Tragedy Beyond The Imagination

At 9:55, when his German class was supposed to be out, Marcy raced across the campus toward Norris Hall. She had to reach him, tell him they needed to get away, something bad was happening. A police cordon stopped her.

Forced to wait back at the dorm, "I called and I called and I called," but Mike didn't answer, she says. "I thought, there are so many buildings over there, he's never going to choose Mike's building." Friends began calling to ask how she was. "I didn't care how I was. I was just trying to find Mike." Hours passed without word. Marcy reached Mike's younger sister, Nicole, at college in West Virginia, and she called home to Flemington, N.J. Mike Sr. began driving south.

Now they stand grieving together on the Drillfield, Mike's father, his sister and her boyfriend, his godfather and the brown-eyed girl he gave a Tiffany heart to last Christmas. "Mike told me every day: We're getting married," Marcy says. It was more a given than a proposal. She had been wondering if the ring might come on her 20th birthday -- May 13. The day after Mike's graduation. He always said he didn't want to be officially engaged for more than a year, but he'd been hinting about a big present.

"He was a tough guy on the outside, but he was romantic," Marcy says. He filled her dorm room with rose petals and chocolate kisses on Valentine's Day. When they went to the Bahamas for spring break, he dipped his powerful arms in the surf and cleared a path because Marcy was scared of "random things in the sea" touching her.

His father is waiting to collect what the coroner's office refers to as Mike's "effects" and what Marcy says is a book bag stuffed with every paper he probably had this semester. She was the organized one.

They cooked dinner together on the weekend nights when he wasn't tending bar at the Nerv, and she laughs through sobs remembering their attempt at fried chicken -- was it only three days ago? -- and how they nearly set his apartment on fire. The smoke was so thick they couldn't see each other. They loved to sleep past noon on Sundays and argue whether their imaginary daughter's name should be Emily Rose or Victoria Rose. Mike favored the latter.

And if their kids ever got in trouble, Mike vowed, he wouldn't lay a hand on them but, Marcy recounts, "he would make them run obstacles and wind sprints instead."

"Always the jock," his father comments, managing a smile. The dean of students told the Pohles that Mike will be awarded his diploma posthumously. Marcy has been excused from classes for the rest of the year, and will go home with the Pohles to bury the man she loved. She'll come back to Tech next year, she says, "because Mike would have wanted it that way." He loved this place.

They would live someday in a cozy house near the water, maybe Savannah or Williamsburg, and backpack through Europe, and sleep past noon on Sundays and argue forever about her beloved Yankees and his Phillies. She would let him name their daughter Victoria, not Emily, and fall asleep each night in the arms of a man who would sweep the ocean floor for her.

Imagine if.