Culture & Community | Music | Arts & Culture | New Haven Public Schools | Wilbur Cross High School
Choir Director Danielle Storey, a 25-year veteran of the New Haven Public Schools who has been at Cross for two decades, with the choir. Lucy Gellman Photo.
The last time Danielle Storey saw Janese Mabel Espinoza, it was a school day in early November, just like the ones that had come before it. Espinoza twirled into the choir classroom, all smiles, with a bounce in her step and coiffed, feathery hair that reminded Storey of Farrah Fawcett. She beamed at herself in the mirror, ready to morph into the songbird Storey knew she could be. "Fit check," she joked with Storey. Then she was gone.
It was the last time the choir director, and many of her friends, would see Espinoza alive. Weeks after her sudden passing, student vocalists took the time to honor her in song, holding her memory close during a season of where loss can feel especially difficult.
That tribute came to Wilbur Cross High School Tuesday evening, as the choir performed Pinkzebra's "Fly Away Home" during the school’s annual winter concert. The brainchild of longtime choral director Storey, the selection offered a rare moment of peace and reflection for students, who are learning to make sense of a world in which a classmate and fellow singer is no longer physically with them.
“There’s not a day that I don’t walk through those double doors and think about her,” said Storey, who has spent two decades teaching at Cross, and felt as if her world had collapsed when she learned of Espinoza’s death. “She was so loved by all. She is not here with us anymore, but she is with us spiritually.”
Espinoza, a 16-year-old senior who was an alto in the advanced choir, passed away on November 11 of this year, after a motor vehicle accident on the Merritt Parkway. While she grew up in New York until high school, she was quick to make friends at Cross, warm and magnetic in a way that endeared her to many of her peers. She died less than two weeks before her 17th birthday.
Cross Principal Matt Brown, who has led the school since 2023, remembered her as “really clever and very funny with a dry wit,” with an ability to build relationships with teachers through short, quirky interactions like the ones she had with Storey. The two saw each other every morning before school, when Espinoza arrived at Cross’s Mitchell Drive building, and lingered outside so she could use her cell phone for a few extra minutes.
Each day, without fail, Brown would start urging students to move inside for class, and Espinoza would slip behind one of the school’s pillars, a joke that she knew Brown was in on. He’d shepherd more students into the building, and she’d pop back out—then disappear for another moment. Eventually, she would emerge with a smile, ready to put her phone in the magnetized pouch where it would remain for the rest of the school day.
“That was our daily ritual,” Brown said in a phone call. “She was very sweet.”
In the wake of her death, the school brought in crisis counselors, social workers, and extra service dogs (a yellow lab retriever named Finn, the New Haven Police Department’s first “comfort canine,” comes to Cross every day, as he has since 2023). The district, meanwhile, covered the cost of school buses to ferry classmates to her funeral, held exactly a month before what would have been her final winter concert.
But when all of that had quieted, Storey wanted to do another kind of tribute, to give students the space to grieve and remember through the arts.
Tuesday, a listener could hear that care in real time, as Storey turned toward the audience, and began to describe the loss she has felt acutely since November. Behind her, over three dozen students filled in a set of three risers, making the stage glow with the red and white of their robes. Already, they had moved members of the audience with “Sanctus,” from Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem in D Minor,” and David Foster and Linda Thompson-Jenner’s “Grown Up Christmas List,” on which several of the seniors shared a solo.
But as Storey spoke about Espinoza, something seemed to shift on the stage. Students, some of whom had been fidgeting moments before, stilled, their robes almost regal under the stage lights. In the third row, student athletes still in their gym clothes and cheerleading uniforms seemed to stand up a little straighter. A few fought back tears.
By the time accompanist Jungmin Yun began to play the piano, there was a kind of reverence among them, as if they could feel the spirits of their loved ones there in the room.
I'll ride with the horses/I'll swim through the sea, they sang. I'll climb to the mountain tops/Won't you come follow me?
In the audience, half a dozen parents raised their phones and cameras to capture the moment. Vocalists, seeming to understand the weight of what they were doing, moved in closer to Storey, until they had nearly formed a half moon. Somewhere in the background, a baby squealed, and it was enough to make a person’s heart tighten in their chest for just a moment.
They pushed forward, voices soaring by the time they reached the chorus. I'll fly away, fly away, fly away, fly away home, they crooned. As they split into a lush, layered harmony, Storey somehow kept it together, her right hand floating through the air as she nodded in time with the music. From far enough away, it looked as though she was praying.
“The wonderful thing is that these children, they are resilient and they are so supportive of one another,” she said afterwards. “And not only are they supportive of one another, they are supportive of me. I feel like they’re the best students in the world.”
Long after they had left the stage, several choir members said they planned to hold on to the moment—and the sound—as a way to recognize and celebrate their classmate's too-short life and to grieve her absence.
As he packed up for the night, senior Jaylon Blatche remembered Espinoza as a warm and ebullient presence, as sharp and witty in English class as she was spirited in choir. “She was always asking me for snacks,” he added with a smile—that kind of detail that doesn’t seem endearing until suddenly it does.
Two weeks or so before her death, the two checked in on each other, just to make sure the other was alright. That was just the kind of friends they were.
Daylin Calderon, a junior who knew Espinoza through the choir, added that for many students, the song became a needed and overdue form of release. Last summer, Calderon lost her uncle, but “I didn’t properly grieve” immediately. When Espinoza died, she didn’t know how to express everything she was feeling. Then she started singing her way through it.
“After we started singing the song,” something in me kind of shattered, she said. “She [Espinoza] didn’t deserve that … Singing the song accessed some deep emotion.”
Back in the hallway, paraprofessional Lindsay Kirwin had come to check on Storey, and the two wiped away fresh tears from their faces. While Kirwin was not close with Espinoza, she said, “any loss that we have is a huge loss.”
“It affects all of us,” Kirwin said. “We are a family.”