He sank beneath the wave,
No mother there to save,
No father’s hand to help him,
He filled a water’s grave.
He left a lonely brother
And friends to mourn his loss,
His broken-hearted parents
To bear a heavy cross.
– “The Drowning of The Heber Springs Boy,” The John Quincy Wolf Folklore Collection
Patrick McNeill had been found floating in the Hudson River in April of 1997, two months after disappearing after a night out with friends. He was last seen leaving an Upper East Side bar to catch a train back to Fordham University in the Bronx.
Even in double-time Big Apple tempo, his weirdly random death — ruled an accidental drowning despite his family’s protestations — was still being bandied about Fordham’s Manhattan campus in the fall just as I was beginning my freshman term.
Good ol’ F.U. had more than its fair share of dust-ups and sweep-unders involving the student body during my tenure there, but none cut as close to the bone for me as McNeill’s fate did. He was a foil for me in every sense: a local boy instead of a transplant, a family guy rather than a loner, a junior majoring in accounting in lieu of a print hopeful, and Irish-Italian kid from the block and not a conspicuous Scandinavian rover from the upstate Tundra — in short, a somebody. Somebody to be missed in a city full of young, rootless nobodies. (read the full article)











