Pat Summitt, legendary former coach of Lady Vols, dies at 64 - The Washington Post

Pat Summitt, who won eight national championships as head coach of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team and had more wins than any NCAA college basketball coach in history when she was forced to retire at age 59 because of a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, died June 28 at a senior living home in Knoxville. She was 64.

She died of complications from the disease, said family spokeswoman Erin Freeman.

Ms. Summitt unexpectedly became coach of the Tennessee Lady Vols when she was 22 and, over a 38-year career, formed a dynasty seldom matched in any college sport. She was the first college basketball coach, male or female, to reach 1,000 victories in a career.

She was national coach of the year seven times and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000, 12 years before <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/pat-summitt-to-step-down-legendary-tennessee-womens-basketball-coach-won-1098-games-8-ncaa-titles/2012/04/18/gIQA2CK2QT_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">she stepped down with a record 1,098 victories</a>. She <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/19/president-obama-announces-patricia-pat-summitt-recipient-presidential-me" title="www.whitehouse.gov">received the Presidential Medal of Freedom</a>, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Obama in 2012.

By far the country’s most successful female coach in any sport, Ms. Summitt molded teams and players in her own tough, tireless image. She recovered from a serious knee injury to win a silver medal as a player for the U.S. women’s basketball team in the 1976 Olympic Games, the first time women’s basketball was an Olympic sport.

PAT TYLER SUMMITT

CLINTON PITINO SUMMITT

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HOLDSCLAW  SUMMITT  BAILEY  GRANATO  MEYERS

PAT SUMMITT

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SUMMITT FLUKER MCDANIEL ROBINSON

SUMMITT WARWICK JACKSON FLUKER MCDANIEL

SEC GEORGIA TENNESSEE SUMMITT BUTTS ZOLMAN DAVIS

SUMMITT HEAD

BUSH SUMMITT

Pat Summitt, Dean Lockwood, Holly Warlick

Pat Summitt

Pat Summitt, Ron Ramsey

Pat Summitt, Briana Brewer, Alex Fuller

Pat Summitt, Taber Spani

Pat Summitt, Meighan Simmons

Pat Summitt 

Kim Mulkey, Pat Summitt

Mickey DeMoss, Pat Summitt

PAt Summitt

NCAA Women's Final Four - Stanford v Baylor

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<i>[Pat Summitt remembered as ‘a hero and a mentor’ ]</i>


Eight years later, she coached the U.S. women’s team to its first Olympic gold medal.

Under Ms. Summitt’s guidance, the Lady Vols of Tennessee became one of the most dominant teams in college sports. Her success at Tennessee helped catapult women’s basketball to popularity throughout the sporting world, making it the third-most popular college sport, after football and men’s basketball.

The women’s Final Four in the NCAA tournament now sells out large arenas, and a professional league, the WNBA, has franchises throughout the country.

She accumulated staggering statistical accomplishments while coaching at Tennessee. Her teams made 31 NCAA tournament appearances, playing in the tourney every season she coached after 1982. Her record in the NCAA tournament was 112-23, and Tennessee reached the Final Four 18 times.

Ms. Summitt coached 20 all-Americans and 12 Olympians at Tennessee. Her eight national championships are the third-most in NCAA basketball history, behind only the 11 of Geno Auriemma, coach of the University of Connecticut women's team, and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060405092.html" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com">the late John Wooden's</a> 10 as coach of the UCLA men's team.


<i>[‘The game is never over’: A letter from Pat Summitt to one of her players]</i>


In 1987, she led Tennessee to the first of its eight national championships. Her 1997-98 team, led by all-Americans Chamique Holdsclaw and Tamika Catchings, had a perfect record of 39-0.

In 2011, Ms. Summitt was named Sportswoman of the Year by Sports Illustrated and was <a href="http://www.si.com/more-sports/photos/2011/12/05-0sportsman-and-sportswoman-of-the-year" title="www.si.com">featured on the cover</a> with her fellow college basketball coach, Duke University's Mike Krzyzewski, who was named Sportsman of the Year.

