By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
Lisbon church remembers plane crash victim Teisha Loesberg

LISBON – As a bagpiper blew a mournful “Amazing Grace,” family members cried. Tearful teenagers marched in unison.

And in the balcony above, children wept.

All around the Open Door Bible Church – where more than 300 people gathered Saturday to remember 16-year-old Teisha Loesberg – the tears flowed.

“We don’t understand why God took her from us,” Pastor David Garnett consoled the people who filled the fundamentalist Christian church.

Yet, it was her time, he said about the Lewiston High student.

“God knew the plane was going to crash long, long ago, before Teisha was born,” Garnett said.

Loesberg, who would have turned 17 on Friday, was one of four people who were killed June 22nd when their plane – an instruction flight for local cadets of the Air Force Junior ROTC – crashed into Barker Mountain near Sunday River in Newry.

Also killed were pilot William “Charlie” Weir, 24, and two of Loesberg’s classmates at Lewiston High School, Shannon Fortier, 15, and Nicholas Babcock, 17.

“It’s been the worst week of my life,” said Lt. Col. Robert Meyer, director of Lewiston’s Junior ROTC program.

Saturday’s funeral was the third in four days for Meyer and his cadets, more than 25 of whom attended the Lisbon service.

“We can’t make it better,” Meyer said. “We say, We’re a family. We need to take care of each other.'”

Part of that came with the goodbye to Teisha, remembered Saturday for her strength and her faith.

During the 80-minute service, several friends spoke of Teisha as a sister figure, somebody who loved the Red Sox and country music when relaxing and a taskmaster while practicing her role in ROTC.

While her uniform hung beside her portrait at the front of the church, one cadet talked of Teisha’s attention to the small details, such as the correct way to wear ID tags. Another talked of being tackled by her during a football game and her smiles that followed.

“She was a tough little girl,” said Tim Foster, who leads the church youth group. She showed extraordinary determination to attend nighttime youth meetings, he said, often refusing a ride.

Instead, she’d walk a mile to church in the rain or snow, often bringing a sister with her, he said.

She showed the same determination to volunteer for Lewiston’s Lots to Gardens program, vowing to help out even when she moved from Lewiston’s downtown to Lisbon.

“She just knocked you over with her energy,” said Kirsten Walter the program’s director. “She pushed our patience, but she taught us so much.”

An intern for the past two years, Loesberg had promised to lead several younger teens through the program.

“Her absence is huge right now,” Walter said.

Loesberg came from a large family. Born in Lewiston to parents John and Denise Poulin, she had several brothers and sisters: sister Tianna, step-sisters Tiffany Ellis and Marie Poulin, and half brothers Michael Caron and Nathan and Charlie Quimby.

It was to be a growing family, too.

Loesberg had become engaged to Carl Davis, a private first class serving with the Maine Army National Guard in Iraq.

He couldn’t make it home, though.

Davis went to Iraq in January as part of an ad hoc unit of new Maine soldiers: Company B, 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry (Mountain), said Maj. Michael Backus, spokesman for the Maine Guard. The unit is conducting convoy and base security missions in the cities of Baghdad and Talil.

Davis sent a bouquet of red roses to the church accompanied by an engraved plaque.

“If God is with the two of us, you can’t be far away,” it read.

It was the kind of reminder that dominated the service.

Had Loesberg survived, her church was scheduled to make her a member at today’s service. She’d been baptized and completed all but her final required lesson, her pastor said.

Then, at his suggestion, the parishioners made her a member anyway.

“We know she’s in a better place,” said Foster, the youth leader. “There is no sorrow. No tears.”

But there were tears.

As he tried reading passages from the Bible, he was forced to stop and wipe his eyes.

“These tears I’m shedding aren’t tears of sorrow or pain,” Foster said. “They are tears of joy.”

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