![]() ![]() ![]() Their school was the kind that parents move to be near: low poverty rate, high test scores and a challenging curriculum. The boy's classmates posted folded hand emoji beside messages encouraging each other to #pray for him. But on the Snapchat and Instagram accounts of preteens across Northern Virginia, his name was spreading fast. News reports identified him only as a Thoreau student. This is what she did not know: When a 12-year-old tries to die, and doesn't, what happens to him next?īut at Thoreau Middle School in Vienna, Virginia, it wasn't at all clear that the boy on the bridge had intended to kill himself. "Is he in treatment? Or did they just do the bare minimum and then just put him right back in school?" "Is he getting help now?" she would ask again and again in the coming months. Leigh worried about this child, as Marisa would have. He looked as if he was just about to giggle. In one photo, his mother's arm was wrapped around him. Here was the boy on the bridge, brown-haired and dark-eyed, standing beside his sisters. What they knew about the boy came only from old photos on his mother's private Facebook and Instagram pages, a few of which Leigh could see. Had his family reached out? Was the prosecutor going to press charges?īut after the crash report, Marisa's parents stopped hearing from Virginia State Police. On the last page of the report was the name of the boy on the bridge, described as "Pedestrian #1." When Leigh and Patrick returned to work - she as a purchasing manager at Edison Electric Institute, he as an operations supervisor in video services at Gallaudet University - people asked about the boy. Marisa's death certificate said "blunt force trauma." Her mother had come to call it "the laws of gravity." The physics of it - his weight, the speed at which he fell, the distribution of force that left only one of them alive - was not explained. He picked "other."Ī diagram indicated that the boy was facing east when he jumped, the same direction that Marisa's car was heading when it emerged from beneath the bridge. To categorise the collision, the state trooper could choose from 20 brief descriptions. So much life in her 22 years, and somehow her end could still be reduced to a five-page crash report, sent to her parents by police about a month after her death. "It is never too late for someone to seek services that help them improve their mental well-being, but working with children allows the healing process to begin earlier," Marisa wrote in her application to Marymount University's graduate program. Leigh Miller, left, with her sister, Sara Miller Fuller, and daughter, Marisa, at a Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribe powwow in 2010. ![]()
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