For 39 years Derek Sabedra had only memories of a beloved classmate who died tragically, but now the former Southern Maryland resident has something tangible after a song he wrote about her was recently recorded.
Denise Evans was 16 years old when she died in a house fire, along with her 14-year-old brother Shawn, in Prince Frederick on Dec. 22, 1985. Luke Doran, 19, also perished in the accident, which started when a discarded cigarette was placed in a paper trash container.
“She was very sweet, caring, and I never saw her angry,” Sabedra, who now lives on the Eastern Shore in Vienna, said. “She was just a sweetheart everybody talked to. She was friends with everybody.”
Sabedra penned “Denise, Denise (My Brightest Angel)” in about 15 minutes after awakening from a dream in 1992 and the song was arranged by Calvert County native Joe Barrick in July 2023. Sabedra imagined it as sounding something along the lines of Elton John’s “Your Song” with some Gordon Lightfoot vocals in the background.
“I could tell this was a person that meant a lot to him,” said Barrick, who now lives in Nashville and runs Arcade Management, which manages musical artists. “The whole chorus ... is the highest respect he can pay this person because she’s in heaven and he’s singing to her. It was very emotional and passionate.”
Barrick, who grew up in Lusby and graduated from Patuxent High School, said he reached out to some colleagues to help him.
“We listened to it and we said, ‘Let’s find a guitar pattern that will work, and then let’s throw some bass and piano and drums behind it, and then we started building the song that way,’” Barrick said. “And then everything just came together to create the song. I remember sending it to Derek and he said, ‘Yeah, I love it. I can’t believe the song is finished. It finally came to life.’ He was all fired up.”
By last December the song, which turned into a country tune from a pop ballad, had been streamed 60,000 times.
Sabedra, Denise Evans, Karen Fletcher, Linda Call, Christine Ridgeway, Adam Dudley, Ben Tilley were part of a close gang in middle school, then at Calvert High School.
Sabedra said he and Evans never dated and that “she was like a younger sister and it always stayed like that.”
The six classmates — Sabedra called them the “Smarties” — would regularly attend school football games, the local drive-in theater and go to parties together.
“School dances were the bomb,” Sabedra said of both middle and high school get-togethers. “We were the dancing group because we didn’t care.”
“The favorite was lunch time because that’s when everybody would talk about what they were going to do and how they would spend their weekend,” Sabedra said.
On that fateful night four decades ago, Sabedra was invited to the get-together by Chris McWilliams, but turned it down. McWilliams managed to escape the blaze and Sabedra now sees him regularly at tennis events.
“I’ve thought about what would have happened if I was there, but it was just timing or just ... weird,” Sabedra said.
He learned of the fire the next morning, and said he was “just stunned. I didn’t know how to react. I just couldn’t talk for about a day.”
He said it took him 30 minutes of composing himself in a church parking lot before he had the courage to walk inside. The tragedy capped off a brutal three-month period for Sabedra, whose father died in October of that year while his grandmother passed in November.
Sabedra graduated from Calvert High School and earned his bachelor’s degree in criminology from the University of Maryland College Park. He also worked from 2000 to 2019 as a teacher, counselor and tennis coach for St. Mary’s County Public Schools.
Sabedra is trying to get a local radio station to play the song, which would mean he “could die happy,” but so far has struck out, he said.
He added that he expected Denise to accomplish big things.
“I think she would be a lawyer, doctor or therapist now because of how she was with people,” Sabedra said. “I think about her often.”
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