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"South Valley crash leaves teenager dead," read the Christmas Day headline in The Trib.

It was just another police brief. Except that it wasn't.

Chris Gallegos was 18 years old, just a few days shy of his 19th birthday. He died Christmas Eve night from injuries suffered in the head-on collision earlier that day. Chris was driving eastbound on Rio Bravo Boulevard over the Rio Grande when he crossed the center line and struck a westbound pickup truck. He was ejected and landed on the riverbank.

Sheriff's deputies found crushed beer cans at the scene and in Chris' car.

I knew Chris from Nuestros Valores Charter School, on Isleta Boulevard in the South Valley. The school's mission is to work with at-risk kids like Chris, shepherding them through high school to graduation. Many make it. Many don't. Chris had dropped out of Nuestros Valores during the 2006-07 school year. He was later the victim of a gang shooting.

Chris lived with his father for most of the time he was at Nuestros Valores. He was a bright kid, with a loud voice, given to telling stories in class of the street life instead of focusing on his school work. Charismatic, handsome and athletic, Chris was the kind of kid who had a way of stealing his classmates' attention away from the teacher with ease. Bright enough to get through college, I thought. I'd pulled him aside and told him that more than once. But college means being able to focus on life goals, and there's the rub.

We call certain kids "at-risk," but what does that term really mean? Mostly it brings to mind those students, usually from poor families, who are at risk of getting involved with drugs and alcohol, joining gangs, or getting pregnant as teens. But there's a funny thing about language. Sometimes we get so used to a term like "at-risk" that it loses its power, its ability to call to mind its real meaning. So there's one more thing that at-risk has come to mean to me since working with kids in the South Valley schools. Call it CBDS for "Could Be Dead Soon."

Chris' cousin, Phillip Garcia, was killed in an accidental shooting two years ago. I remember him telling me once in Spanish class that he'd had a tough time focusing on school lately — his best friend had been killed in a car crash when he was text messaging while on an interstate ramp. The gun that killed Phillip had apparently been procured because of a looming gang threat to the neighborhood kids.

The rosary for Chris left me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. His younger brother came up to the pulpit to read an account of the accident, the waiting at the hospital, the passing, and how much he'd miss Chris, with his beautiful green eyes. Then he asked Chris to watch over him.

After that came the words of the rosary, over and over again: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen."

In the South Valley, the reckless behavior and the gang worship lives on and the "at-risk" cycle seems to perpetuate itself. These kids go to so many funerals. I'm sure many of them are in so much pain that they wish they could be next: dead, but the center of attention, honored. I'm sure I had feelings like that when I was in high school. It's romantic, dying young. Always has been, I suppose — the notion, I mean. The actuality doesn't feel quite so romantic.

Anyway it seems kind of absurd to ask at-risk kids to drop everything and take the New Mexico high school competency exams, or the No Child Left Behind standardized tests.

I was filling in at Nuestros Valores last week and things seem to be going well. Oh sure, there's still tagging in the bathroom, but the basketball team is winning this year under Coach Kevin Bundy, whose first rule of coaching seems to be sportsmanship above all else. Heidi Englade's English students are learning about the Holocaust. Dan Dumas' 10th-graders are reading "Black Boy," Richard Wright's powerful and haunting account of growing up in the Jim Crow South. After all, other people in the world have been dealt a tough hand. Many have overcome it. And many others haven't.