For the 475 seventh-graders in the boy’s class, that meant learning about cell mitosis, calculating linear equations and reading “The Giver”. 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. Her mother had come to call it “the laws of gravity”. Marisa’s death certificate said “blunt force trauma”. 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 wellbeing, but working with children allows the healing process to begin earlier,” Marisa wrote in her application to Marymount University’s graduate programme. And here was Marisa in Guanajuato, Mexico, volunteering at the domestic violence shelter where she decided she was going to pursue a career working with traumatised children. And here was Marisa at Maryland’s Towson University, where she met Perry, the first and last boyfriend she’d bring home to meet her parents. Here was Marisa at a Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribe powwow, from the high school years when she began to embrace her Native American heritage and her middle name, Wenona. Gathering photos, each a memory of who she had become: here was Marisa reflected in her bedroom mirror, from those middle school days when they worried about the way she was bullied by other girls. The emergency kit they had given her so that she would be safe on the road. Collecting Marisa’s personal items from her totalled car. Fielding messages from strangers who wanted to send them money and setting up a fund for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. There was nothing to do, the couple learned, but go home to the Olney, Maryland, townhouse where they raised Marisa, and face all that came next: talking to reporters, as the story of such a bizarre crash spread from local reports to sensational tabloids, People magazine and viral news sites in dozens of languages. Marisa was not at the hospital, it turned out.

12 year old boy jumps off overpass