Florida best friends, Albert Ales and Zachary Morris, from Bradenton’s Southeast High School killed in bike crash hours after arriving in Peru for field trip.
Friends and family are mourning after two recent graduates from a Florida high school were killed in a crash, hours after arriving in Peru for a long-awaited senior trip.
Albert Ales and Zachary Morris, both 18, traveled to Cusco on Friday to celebrate their graduation from Bradenton’s Southeast High School and died in a motorbike accident local media outlet, La República reported.
The best friends were exploring the city when they fatally collided with a public transportation bus.
Both teens were brought to a local hospital, where they died later that day from their injuries.
Albert Ales and Zachary Morris lauded and remembered:
The pair died nearly a week after they graduated from Southeast High School‘s rigorous International Baccalaureate program.
‘You see stuff like this in the news, so it’s really hard when this happens to you, it’s not easy,’ friend Anthony Sevarino told via Florida’s KTSU.
‘Our Southeast Community is heartbroken after hearing the unimaginable news that recent IB graduates Albert Ales and Zachary Morris passed away yesterday in a tragic accident while exploring Peru,’ the school posted on Twitter.
Both young men were part of the school’s student engineering and entrepreneurship program.
The club built a machine that can make a thousand wooden toys each month. Those toys are then given to the 101st Airborne division, who hand them out to children they meet in Afghanistan or other deployments.
Morris was planning to attend Yale University and Ales was headed to the University of Central Florida.
‘These young men, they exemplified the best in what our school can produce and what our state can produce. They were the best,’ teacher Richard Platt told via WFLA.
Southeast school is asking students to honor the teens on Tuesday by wearing the color orange or a Hawaiian shirt.
To date authorities have not said who was at fault and whether any charges were being considered.
