Drawn Together in Life, Held Together After Death
Ex-Lacrosse Player Leans on Best Friend's Family

By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 3, 2006

Greg Raymond had trouble gripping the telephone. His hands trembled. Shortly after 11 on a December night, Greg stood in front of the Baltimore City Detention Center with tear stains on his face and dried blood on his shirt. He felt dizzy. He gasped for breath. But he needed to make this call.

For the last 18 hours, Greg had paced in a cell and tried to comprehend the two facts that now defined him: His best friend was dead, and Greg was partly responsible.

So much about the previous night had felt ordinary, Greg thought. He and his alter ego, Matt Stoffel, former Johns Hopkins lacrosse teammates, both 23, went out for beers. They talked about college, about old memories and new careers. Then, a little past 1 a.m. on Dec. 11, 2005, Greg drove them to meet up with more friends, never considering how much he'd had to drink or whether his blood alcohol level was above the legal limit.

He crashed and watched Matt's life seep away in the passenger seat. Minutes after his best friend left the scene of the accident in the back of an ambulance, Greg left in the back of a police car.

Almost immediately after Greg made bail and left lockup, he felt compelled to talk with Matt's parents. He knew Glynn and Patricia Stoffel well, and he wanted to tell them that he loved Matt, that the accident had been his fault and that he was sorry. Greg didn't expect their forgiveness. He could never even imagine forgiving himself.

In the minutes before he talked to the Stoffels, Greg braced for anger, incomprehension and bitterness. Part of him hungered for it. "I deserved whatever reaction they had, no matter how bad, because that would be part of my punishment," Greg said. He had thought of things to say, but he remembered none of them when Glynn's tired voice came through the phone. Greg stumbled through a tearful greeting. Then Glynn interrupted him.

"We're going to get through this," Glynn told Greg that night. "And we're going to get through this together."

A Constant Togetherness

Patricia Stoffel met Greg in 2000, and no teenager had ever left her with such a dynamic first impression. At the Johns Hopkins annual dinner for mothers of lacrosse players, Patricia sat in a room filled with near strangers. Hopkins lacrosse coach Dave Pietramala introduced one freshman player who had been picked to talk about his experiences during his first few months at Hopkins. Greg stood up.

At 6 feet 4, Greg had broad shoulders and a barrel chest. His soft, dark hair fell over kind eyes. When he started to speak, he made self-effacing jokes and held eye contact. He entertained the mothers for about 10 minutes and, by the time he sat down, Patricia had picked out her son's new best friend. "Greg had it ," Patricia said. "Right away, I wanted Matt to befriend him."

Matt and Greg built a bond even stronger than friendship, teammates said. They became extensions of each other. They lived together with various other teammates for three years at Hopkins, and Matt and Greg developed the rhythms of a married couple. They watched "Nip/Tuck" on Tuesdays and "Laguna Beach" on Wednesdays. They lifted weights together, and then, on game days, stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the sideline. Greg banged Matt's helmet every time Hopkins scored a goal.

On Sundays, they'd lie on couches in their apartment and watch 10 hours of football. "We wouldn't even have to talk," Greg said. "Then, at the same time, we'd both stand up, stretch and say, 'Dominos?' "

They balanced each other out. Matt tended to be quiet, and he devoted his energy to an economics major and a close group of friends. Greg was so outgoing that his teammates voted him a three-time captain even though he never emerged as a star player. Matt played guitar; Greg tried to sing. Greg accepted Hollywood movies as great entertainment; Matt forced him to analyze them.

"Those two, they had the type of bond that you can only hope to re-create a couple times in a coaching career," Pietramala said. "They did everything better when they did it together -- schoolwork, lacrosse, laughing. They laughed a lot."

Matt's and Greg's parents meshed almost as easily. The dads, Glynn and Larry Raymond, smoked cigars after Hopkins lacrosse games and complained about their sons' lack of playing time. The moms, Carol Casbeer and Patricia, traded notes on the latest mess in Matt and Greg's apartment. Patricia often mothered Greg, since his family lived in Upstate New York. She sometimes called Greg her "other son."

'We Have to Let Him Go'

Greg had not seen Matt for about a month when he returned to Baltimore for a weekend last December. They went to Mother's Federal Hill Grille, a bar near Matt's apartment, and Greg later testified that he drank about five beers and two shots of liquor. Matt teased Greg about his job as an assistant coach for Princeton, a Hopkins rival. Greg teased Matt about his complicated job as a recruiter for Harbor Point Resources in Glen Burnie. "What do you even do all day?" Greg joked.

