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Young girl made an impact on city's art world
She was a museum volunteer. She was a gallery assistant. She was an art critic. Hardly anybody she worked with knew she was 15 years old until they read her obituary in The News Tribune on Sunday. They thought she was older. And everyone, including her family, thought she was healthy until she
went to the emergency room complaining of a sore throat and body aches.
She was diagnosed with leukemia one day later. The next day her heart
stopped while her dad was praying for her in a nearby church. When he returned to the hospital, a social worker was scouring the streets
for him, and he knew she was gone. "She was already cold, and that wasn't like her," said her
father, John Kelly. A shocked art community turned up at Sara's memorial service at Holy
Cross Catholic Church in Tacoma on Tuesday to celebrate a girl who had
few friends who were not adults, artists or children she was mentoring. "When she came to us four years ago, she had told us she was 14,"
said Peg Tysver, who worked in Tacoma Art Museum's education department
with Sara. Sara was actually 11 when she started volunteering with at-risk kids
in the museum's after-school program. Sara had attended every function the Random Modern Gallery ever had,
so owner Timothy Hagen decided it was only fair to hire her to help run
the place. She worked there eight months until the gallery closed this
year. The day she died, July 5, the last art was picked up from the gallery
and it was fully closed, Hagen said. "She wasn't (in) glee club and she wasn't cheerleading, so you look
for those things that allow you to survive in life, and Sara found art
at a very young age," Hagen said. At the gallery, Sara talked about the artworks to visitors who obviously
couldn't afford to buy them, Hagen said. "They loved her. They would run and give her a big hug every time
they came in," Tysver said. Once, a mentally handicapped boy who mows the lawn for Sara's father
saw her on the bus. "He said, 'Sara was the only person that would
talk to me on the bus,'" John Kelly said. Sara could relate to outcasts because she didn't have many friends her
own age, Tysver said. Instead, Sara spent time with a group of adults
in the arts community. "We'd hang out in the restaurant section of a bar to hang out with
her," Tysver said. At school, Sara typically ate lunch with teachers, not students, her
father said. A few weeks before she died, he was laid off from his job in heavy-equipment
sales, so he would drive to her school and they'd have lunch in the car,
listening to the radio. "Some of my friends have said, 'Man, my kid would never want me
anywhere near her school,'" Kelly said. "But she would just
love it." Sara would have been a junior at Wilson High School this fall. Her 16th
birthday would have been July 21. She wanted to be an art critic and had
been the youngest person ever to write for the Tacoma Reporter when her
first review appeared Jan. 4, according to Ani Harrison of the Reporter.
Her last story ran the day she died. She was born in Bellevue. Her parents divorced when she was young, and
she moved to Tacoma to live with her dad before she started the seventh
grade. Her mother, Denise Bledsoe, and 6-year-old half-sister, Amy, were
driving from their Tennessee home to see Sara when she died. Ben Markovich had been Sara's first real boyfriend. They met in April
when Markovich was driving along Sixth Avenue and saw her walking. He
honked, she waved. Markovich turned the car around and paid a friend $5
to give up a seat in the crowded car so he could track Sara down, tell
her she was beautiful and offer her a ride home. "That's not really like me, to honk my horn at somebody," Markovich
said. "It's the first time I'd ever done it. I still don't know what
made her decide to get in my ugly Volvo." Markovich, 19, didn't know that Sara was only 15 until she died. They got into R-rated movies together, and he never asked her age. He thought of asking her to marry him. Sara's father liked Markovich. Kelly didn't like it when Sara joined
the WTO protests against his wishes, but she protested many things, including
whaling and police brutality. Her father saved her drawings and writings. He is grateful that the art
community accepted her. He recalls Sara modeling for paintings by Rob Jones, a Tacoma artist
who ran Commencement Art Gallery. "The darned thing was, she always wanted to smile, and Rob would
have to say, 'That's not the tone of this, Sara. Try not to smile.'" Kelly knows his daughter would have been a star. "It will never be a normal life for me again," he said. "Sara
and I were like two peas in a pod. We were more like friends. She was
the mature one in the family." |