Word: joe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...took a year of fighting on a near daily basis, but Joe finally found in Mandernach a man he could trust. He took Mandernach's power technology class in his sophomore year and thrived. Junior year he arranged his schedule to be with Mandernach for a remarkable three hours a day: in auto lab, auto mechanics and as a student assistant. His academic teachers began to see less antagonism. Joe was finally getting his high school life under control...
Then, on July 25, 1998, Joe's 18-year-old sister Erica was killed by a drunk driver...
...Senior Joe Brussel, with his purple Burton backpack slung over his right shoulder, cell phone clipped to his tan cargo shorts, strolls into Frank Mandernach's advanced auto-mechanics class--late but relaxed. The rest of the class is already in the lab room, watching a student take apart a 1987 truck engine. Joe makes eye contact with Mandernach, settles into a chair out of sight of most of his classmates and pulls out a notebook. "Sometimes Mandernach just lets us get organized," he says. For the rest of the period, Joe stays to himself, his mind far away from...
...boys but a growing number of girls too--flock to this faraway corner of the school in search of less structure and more responsibility, a place where they get to move around and use their hands. "In a lot of classes, it's 'Do this' or 'Do that,'" says Joe, "but in auto shop you know what you need to do when you come in here, so you get it done yourself...
Three years ago, Mandernach, as Joe's freshman-year academic lab instructor, saw Joe the way his other teachers did--angry, ready to fight even at the slightest challenge, and irresponsible. "He had a small-man problem," says Mandernach. Joe weighed only 80 lbs. in his freshman year, and even now, with short brown hair, smooth face and dimples, he looks more like a freshman than a senior. "Joey's such a sweet kid," says his mother Debbie Deimeke, who divorced Joe's father when Joe was six, "but inside he's got all this pent-up anger...