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Sports

AJO4Lax Turns Tragedy Into Teaching Opportunity

The Andrew Oswald Memorial Fund helps promote teen safe-driving initiatives through fundraising efforts tied to the promotion of youth and high school lacrosse in Georgia.

Andrew Oswald was following in his father’s footsteps. Bruce played lacrosse in eastern Pennsylvania since he was 9 years old and continues to play to this day. It has been a way of life for him, so it was natural that his son would develop an interest in the sport.

“He had a stick in his hand when he was 3 years old,” Bruce recalled. “He was around the game his whole life.”

Andrew played on some of the first youth lacrosse teams in the metro Atlanta area at Murphey Candler Park in the late 1990s and he developed a knack for the game. By the time he reached his senior season at Pope High School in 2004, he was the best player on a team that is still talked about as one of the best in Pope’s history.

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Andrew graduated and enrolled at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta. One night during his freshman year he was driving his friend Jonathan home to his suburban East Cobb neighborhood. He called his dad around 10:30 that night to let him know he wasn’t coming home. He was just going to drop Jonathan off and head back to his dorm.

“And it happened probably within 15 minutes of that call,” Bruce said.

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Andrew was driving on Providence Road near , making his way back toward the interstate, when, according to a witness, he swerved to avoid an animal in the road, lost control of the car and collided with a tree.

“It’s the accident that you hear about a thousand times. Less than five miles from your house. One car. Light rain. I’ve driven the road a hundred times. He couldn’t have been going more than 40, maybe,” Bruce said.

Confusion reigned over the next four hours as police on the scene of the accident found Jonathan’s wallet in the car but found no identification for Andrew. They called Jonathan’s parents to let them know what had happened, under the assumption that the badly injured person in the car was Jonathan.

“They were at the hospital thinking it was their son,” Bruce recalled. “And he was so beat up, they couldn’t tell. (Andrew and Jonathan) were both about the same size–5-11, thin build.”

Around 2:30 in the morning Andrew’s girlfriend called the Oswalds’ house. Andrew hadn’t come back. Bruce also spoke with Jonathan’s parents as the possibility of the unimaginable became more and more real.

“We started talking to them. They called us, and we were saying, ‘Where’s Andrew?’ And they were saying, ‘We don’t know; we’re not sure if this is Jonathan,’ ” Bruce said. “So I went down there, and they brought me the clothes. And I knew they were Andrew’s clothes. Then we knew it was Andrew; it wasn’t Jonathan.”

Andrew held on in a coma for a week before the injuries to his brain overcame him.
Dealing with the grief of losing their firstborn son, Bruce and his wife, Kathleen, made what was for them a natural progression.

“How do you make this a positive thing?” Bruce said.

They started by asking people to donate money to Pope High School instead of buying flowers for Andrew’s funeral. That decision brought in approximately $15,000, which proved seminal. The school gave the money back to the Oswalds, who then started AJO4Lax, the Andrew Oswald Memorial Fund. (The name is Andrew’s initials, along with the jersey number he wore at Pope.)

One of the AJO4Lax’s major yearly events is an all-day lacrosse tournament, which took place Saturday at Pope. Ten of the area’s best teams competed, with all of the admissions money and other proceeds going to the Oswalds’ foundation.

The money primarily goes back into the lacrosse community. The Oswalds use it to provide rental equipment for players who can’t afford new items. They’ll also pay for a player’s team fees if the player’s family can’t afford them. And they hand out a yearly scholarship of $1,000 to a graduating senior who will be playing lacrosse in college.

They also do their best to ensure that what happened to Andrew doesn’t happen to any of the players who participate in the tournament.

They’ve partnered with SafeTeen Georgia, a driver’s education initiative that educates teenagers about safety behind the wheel.

“We donate money to them that allows every kid that plays out here to go to that class as well as other driver-ed classes,” Bruce said.

The Oswalds plan to continue the annual tournament for the foreseeable future, perhaps adding a college game as the finale for next year’s event. For them, it’s an ongoing way to do something positive in a world that handed them something tragically negative.

“We’re very positive people,” Bruce said. “We wanted to turn this into a positive. I know people that go the other way. They go to the bottle or do whatever.

“We were determined not to do that.”

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