Just days after graduating 22-year-old Yale student, Marina Keegan, succumbed to a deadly car crash. Her boyfriend, 22-year-old Michael Gocksch who is now in stable condition, lost control of his Lexus and hit the side rail. Keegan was pronounced dead on the scene at 2 pm on Saturday afternoon.
Yale Daily News is cited saying of Keegan that she was a “Prolific writer, actress and activist” Keegan had graduated manga cum laude had just landed a job as editorial assistant the The New Yorker. She excited in anticipation of moving to Brooklyn with friends in June.
Keegan was a member of Occupy Yale and sparked controversy on campus after penning a feature story in Yale’s WEEKEND Magazine called “Even Artichokes Have Doubts.” The topic of her article was the high percentage of Yale graduates who go on to find careers in the consulting and finance industry. NPR had highlighted the story in the program “All Things Considered.”
Keegan’s mother told the New York Daily News that her daughter was “just one of those amazing, wise souls that was given to us as a gift. She had an unbelievable, beyond-her-years way of looking at the world, and her passion was to try and use her words to explore the human condition”
In her last article written for the Yale Daily News she wrote of her hopes and anxieties for the future. The piece was titled The Opposite of Loneliness: “What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time,” she wrote. “The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”
