Elsa and Jim Croucher heard the news and broke down crying.
The Monroe couple, whose daughter Tina was murdered by her boyfriend in 1992, had learned 18-year-old Kings High School student Troy Penn fatally shot 17-year-old Little Miami student Amanda Borsos, then turned the shotgun on himself.
“We were both devastated,” Jim Croucher said. “We just felt like for the last 15 years what we’ve been doing, we thought was making a difference. It’s as though we failed.”
Croucher said they felt guilty because they never had been invited to lecture on teen violence prevention at Little Miami High School.
“We’ve been to Kings but we’ve never been to Little Miami,” he said. “We thought, ‘Well, maybe we could make a difference.’”
The Crouchers already have done much to make a difference, forming the Coalition Against Domestic Violence in 1996 and working since then to get Tina’s Law passed.
The law, which goes into effect in the 2012-2013 school year, requires all Ohio school districts to provide teen violence education in junior high school and high school health classes.
Over the years, the Crouchers estimate they’ve helped more than 100,000 students by helping them realize what constitutes teen dating abuse, be it physical, emotional or verbal.
“We’re on the right track, but you just can’t reach everybody. You just reach the ones you can reach.”
Little Miami long has held seminars for students regarding making positive choices in regards to peer relations, dating, sexting, driving, preparing for college and other matters, according to district spokeswoman Lisa Knodel.
“While we don’t have something planned specifically related to Amanda’s death, we will continue efforts to help students become productive citizens,” Knodel said.
Interim Superintendent Greg Power said he and Kings Superintendent Valerie Browning have met to ensure both school communities work together to support their students and staff.
“As school reopens, we will be vigilant in recognizing opportunities to support students as they experience a wide range of emotions in dealing with their grief,” Power said.
With the law’s passage behind them, the Crouchers now are turning their focus to helping in its implementation via the Tina Project.
“The goal is to have each county to tie in and every county has several school districts in it, and then the school would tie into the Tina Project,” he said. “One of our trained people would go into the schools for an in-service and explain dating violence and the bullying issues and how serious they are.
“Our main goal is to get all 88 counties on the same page. We don’t want one district handling the situation differently from another district.”
The Crouchers warn teens to look for warning signs in their dating partners, everything from extreme jealousy and excessive calls and text messages to attempts to isolate a boyfriend or girlfriend from their friends and family and changes in behavior.
Heather Hill of Deerfield Twp., who knew Penn for seven years, said she saw no warning signs when it came to his behavior.
“Troy was the funniest kid,” she said. “He played practical jokes on people. He always wanted to make people smile and laugh.”
Hill said she never would have imagined Penn would have been capable of taking another person’s life, let alone his own.
“This was so out of the blue, so out of character,” said Hill. “I have two teenage daughters, and I trusted Troy with them on a regular basis.
“If I could do it over again, I would still trust him with my kids because I just can’t figure out what would make Troy do something like this.”
Hill said the parents of Katie Caudill, a Kings student who was murdered by a neighbor in 2005, attended Penn’s funeral Wednesday to lend their support.
The Crouchers said they plan to reach out to the Borsos family sometime in the near future.
“From experience, we know that during the funeral and all that, there’s a lot of people around and lots going on,” she said. “When things settle down a little bit, we will contact them and hopefully get together with them and help them somehow.”
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