“Pat Summitt is a pioneer in basketball,” Krzyzewski, the winningest men’s college coach of all time, told the Associated Press in 2012. “Her amazing career accomplishments are among an elite group of leaders. Very few people leave a lasting legacy in their chosen professions, and Coach Summitt has done just that at the University of Tennessee and in women’s basketball.”

Ms. Summitt’s coaching career coincided with the growth in women’s sports that took place as a result of Title IX, a 1972 amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965, which increased opportunities for girls and women in sports.

According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, fewer than 300,000 girls took part in high school sports in 1972; 40 years later, when Ms. Summitt retired from coaching, there were more than 3 million.

At Tennessee, Ms. Summitt led grueling practices that became the stuff of legend. After learning that some of her players had been drinking at a party, she held a practice early in the morning and placed a garbage can at each corner of the court. The women ran laps, one after another, stopping only to vomit into the garbage cans.

At least once, after the team played poorly in the second half of a game on the road, Ms. Summitt ordered her team to put their sweaty uniforms back on after their bus pulled into Knoxville.

“Now, you’re going to play the half you didn’t play last night,” she said, reportedly insisting the players use for practice the smelly clothes that had been locked away in their bus overnight.

She inspired fierce loyalty among her players and went to great lengths to recruit the best basketball players in the country.

Ms. Summitt, who never missed a day of school while growing up in rural Tennessee, required that all of her athletes sit in the first three rows of their classes. She did not allow a single unexcused absence.

As a result, every one of the more than 100 players who completed their athletic eligibility at the university received a degree.

Although she “never raised a placard or a peep for women’s rights,” Sports Illustrated noted in 1998, Ms. Summitt became, by steely example, an “unconscious revolutionary who’s tearing up the terrain of sexual stereotypes.”

Patricia Sue Head was born in Clarksville, Tenn., on June 14, 1952, and grew up on a farm near Henrietta, Tenn. She credited much of her leadership on the court to her parents and the work she did on her family’s farm.

“It’s not done till it’s done right,” she recalled her father saying.

She had three older brothers and, after the chores were done, played basketball with them in the hayloft of the barn. Her family moved to a different school district, where there was a high school that had a girls’ basketball team.

Ms. Summitt was baffled by differences in the rules for girls’ basketball at the time. Teams had six players, but three were placed on each side of the center line, forbidden to cross to the other side.

"We were capable of heavy farmwork, and of absorbing whippings, but for some reason, they didn't think we could run 94 feet without getting the vapors and passing out or damaging our ovaries," she said in her 2013 autobiography, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594137129?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=1594137129" shape="rect" title="www.amazon.com">"Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective,"</a> co-written with Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins.

It wasn’t until 1971 that women’s college basketball began to look like the men’s sport, with five players on a team, running the full length of the court.

In 1974, Ms. Summitt graduated from the University of Tennessee at Martin, which she attended without an athletic scholarship because they weren’t yet offered to women. That year, she became an assistant coach of the women’s team at the University of Tennessee’s flagship campus in Knoxville, but when the head coach resigned shortly before the season started, Ms. Summitt was forced to take charge.

Her coaching salary in her first year was $250. She also taught physical education classes, studied for a master’s degree, recruited players and worked out every day to rehabilitate a knee injury. She drove the team van to away games.

She earned a spot as a player on the 1976 Olympic basketball team, and seven months later coached her Lady Vols to the Final Four.

In 1980, she married Ross Barnes “R.B.” Summitt, a bank executive. In her memoir, she wrote about her struggle to have children, saying she endured six miscarriages before giving birth to her son and only child, Tyler.

In her book, Ms. Summitt described making a recruiting trip to Pennsylvania for a top high school guard as her water broke.

“Pat is getting up and going to the bathroom, and coming back in,” said Michelle Marciniak, the player who ended up leading the Lady Vols to their fourth national championship in 1996. “Gets up, uses the bathroom, comes back in. Gets up, uses the phone. And I’m like, ‘Okay, seriously, what is going on?’ ”

Ms. Summitt boarded a plane immediately, and when the pilot suggested they make an emergency landing in Virginia so she could give birth, she scoffed at the idea. She insisted that her son be born in Tennessee.

