Friends Remember Nicole Oman

When the Mead Junior High School symphony performs this week it will be minus Nicole Oman, its second chair violin.

The Colbert girl died in a car accident during spring break last week.

Many of Oman’s classmates and friends didn’t know about her death until Monday when they returned from spring break.

Oman was an eighth grader at Mead Junior High, but was part of a close-knit group of friends with whom she attended Ridgeview Elementary School and one year of Salk Middle School.

Teachers at Salk and Mead spent the early part of this week helping students work through their grief.

At Ridgeview, physical education teacher K’Anne Howland said she remembered Oman as a girl who collected ceramic horses, even if they were cracked with age. Living in a semi-rural area, Oman had developed that love into an offering to help care for her neighbors’ horses.

Sixth-grade teacher Pete Nemeth remembered Oman speaking up for her friends when they wouldn’t speak up for themselves.

As a child she would catch dogs running loose around Ridgeview and knock on doors looking for their owners, said her mother, Lynette Smilden.

“She was always taking care of people and animals,” her mother said.

Oman died April 3 from massive head injuries she suffered April 1 when she was thrown from a car involved in an accident near the intersection of Day-Mount Spokane Road and Dunn.

Three other people were injured in the accident. None were wearing seat belts, the Washington State Patrol said.

“Like other teens she made some poor choices from time to time,” Oman’s pastor, Michael Wiser of St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, said. “Like riding in a car with someone she really didn’t know.”

Wiser said Oman will be remembered as a good person who worked hard to reach her goals.

“She had a smile that cut right through you,” he said. “Her youth pastor caller her sassy.”

Her death leaves her brother Bryce, 10, of Midway Elementary School feeling like he is on his own, Smilden said.

Often Bryce and Nicole would try to talk late into the night through the heater vents in their house, Smilden said. When their parents told them to stop talking and go to sleep, Bryce sometimes would steal into Nicole’s room and they would continue to whisper.

“The night before she died, he fell asleep in her room after their last long talk,” Smilden said.