| 3.20.2003
Bridget Sanetti, 25; a patient, caring mentor
She was known as "Bri."
Bridget Marie Sanetti, a 25-year-old teacher from Coventry, was stylish,
outgoing and caring. She reached out to everyone, from students with emotional
problems to alcoholics trying to dry out.
Even her cat, Lilly, had been rescued from an animal shelter.
James Williams, principal of the small Hillside Alternative School, in
Woonsocket, where Bridget taught for two years, remembers how her spirit
would reach even the school's most difficult students. "They'd come
into school with a big attitude, and her smile would just light them up,"
he said.
Bridget's other love was shopping, said her mother, Annmarie Swidwa,
of Fort Meyers, Fla. "She was a very good dresser."
Bridget shopped at the most expensive stores, "But she was always
looking for a good price," Swidwa said.
Bridget went to the Great White concert with her friend Katie O'Donnell,
26, of Seekonk. They joined Bridget's uncle Ricky Sanetti and some of
his friends. Ricky Sanetti and his friends made it out alive, but Bridget
and Katie did not.
Before the show, friends had chided Bridget for wearing a nice pair of
jeans, high-heeled black boots and "all the right jewelry."
She stood out amid the sea of concertgoers dressed in sweatshirts and
jeans.
Bridget wasn't really a Great White fan, but she went to the show for
the spectacle of seeing people jamming to tunes two decades old by rock
stars with out-of-style hairdos.
"She said it would be fun to laugh at all those people stuck in
the '80s," her mother said.
Bridget's compassion, patience and feistiness made her a successful mentor
for Hillside's at-risk teenagers.
If one of her students got out of hand, Swidwa recalls, Bridget would
take them to a phone and say, "You know what? You're going to have
talk to my mother."
"I would tell them they'd better behave," Swidwa said. "Bridget
turned out good because she behaved, and you'd better behave."
"I never once was in her presence when she wasn't smiling,"
said Elaine Hazzard, the Woonsocket school district's director of special
education. "Bridget was absolutely wonderful: young, sweet, caring,
intelligent. The kids just truly loved her, and she truly loved the kids."
-- Journal staff and wire reports
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