Her marriage ended in divorce. Tyler Summitt served as the head women’s basketball coach at Louisiana Tech University, one of Tennessee’s longtime rivals, before resigning in April after admitting to an inappropriate relationship that was not specified.

Other survivors include her mother, Hazel Albright Head; three brothers; and a sister.

Ms. Summitt often appeared as a motivational speaker on leadership before groups as dissimilar as Victoria's Secret and the CIA. She raised millions of dollars for charity and, after <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/pat-summitt-tennessee-womens-basketball-coach-diagnosed-with-alzheimers-disease/2011/08/23/gIQADEuDZJ_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">announcing in 2011 that she had Alzheimer's</a>, established <a href="http://patsummitt.org/" title="patsummitt.org">a foundation to support</a> research on the disease.

In January 2015, the University of Tennessee announced it would expand the Alzheimer’s wing of the hospital and name it after Ms. Summitt.

In her manner and coaching style, Ms. Summitt often invoked the stern lessons and the work ethic she learned from her father. She never received a hug from her father until she won the national championship in 1996 — her fourth NCAA title.

"I was forty-three years old before my father hugged me for the first time," she wrote in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0767902297?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=0767902297" shape="rect" title="www.amazon.com">"Reach for the Summit."</a> "I had said publicly over the years that he was a forbidding man, and that I'd never been able to win his approval. I guess he got tired of hearing about it."

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Erik Martin helped make Reddit huge, then he left. What's next for an Internet master? - The Washington Post

<span class="dateline">NEW YORK —</span>A
<span> </span>day before he was to speak at Harvard, Erik Martin
 was walking his 5-year-old mutt, Mog, down a few Brooklyn streets to a park.

Martin is in roomy blue jeans that fall over faded blue Nike sneakers. A few weeks ago, he was managing Reddit, one of the largest Web sites in the world. Now, he’s unemployed.

The longtime manager of one of the world’s most successful start-up Internet companies leans down to bag Mog’s droppings. The next day, he’ll speak on a panel about journalism for social change at the Igniting Innovation Summit on Social Entrepreneurship in Cambridge.

Time magazine named Martin to its list of the most influential people in the world in 2012, when Reddit was less than a fifth of its current size. The site, said to be valued at $500 million, boasted more than 174 million unique visitors in September 2014, just weeks before Martin <a href="https://twitter.com/hueypriest/status/521668625346727939" title="twitter.com">announced his resignation</a> as general manager on Oct. 13.

"If the Web's most powerful images are the ones that go <i>viral</i>, then Erik Martin oversees the most infectious petri dish around," Time <a href="http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2111975_2111976_2112126,00.html" title="content.time.com">said of Martin</a> in 2012. "Since its founding in 2005, the site has avoided the influence of corporate brands and self-promoting celebrities, instead favoring the sometimes questionable taste du jour of its hive mind."

Martin’s transition from Reddit could reflect future generations of entrepreneurs with varying interests as the Internet enters its “second generation,” a time when young people coming into the workplace have had access to the Internet for their entire lives. His leadership at Reddit helped shape the model of Internet freedom we experience today.

“ ‘A.D.D.’ is a very good term to describe what is going on in the Internet world,” says Kathleen Allen, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California, about tech entrepreneurs. “Even if they make it big, they tend to start something new. It’s a lifestyle sort of thing.”

So what’s the next step for Martin, a 37-year-old barbecue-loving, early-’90s rap connoisseur and media guru considered an expert on communication in the digital age?

“It’s called A--h---- on Demand,” he says with a slight giggle.

To understand Martin’s day-to-day work while he was at Reddit, one has to have at least a broad understanding of the vast informational ocean he was tasked with overseeing. Reddit’s aforementioned 174 million unique visitors hail from 186 countries and tallied more than 6.1 billion page views in September alone.

Part of his job involved meeting with potential advertisers, giving people the “Reddit 101,” as he says, and finding ways to monetize a free service.

