Death, violent death, is always tragic. When it befalls the young, the tragedy seems amplified.

Two incidents this week have brought that to mind, even more so because in each case young people lost their lives on the very cusp of new beginnings. For students at Durham's Hillside High School and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the excitement of the opening of another school year was muted by those deaths.

The circumstances were quite different, and much remains unknown about the underlying causes in each.

Destinee Taylor, a freshman at Hillside, died along with 22-year-old Antwann Cissell in an automobile wreck just moments after the first day of classes ended on Tuesday. And early Sunday morning, a police officer shot and killed an apparently disturbed Courtland Benjamin Smith two days before the UNC junior would have begun classes.

The grim reminders from the Durham crash are straightforward ones that, no matter how frequently repeated, seem too often not to connect with young drivers. Speed was a factor, police say, in that accident, an especially dangerous factor when combined with young, relatively inexperienced drivers.

And police say none of the three occupants (the third is in critical condition at Duke University Hospital) was wearing a seat belt. We don't know if that would have made a difference, but we know that it often is a lifesaver in a crash.

The unknowns surrounding Smith's death are so great as to make any speculation risky. We do know that his last, troubled call to a 911 dispatcher indicated he was speeding, he had been drinking and he was, he said, trying to kill himself.

We have no idea why. But those revelations do remind us of the enormous stress under which many young people feel these days, a fact known to college counselors and administrators who struggle to identify and bring help to troubled young men and women.

What we do know is that for the friends and loved ones of these young people, there is grief today, and our hearts go out to them.