out more than others — and Myka was one of those students.”
Campbell spent Monday afternoon swimming in a lake with her boyfriend, said her grandmother Shirley Gray. The teen was taking him to his Gold Bar home when it happened.
Campbell and her boyfriend were involved in a terrible crash with a motorcycle on Highway 203 near Monroe.
They were rushed by helicopter to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where doctors were unable to save Campbell.
Her boyfriend, 18, was listed in serious condition in the hospital’s intensive care unit Tuesday afternoon, said Susan Gregg-Hansen, a hospital spokeswoman.
The driver of the motorcycle, Thomas Walter Devine, 44, of Newcastle, died at the scene.
It may take some time for crash investigators to determine what happened, Washington State Patrol trooper Keith Leary said.
Detectives will collect evidence and use sophisticated computer programs to try to recreate the crash.
Witnesses told police that Campbell was headed eastbound on Tualco Road waiting to merge onto the highway.
She began to nose her 1994 Pontiac Sunbird into traffic, then stopped, Leary said. The motorcycle appeared to be going very fast, he said.
Police believe the Harley-Davidson slammed into Campbell’s car with “phenomenal” force, flipping the car over, Leary said.
The accident was the first time since June 27, 2006, that two people were killed in a single crash in Snohomish County, Leary said.
When Campbell wasn’t home by 9 p.m., her grandmother was already worrying. The teenager lived with her grandmother and had called her earlier in the day to let her know she was going swimming.
Gray was concerned her granddaughter might go to a river where someone recently drowned, but the teen promised her grandma she was heading to a lake.
Gray said her granddaughter was never late.
“She’s always here,” Gray said. “She’s very, very dependable. She’d always be here by 9 p.m. to get a decent sleep and get to school in the morning.”
Even though the grandmother was working as a caretaker Monday night, she kept trying to reach her granddaughter.
“I dialed and dialed and dialed,” Gray said.
Finally, around 2 a.m., someone from Harborview called Gray’s home and spoke with her son. He called Gray at work with the awful news.
Gray remembers her granddaughter as a talkative teen who dabbled in snowboarding. When the girl was younger, she happily tagged along with her grandma to bingo halls. When she turned 16, Campbell celebrated by playing bingo at a tribal casino for the first time.
She dreamed of becoming an attorney.
Though she had once struggled academically, the bubbly teen recently had been nominated as Marysville Mountain View’s student of the quarter, Bechtholdt said. She was also honored for not missing a single day of school in April.
“When she finally realized that she had all the tools inside herself to be whoever she wanted to be, she just took off,” the principal said. “She was pretty opinionated and she really tried to let other students know what they should be doing. She spoke from experience so that they wouldn’t make some of the same mistakes that she did. She really tried to be a positive influence on her friends.”
On Tuesday, Bechtholdt drafted a letter about Campbell’s death to send home to students and families at the school. She also went to summer school to comfort one of the teen’s friends who broke down as she walked into school.
Bechtholdt said losing Campbell — with her blushing smile that seemed to start deep inside her — is an unusually tough blow for the school.
“Every student takes a different path to get to the end of the trail,” she said. “Myka was forging her way right through the solid trail to get to that graduation goal — and it was going to happen next spring.”
Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.
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