The company “runs roughly break-even” through advertising and revenue-generating perks, says Sam Altman, president of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, an investor in Reddit.

“What I care about is not revenue right now, what I care about is getting to a billion users,” Altman says.

Martin’s job as general manager, a role that he took on in 2011 after coming in as a community manager in 2008, was to make sure his employees were appeasing a crowd that at some point got too big to be completely monitored by staff members. Martin remembers times when he would check the site at 3 or 4 a.m. “just to make sure something horrible wasn’t happening.”

While the site became too big to surveil, that responsibility was also inherently unnecessary. The premise of Reddit is based on free speech. A crude eyesore of a site, the giant message board is as close to endless content as you can find on the Internet.

Threads unspool after a person posts a link or message, and the universe responds with an avalanche of comments. The appeal is in its unpredictability.

“It’s endless. It’s like 100,000 comments per day. It’s impossible to read all that — no one should read all that,” Martin says.

Users can subscribe and add to subcategories, called subreddits, or they can create their own communities to serve their interests. The majority of the site is suitable for all viewers, but it’s also impossible to mention Reddit, and the role Martin has played in shaping the concept of free speech on the Internet, without mentioning the grimy elements that often generate more media coverage than anything else.

You need not look hard to find racism, offensive language and borderline illegal content, if that’s what you’re looking for. Recently, floods of stolen nude pictures of female celebrities such as actress Jennifer Lawrence and Olympic athlete McKayla Maroney were uploaded via a subreddit called The Fappening. An example of the conflicted role Reddit plays in aggregating the Internet, the site’s statement about the subreddit jumped from resigned to sympathetic to defensive regarding the decision to host it.

<span>"While current US law does not prohibit linking to stolen materials, we deplore the theft of these images and we do not condone their widespread distribution," the statement <a href="http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-for-his-own.html" title="www.redditblog.com">read</a>. "Nevertheless, reddit's platform is structurally based on the ability for people to distribute, promote, and highlight textual materials as well as links to images and other media. We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize</span>.

“Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event.”

Reddit eventually banned the subreddit after users repeatedly posted images that broke site rules for child pornography.

Although Martin says he was phasing out of his duties as general manager by the time the pictures leaked, his general thoughts on moderation helped mold how Reddit dealt with the situation and how the company will probably deal with the many others that are sure to follow.

Unless law enforcement is involved, the content basically goes untouched, even the ugly, even the untrue. Without that freedom, the credibility and appeal of an anonymous message-board Web site would be tarnished.

Martin compares the company’s role in moderation and censorship to running any other type of business, putting it in metaphorical terms while eating at his favorite restaurant, Hometown Bar-B-Que.

“If you and I get into a serious argument in this restaurant,” he says, “no one would expect the manager to come out, determine who is right and kick one of us out. No, he would say, ‘You both get out.’ Or he would say, ‘Leave me alone.’ But like, if I stab you, the manager might call the police. But short of that . . .”

The lack of a moral obligation made it easier for him to sleep at night, he says, knowing the thousands of comments flowing through Reddit’s servers weren’t his responsibility alone. Users can “upvote” or “downvote” comments on the site, as well as report the comments to moderators as spam, for revealing personal information or as illegal content.

It is self-policing, because that’s the only way a site this big can operate. But also because that’s the point.

“The whole premise is that we’re not journalists. We have opinions, like everyone else, but the whole premise of the site is that it’s not about our opinions. It’s about the people,” he says. “We didn’t always agree internally. . . . So we would rather put our energy and time into making tools that help the community decide.”

But what does “Erik Martin, human being” — not “Erik Martin, GM of Reddit” — think about some of the disgusting content the site hosts?

He gives a small grin and looks down at the table.

“It’s horrible,” he says. “Daily, I’m tempted with, ‘Oh, I have that button where I can make this discussion disappear.’ Not really a button but theoretically, I could close this down. There is so much I find ignorant and stupid that I think shouldn’t exist. And just mean. That’s the stuff that bothers me the most.

“People are just mean for no reason.”

Martin lived in San Francisco for a short time but moved back to New York because he missed the seasons. Surrounding himself with tech folks day in and day out may have grown tiresome, as well.