The two friends returned to Matt's apartment after midnight. Then, a half hour later, they decided to meet former classmates near the Hopkins campus. When they walked out to Matt's 1999 Jeep Wrangler, Greg volunteered to drive. He thought Matt had drank more.

"What's the hardest part for me, I guess, is just knowing how close of friends we were, and that Matt trusted me to drive," Greg said. "I never thought about it like, 'Oh, I'm going to be driving drunk.' It was never a big, dramatic moment or a big decision. I guess that's the worst thing about it."

Greg was driving north at about 50 mph on Interstate 83 in Baltimore -- a winding freeway with, in some spots, a 40-mph speed limit -- when he sensed a car racing up behind him. Greg tried to quickly change lanes, and the Jeep skidded on a patch of ice. It banged against a restraining wall, and the right two tires slid about a foot off the ground. The Jeep tilted slightly, and its right side scraped against a fence. The car skidded to a stop.

For a brief second, Greg was overcome with relief. He felt fine. The car had suffered minimal damage. He turned to Matt to ask if he was okay, fully expecting the answer would be yes. Instead, Greg turned and saw that a pole from the fence had crashed through the window and impaled Matt, nicking his carotid artery. Nothing during the next 30 minutes -- Greg trying to stop the bleeding with his own jacket; paramedics rushing to the scene; an ambulance speeding to the hospital -- could prevent Matt from bleeding to death later that morning.

Greg failed a sobriety test on the side of the road. He spent the next 18 hours locked up. He learned that Matt had died about 12 hours before his release.

Across downtown, Patricia and Glynn held hands over Matt's hospital bed. A respirator kept him alive. He had wanted to be an organ donor, but Glynn watched his son's body shutting down and thought: "Enough. It's taking too long. We have to let him go." Early in the morning, the Stoffels told the hospital to take Matt off life-support.

Acceptance, Apology

The Stoffels saw Greg for the first time a few days after the accident, on the morning of Matt's viewing. Greg walked slowly up the driveway of the Stoffels' small Glen Burnie house, and Glynn hardly recognized him. Gone was the buoyancy and swagger that had often defined him. Greg looked pale and exhausted -- as if he were suffering from a severe illness, Glynn said. Greg's bloodshot eyes were fixed to the ground.

Months later, Patricia would think hard about her feelings for Greg. But, in the first week after Matt's death, the Stoffels based their reaction on a basic instinct.

"You could just see that Greg was broken," Patricia said. "If we hadn't reached out to him . . . I don't even know. He was so weak, and one condemning word from us would have destroyed him. It's a terrible feeling, to have that kind of power over somebody."

So when Greg walked up the driveway, his face gaunt after three days during which he could hardly stomach food, the Stoffels rushed to hug him. They invited him to ride to the funeral in a limousine that carried Matt's immediate family. They sat beside him in the pews at Matt's Catholic service. They supported Greg when he walked to the front of the crowd and read a passage of scripture.

Greg had always tended toward stubbornness. In college, he once walked circles in the snow for 26.2 miles on the Hopkins track just to prove to a friend that he could. And now again, in the days after the crash, Greg tried to forge ahead -- frailty be damned. He tattooed Matt's lacrosse number over his heart before the funeral, and he promised to live a life that would make his best friend proud. He accepted full blame for the accident, and apologized profusely. He revealed little emotion to friends and coaches, because he didn't want to worry them.

At the funeral, a packed procession marveled at Greg's composure, at his resiliency. But in solitude, Greg discovered within himself an unmistakable dependency. "If the Stoffels didn't forgive me," Greg said, "I never could have even started to think about moving on and trying to forgive myself."

Family Reaches Out

In the months after the accident, Patricia sometimes sat in a quiet room and focused her thoughts on Greg. She tried to get angry.

Patricia thought she must have buried rage somewhere deep in her subconscious, and she searched hard for it. There was so much to be angry about. Patricia had left Matt with a standard goodbye almost every time they parted: I love you, be safe, and don't drink and drive. His final decision tormented her. "I just want to know why," she said.

Patricia had put away most pictures of Matt, because she could hardly bear to see his rosy cheeks puff around a wide smile. She and Glynn made initial plans to flee to Florida, where they could live near their only other child -- a daughter -- and two grandchildren. Patricia went to a specialist to restore a DVD of Matt skydiving in New Jersey. Matt free-fell through the air, his eyes glistening. He looked so . . . a live . Patricia wanted to remember him like that.

"Sometimes I would try to focus all this pain on Greg, just to see if that was inside me," Patricia said. "I had plenty of anger, but I would never be able to get angry at Greg without getting angry at Matt. I could never separate the two of them. It was never just Greg; it was Greg and Matt."

