Marina Keegan, Yale Student, Killed In Car Crash Days After Graduation

Marina Keegan, a promising writer who graduated from Yale University just five days ago, was killed in a car crash on Saturday in Massachusetts.

Keegan, 22, passed away Saturday in Cape Cod, when her boyfriend’s Lexus rolled twice across Route 6, according to state police. Her boyfriend and the driver of the car, Michael Gocksch, 22, was taken to Cape Cod hospital and released later that day.

Marina was an outstanding writer, and was set to move to Brooklyn, New York, with friends, in order to start her dream job at The New Yorker next month. Police have stated that both passengers were wearing seatbelts, and that speed did not appear to be a factor in the crash. Instead, it appeared that Gocksch’s Lexus lost control, veering into a guard rail.

Tracy Keegan, Marina’s mother, told The New York Post that:

“I just can’t believe she’s gone. She truly could not have been more excited and happy about getting to embrace the world beyond her college education and it’s nothing less than a crime that she’s not being given that opportunity. She was nothing less than amazing. I honestly feel she was a gift given to all of us.”

Yale Daily News reports that English lecturer John Crowley, who advised Keegan on her writing concentration senior project, wrote in a Sunday email that:

“She was an exceptional person, wildly talented, and with the confidence and character (and personal modesty) to have done fine things…the loss also to the world that lay before her. In what seems to me now the beautiful yet terribly small pile of writing she left, that’s clear.”

Keegan wrote her last piece as a staff writer for the Yale Daily News, titled “The Opposite of Loneliness,” which was published the day after her death. In the article, she wrote:

“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. 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.”

Check out footage of writer, actress, and activist Marina Keegan performing “Nuclear Spring” for WORD at Yale here:

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