“It’s like anything else,” he says. “You want to be surrounded by different kinds of people. The tech world can be very insular.”

It can’t be understated how poorly Martin fits the start-up culture stereotypes: the extravagance, the arrogance. He’s not overtly extroverted or introverted; he’s a quietish, funny, normal dude.

<span>His father, Werner, remembers that when Erik was a child in Chapel Hill, N.C., he would gather kids together and create elaborate plays with homemade costumes.</span>

“He’s not the recluse who sits in his room with his Internet connection,” Werner Martin says.

Werner immigrated to the United States from Switzerland more than 40 years ago and now runs his own robotic engineering company.

“We both learned business the same way,” Werner Martin says of his son. “I have a forest engineering degree, I don’t have an M.B.A. I know trees.”

Erik remembers being 10 years old and there always being six or seven people working in his living room on his dad’s latest project.

After getting a degree in American studies from Tulane University in New Orleans, Erik Martin moved back to North Carolina while working on an assortment of film and music projects, at one point joining an Internet improv troupe, before stumbling onto Reddit in 2005.

He discovered the site through Y Combinator and cold-e-mailed Alexis Ohanian, one of the site’s co-founders. Martin was one of the site’s first consistent users.

“When he first started reaching out to us, Reddit was me and Steve [Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder] in this crappy apartment,” Ohanian says. “When I first met him, it was clear that he was one of the few people who thought about Reddit then, and even the few that do even 10 years later, the way anyone other than me and Steve do now.”

At its most basic level, the allure of entrepreneurship comes from the desire to solve a problem. Not to change the world, or culture, or make a bunch of money, explains Allen, the USC professor who is the founding director of the university’s Marshall Center for Technology Commercialization.

“The really successful entrepreneurs are the ones who go in because it’s like a calling,” Allen says. “They worked like crazy but loved it. When they became hugely successful, they look at the hard times and say, ‘I really enjoyed that.’

“Running a big company is not something entrepreneurs are really passionate about.”

Which brings us back to Martin, a man just three years removed from making $14 an hour while Reddit was in its infancy. When discussing his future, he revels in the open road but makes multiple mention of having to “keep paying the bills.”

In the time immediately after he left Reddit, he wasn’t looking at any full-time jobs at other companies. He’s started mulling that option seriously, however, at other start-ups. He’s careful to look only at companies that aren’t too much like Reddit.

“People would always ask me, ‘What’s it like working at Reddit?’ Good, bad or whatever, I would say, it’s always something interesting. I always was like, if it ever becomes boring, I’ll quit,” he says.

“It’s not quite true that it became boring; there were still interesting problems, but it sort of became — not quite boring but closer to boring. A lot of what we set out to do — what I set out to do — we did it. I’m just ready for something different.”

“I’m starting new co called ‘a--h----- on demand,’ ” he wrote in October. “Hire us to deal with insurance, cable, etc co’s. ‘We’re a--h----, so you don’t have to be.’ ”

What started as a joke has turned into a curious but serious endeavor. A woman responded to the tweet and said she was interested in helping him create the company.

Martin bought the domain name days later, and <a href="http://www.assholesondemand.com/" title="www.assholesondemand.com">the site</a> is now live.

The start-up will aim to help those who, for whatever reason, don’t have the resources to fight for themselves, whether it’s a language barrier preventing a person from arguing with a cable provider or a lack of institutional knowledge about health insurance.

“We’re like the X-Men, but for a--h----!” Martin tweeted a day later. He has recruited more than 100 a--h---- so far.

Ohanian rejoined Reddit in November as executive chairman, after chief executive Yishan Wong resigned over a dispute involving the company’s new office location. Wong hasn’t announced what he is doing next.

While Martin denies that relationships with other higher-ups at the company played a part in his decision to leave, his dad mentions changes at the executive level as a contributing factor.

Ohanian left Reddit in 2010 to start a travel search start-up called Hipmunk before joining Y Combinator as an ambassador.

He says he expects to be a beta tester for A--h---- on Demand whenever Martin says it’s ready for him. The two are good friends.

