US Pupil found dead on Ghana trip

A High School senior on a school club trip to Africa disappeared late Sunday and was found dead in her hotel's pool Monday morning.

Phylicia Moore's death occurred on her first trip out of the United States -- and the first without her family.

"It beat me, beat me hard," said her visibly shaken father, Douglass Moore, on Monday. "Forty-eight hours ago we were taking her to JFK [Airport]. ... I wish I could turn back time."

Moore, 18, was traveling with 23 other Teaneck students in the West African nation of Ghana. The students arrived Sunday morning in Accra, the capital, to begin a two-week goodwill and cultural exchange trip, including dance performances and visits to an orphanage, hospital and school.

Moore left a group of students sitting near the hotel pool around 10:30 p.m. Sunday, saying she didn't want to swim. She headed back to her room to change out of her bathing suit, according to an account given by trip leaders to Moore's father.

She apparently never arrived in her room. Her roommate later told trip leaders Moore's bed was undisturbed that night when she went to sleep and remained neatly made the next morning. The group learned she was missing at breakfast and soon found Moore's body, still wearing her bathing suit, floating in the pool of the First Choice Hotel. Her father said Phylicia was not a strong swimmer.

He said trip leaders apparently did not check that all students were in their hotel rooms on Sunday night.

"You don't go halfway around the world with a group of teenagers and not do a room check," he said. "If you're going to take that responsibility, taking these kids, at least they should have done a room check. Maybe then they could have made sure she was safe."

Local authorities are conducting an autopsy, and the death is being investigated, Teaneck teacher and trip leader Marlene Ware said from Africa on Monday. The eight chaperones and students from the non-profit organization THREAD, or Teaneck High Represents Education, Arts and Diversity, had been scheduled to deliver donations to local AIDS patients, orphans and schoolchildren on Monday. The distraught group instead visited the U.S. Embassy and considered returning home. But the group will likely continue the trip to carry out its planned charitable works, Ware said.

"The students are holding together as best they can," said Ware, who has led at least two other student trips to Africa. "The majority of them want to continue, as a tribute about this young lady, because of the work that we do."

The Moore family learned of Phylicia's death shortly before noon Monday, and the high school principal and district superintendent visited their home later that day. Officials at the high school announced her death Monday afternoon after meeting with the senior class. Counselors will be available today for students and staff, district officials said.

Educators were "shocked and saddened by this unspeakable tragedy," said Superintendent John F. Czeterko. "This is a time when the Teaneck High School community has already come together to mourn, yet celebrate, a life that was filled with so much promise and accomplishment."

The Ghana tour was a dream trip for Moore, who saved for months and took an after-school job at a local Bed Bath & Beyond to pay the $2,727 cost. She was by all accounts a kind-hearted, understated girl who was close with her brother Christopher, a sophomore at Teaneck High School, and loved mentoring freshmen in her school's peer leadership program. This spring, she was weighing college possibilities, including an acceptance at Montclair State University. She planned to become a journalist and frequently corrected her father's grammar, he recalled fondly.

At 6-foot-1, Moore was a committed support player on the Teaneck girls basketball team. She could play tough when called to fill in as center or forward, but felt bad for opposing players whom she fouled, Coach Kelly Jacob-Burns said outside the Moore home on Monday.

"She really had a quiet dignity, a quiet grace about her," Jacob-Burns said. "She was a real role model to younger girls. She went out and tried every day, and showed that it was OK to be a part of a team."

Her teammate, junior Tamiel Murray, said the ordinarily easygoing Moore was full of eager chatter about college and her high school prom during the school's annual basketball dinner last week.

"We had a long conversation ... she was talking about the stresses of the prom," she said. "And after that conversation, now I can't have another."