PHOENIX — One year after two Arcadia High School students were found shot to death near Mount Ord, the victims were honored during the school’s graduation ceremony as family members accepted diplomas on their behalf.
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Sandra Sweeney, the mother of 17-year-old Evan Clark, accepted an honorary diploma for her son during the ceremony earlier this week. Clark and fellow student Pandora Kjolsrud were found dead in a remote area near Mount Ord shortly after Memorial Day weekend last year.
“Gut-wrenching, gut-wrenching. He was my everything,” Sweeney said.
May 27 marks one year since Clark’s death, a date Sweeney said she will forever dread. Although she no longer lives in Arizona and has returned to her home state of California, she said the grief has not eased.
“It’s been very, very hard, but it’s also been healing because I’m not there and I’m not where this terrible thing happened,” she said.
Clark would have been a senior this school year. During the graduation ceremony, Arcadia High School administrators presented honorary diplomas to both students’ families in recognition of the lives they lost before completing high school.
Sweeney said she appreciated the school’s decision to honor the students, especially because her son attended Arcadia for only eight months. Still, returning to Arizona for the ceremony was emotionally difficult.
“When you receive something like this, you think it’s going to be posted in your bedroom or on your walls,” Sweeney said. “The truth is, I was not able to actually look at pictures of my son until very recently.”
She said she recently created a photo wall in her bedroom featuring pictures of Clark as a young child.
Despite the healing she says she has experienced over the past year, Sweeney said the diploma remains a painful reminder of her son’s absence.
“I just take it one day at a time,” she said. “As of right now, it’s with me, and I’m happy to have it, but at this moment it’s not something I can display where I can see it all the time.”
In October, authorities arrested 32-year-old Thomas Brown in connection with the killings. He was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Clark and Kjolsrud.
While Sweeney said she hopes justice will come for her son, she described the grief of losing a child as overwhelming.
“It’s the most unspeakable, unimaginable pain you can imagine,” she said. “This was a living being that was in my body. You don’t ever recover from it.”
Sweeney said some of her comfort now comes from her work with children in California, many of whom remind her of Evan.
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