“Erik has a really great creativity that is very —” Ohanian pauses, searching for the word, “very Internet.”

Martin now finds himself in a limbo that’s as familiar as it is exciting and daunting: The simplicity of pitting an idea, whether by himself or with a newish company, against ever-changing, ever-evolving infinite competition online.

“There’s always going to be another kid in college working on something,” he says and half-laughs.

He walks the few blocks back to his apartment.

He is going to relax for the rest of his Friday. Make an espresso, surf the Web, then pack for an Amtrak train to Harvard.

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For 2 tied ANC races, a not-so-technical way to decide rules the day - The Washington Post

The candidates converged Thursday to decide the outcome of two elections for Advisory Neighborhood Commission positions that — remarkably — had ended in ties.

But no one seemed to know how it was supposed to happen.

“Who the hell knows what ‘casting of lots’ is?” incumbent Dyana Forester had tweeted last week.

More than 1,000 votes were cast in two ANC races more than a month ago, yet here the candidates were at the Board of Elections office. After a pair of recounts, they were knotted and dead even.

Election officials said that they weren’t sure exactly when there was last a tie but that it had been at least 25 years.

“Casting lots,” someone pondered from the back corner of the room, about 15 minutes before the process began, “sounds biblical.”

D.C. code specifies the time — noon — when the casting of lots is supposed to occur after a tied election. But it doesn’t define the process.

Forester, who was seeking election for her second term as commissioner for district 1B06 in Columbia Heights, sat just a couple seats away from her opponent, David Gilliland.

Gilliland initially won the election by two votes on election night, Forester said. After votes were certified, Forester was ahead by one. A recount found them tied at 204.

“I read about a city council race in Florida,” Gilliland said. “They flipped a coin to determine who would pick a numbered ping-pong ball first.”

The elaborate ceremony he was referring to happened this year in Duval County, Fla., and was more complex than that. The two city council candidates in Neptune Beach drew names to determine who would get to call the coin flip, which determined who would <i>decide</i> <a href="http://www.duvalelections.com/Portals/Duval/Documents/Elections%20%20Offices/FINAL%20-%20Minutes%202014%20General%20Election%20Certification%20and%20Determination%20by%20Lot.pdf">who picked</a> the first numbered ping-pong ball.

Casting lots is meant to determine a winner at random, and it can be done in a number of different ways. As seconds ticked toward noon Thursday, the D.C. candidates were still in the dark about how their races would be won.

The other race, for district 7E04 in Southeast Washington, was a dead heat at 204 votes apiece as well, between Myron Smith, and incumbent Mary D. Jackson.

As Thursday’s meeting began, Clifford Tatum, executive director of the Board of Elections, began explaining how it would all go down.

Heads or tails, like the beginning of an NFL game? Names from a hat, like picking houses in “Harry Potter”? Numbered ping-pong balls like the NBA lottery?

In Minnesota’s Cook County, commissioners were going to draw bags of Scrabble tiles to settle a tie, with the person who drew the bag with a ‘Z’ being named the winner. They eventually decided to draw colored blocks instead.

On Thursday in the District, it would come down to a red, reusable grocery bag.

First it was 7E04. Tatum stood in his gray, pinstripe suit, taking center stage with the tote bag and a pair of sealed envelopes, each including a candidate’s name.

“I will drop the envelopes into the bag,” he said. “I will shake the bag.”

He then walked to Dianne Harris, of the Commission on Human Rights, which the board selected as an unbiased third party. She stood and picked an envelope, giving Smith a victory in 7E04.

The second envelope she grabbed had Forester’s name in it. The candidate couldn’t contain a smile.

From the other side of the room, Smith also smiled and nodded, having waited a month to find out that he defeated an incumbent who had held the post for more than 20 years.

“Nothing has been going on, so me doing anything will be an improvement,” he said. “Just even letting people know when the meetings are.”

Smith said that the original drawing was supposed to be held last Friday morning. But it was pushed back to this week because the board couldn’t get a quorum for an official meeting. He observed that deciding a political election by picking envelopes from a sack “seems arbitrary,” but he added that he was just glad to have a resolution.

