BONNER - Amid tears and laughter, a grief-stricken community said goodbye Thursday to two young girls killed Saturday by an allegedly drunken driver.

On the last day of the year and the decade, Bonner and Missoula came together to bid farewell to Ashlee Patenaude and Taylor Cearley.

The Bonner girls, members of the Hellgate freshman basketball team, died late Saturday night when they were hit by a car along Highway 200 just east of the East Missoula I-90 interchange.

Two other girls, Teal Packard and Hailey Rumpel, were also injured in the crash but survived.

A Turah man, 29-year-old David James DelSignore, is charged with four felonies related to the accident.

The girls were on their way to the house of a friend in East Missoula to watch movies when DelSignore's eastbound pickup went off the road and hit them.

The community put its collective arms around the surviving girls on Thursday as they struggled mightily to maintain their composure at their friends' memorial service.

More than 500 people packed the Bonner School gym and library for the joint service for 14-year-old Patenaude and Cearley, who was 15.

"This is a celebration of their lives," said Pastor John Payne, who presides over the Journey Be Church in Polson.

To that end, there was a slideshow that was by turns goofy, athletic, sentimental, beautiful, loving and sassy. Everything that teenage girls are.

Payne kept the service grounded in the young girls' lives, steering clear of omniscient explanations for what happened.

"This is not God's will," Payne said. "But God's heart was the first to break when this happened."

That sense of heartbreak and loss is natural, but Payne urged the crowd to move carefully beyond it and embrace the joy that Taylor and Ashlee took and provided in life.

"We are on a journey of grief," Payne said. "... We are a community of the hurting, but also of the helping."

In fact, Payne said, part of the girls' legacy will be the community's response to their deaths.

"Their deaths cannot cripple your love, shutter your hope," he said.

Taylor Cearley's older brother Brannon spoke movingly about long talks with his little sister, but cried when he described not talking to her on the day of her death.

Taylor's father Jim read a poem he'd written for his daughter, reminding the crowd he was an engineer and not a poet.

"It is not my strength that keeps me rising,

"But of those all around silently grieving,

"making me strong by each prayer,

"knowing that so many care."

Finally, after all the words that soothed and consoled and could not explain, the crowd filed into the winter afternoon.

Go in peace, Payne told them.

Go in love.

Amen.

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.