Matt had been fiercely loyal to his friends, and he forgave them for everything. Plus, Patricia considered Greg an almost equal victim of the crash. He lived with the memory of 20 horrific minutes alone in the jeep with Matt after the crash -- a scene so grim that neither Glynn nor Patricia ever wanted to hear the details.

Greg's attorney feared that his client might be charged with vehicular manslaughter, and Patricia and Glynn decided, unequivocally, that they did not want Greg to go to prison. It would be a worthless punishment, they said. "Greg was going to live with this, with the guilt and agony, for the rest of his life," Glynn said. "So what good would it do for him to sit in a cell?"

When Glynn and Patricia received a victim's assessment form from Baltimore, they refused to fill it out. Instead, they called the investigative officer to plead for mercy. They reached out to the state's attorney. They wrote a letter to the judge. "To have that kind of cooperation from the victim's family is really unbelievable," said Daniel Sussman, Greg's lawyer. "They campaigned for Greg."

Greg pleaded guilty to driving while impaired in February, and Glynn and Patricia sat near Greg's parents at his sentencing in May. Glynn and Patricia both spoke. The state's attorney requested a 90-day jail sentence. The judge, Gary Bass, instead sentenced Greg to two years of probation and 250 hours of community service. Bass told the court that issuing a prison sentence would only cause the Stoffels more suffering. After he issued the verdict, Glynn and Patricia hugged Greg's parents.

"I get this sense sometimes that people think, because of what we've done for Greg, that that somehow diminishes what we felt for Matt," Patricia said. "That bothers me. I just can't imagine why people think we should be so hate-filled. Yes, you want to blame somebody. But the reality is Matt was an adult, and he knew. I've never, ever been with Greg or talked to him where I've felt anything but love and compassion. He lost Matt, too."

Staying Connected

Glynn once told Patricia that he believed tragedy left its victims with two choices. It drove people apart, or it pushed them together. "And to me," Glynn told Patricia, "that's not much of a choice."

Glynn craved the company of Matt's friends, because being with them brought Matt back to life. He became close with Pietramala, the Hopkins coach, and attended almost every Hopkins lacrosse game last season. Glynn spoke to the Hopkins team about the importance of family, and he traveled on the team bus to a road game in the playoffs. "It felt good to be with those boys, to feel their energy," Glynn said. "To be honest, after the lacrosse season ended, I was pretty depressed. I didn't know what I would do. It was like grieving all over again."

Glynn had just begun to build a man-to-man relationship with his only son, and he looked to Matt's friends to re-create small pieces of that bond. He invited Matt's friends over the day after the funeral to lie in the Stoffels' basement and watch football, just as Glynn had done with Matt. One of Matt's former teammates invited Glynn to a Baltimore Ravens game, and he accepted on one condition: They would arrive at the stadium at 8 a.m. to tailgate, because that's what Matt had always insisted.

Most fervently, Glynn reached out to Greg. He invited him to sleep over on weekend visits. He taught him how to crack crabs. A few months after Matt's death, Greg suggested to Glynn that the two men make a pact. They should talk on the phone, Greg said, at least three times each week.

"We had been sort of dancing around the subject that both of us were pretty hurt," Glynn said. "We were both pretty sad, and things in our lives weren't going the way we wanted them to. It's harder than you think, getting over something like that. We decided we needed to talk, and maybe we could heal together."

Greg had spent the first six months after the accident searching for an effective coping strategy. He stopped drinking alcohol and ate only healthy foods, hoping he could purify his mind by cleansing his body. He went to counseling. He tried writing in a journal that his girlfriend gave him. None of it worked. "People tell you different things are going to help," Greg said. "But they don't know what's it's like."

In Glynn -- or Papa Stoff, as Greg called him -- Greg found intimate understanding. He called Glynn every other day. Sometimes they talked about Princeton's lacrosse schedule. Sometimes they talked about Matt.

"Greg came up here and stayed one weekend over the summer," Glynn said. "When he left, I dropped him off at the rail station so he could take the train home. And it's funny, because Greg is a big, strapping guy, and when we walked into the station, all these girls started grabbing into their purses to fix themselves up.

"Greg was oblivious to it. But I was kind of proud about that, proud like a dad would be of a son. I'm going: 'Wow. This is really something. They're looking at my boy over here.' . . . I had my chest puffed out a little bit, and it felt like being a dad again.

"Greg got on his train, and I walked out to my car and just started to cry. I thought, 'Wow, it's almost like I was dropping off Matt.' "