“I mean . . . I’m sure bigger minds have thought through this,” said the new advisory neighborhood commissioner. “Or maybe not.”

An earlier version of this story portrayed an incorrect order of events. District 7E04 was the first district decided, followed by 1B06.

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Montgomery County Maryland Plane Crash

Plane crash in Gaithersburg, Md., shattered picture of a happy family - The Washington Post

Late last week, the Gemmells bundled up and went to a Christmas tree lighting in downtown Rockville: Marie, Ken and their kids, Arabelle, 7, Cole, 3, and even little Devin, not yet two months old.

Arabelle hit the outdoor ice rink. Cole got to meet Santa. Marie stood to the side, holding Devin.

“That was them,” said Pallavi Rana, a close friend. “They were always together.”

The family of five became two Monday morning in the most random of tragedies. A small jet trying to land at an airport near their Montgomery County community <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/plane-crashes-into-house-in-gaithersburg/2014/12/08/15913716-7ef2-11e4-8882-03cf08410beb_story.html">crashed in a neighbor's yard</a>, sending a fuel-laden wing catapulting through the side of the Gemmells' house.

At the time, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/man-whose-family-killed-in-md-plane-crash-no-words-can-describe-our-loss/2014/12/09/e696a156-7fed-11e4-9f38-95a187e4c1f7_story.html">Ken</a> was at work; Arabelle was at school.

HANDOUT 

NO SALES  NO TRADES  NO WIRES

Investigators believe that the three were upstairs. From below, there was a sudden, furious eruption of flames, fed by jet fuel mixed with oxygen rushing into the house through large holes the wing had created.

(Audio: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/local/911-calls-after-md-plane-crash-it-went-straight-down/2014/12/09/5fb44d8a-7fcc-11e4-b936-f3afab0155a7_video.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">911 calls after crash: 'It went straight down'</a>)

“The fire was immediate and intense,” said Capt. Darren Francke, commander of the Montgomery Police Department’s major crimes unit.

Marie made her way to a bathroom with Devin and Cole, detectives believe, and held one of the boys in her arms and the other between her legs. It was probably just a matter of minutes, authorities said, before all three died of smoke inhalation.

“She took that bathroom as an area of refuge,” said Capt. Michael Redding, a fire investigations supervisor in the county. “To be trapped like that, it’s terrible.”

As friends and relatives learned what Marie did — covering her children, trying to save them — they expressed no surprise.

“She loved those kids more than anything on the face of the Earth,” said John Sadlik, a friend.

Until Monday, the Gemmells’ life seemed defined by smiles and cheers. They hosted parties. They took the children to D.C. United soccer games. They liked to eat together at the Dogfish Head Alehouse in Gaithersburg. Marie wouldn’t just say, “Hi,” to waitresses, said Haleigh Powell, who works there. She would say, “Sit down and have a beer with us,” according to Powell.

Ken and Marie, natives of  New Jersey, were married Sept. 25, 2004, according to their Facebook pages.

Marie would write about it a decade later, while pregnant with Devin: “10 years ago today. It was bright, clear sky and warm and I was likely having a mimosa right now. Today 2.5 kids, a dog, turtle and a house later its rainy and cold and I’m on my way to work with no mimosa. No matter the weather or what we are doing its still a great a day. Happy 10-year Anniversary Ken Gemmell.”

Ken Gemmell’s Facebook page also tells the story of a family deeply entrenched in modern family life: soccer practices, football games, garden tomato harvests, pride in a daughter’s progress in reading.

“So in an effort to slow Arabelle down in her reading because she reads too fast and doesn’t always grasp all the concepts,” Ken wrote, “I have given her my college Calculus book. Strangely she took it without an argument, and now she wants to trace some of the shapes and graphs.”

Marie replied: “There is no doubt she is your kid. Her love and great skills at math make me wonder if she is mine.”

As Cole spent time at the Cuddles and Crayons day-care center, near their home in Gaithersburg, Marie became close with Rana, who ran the place.

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