and Maggie Long, her best friend…
Susie was a sophomore at the high school when we first met her. She, her mother, and her brother lived just down the road from us.
Susie’s mom stopped the car one day and introduced herself shortly after we’d moved up here. Susie was in the front passenger seat, and her brother was in the back. Susie’s personality bloomed that day; she was an effusive, happy, bright young woman who treated us like she’d known us forever.
We spoke about that as we continued our walk, noting that it was unusual for a young person to be so outgoing and personable these days.
We would run into Susie, mostly with her mom, over the months following that first meeting. We learned she was a musician, playing the violin and clarinet. She was also in the drama club and invited us to the high school to see their play. It was based on Grimm Brothers’ motifs and was called “Into the Woods.” Susie played a witch, and she carried the role perfectly. Not an evil witch, but a hag with a twinkle in her eye.
As time went on, we had several short conversations with Susie. Finally, one day I asked her if she was thinking about college. She said she was and wanted to go to a college near Boston. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what she said she wanted to study. And whenever I think about it, I want to say a nuclear physicist. She was that bright. Still, knowing her personality as I did, I suspect it was probably something in the arts or medicine.
Before the tragedy struck, I cannot remember when Susie was anything but a bright, shining, precious young woman with a clear sense of where she wanted to go. If we saw them on our morning walk, she’d grin from ear to ear and wave her hands at us as her mom drove her to school.
Susie’s best friend was Maggie Long. And, the more I read and hear about Maggie Long, she was everybody’s best friend, a unique young woman who gathered everyone to her soul.
On December 1, 2017, Maggie, an Asian-American seventeen-year-old, left school in the afternoon to go home. She had committed to providing water and snacks for a concert later that evening at the high school. Susie’s backpack was in Maggie’s car when she left. The plan was for either Maggie to take Susie home after the concert or for Susie to retrieve her backpack the next day. As the concert hour neared, Maggie’s friends were worried that she had yet to show up with the water and snacks. They tried to call and text her to no avail.
Maggie didn’t show up for the concert.
When she got home that afternoon, speculation is that several persons were inside her family’s home, which was set off into the forest a long way from the highway. She confronted them or was immediately subdued when she entered the house. The unknown persons were in the process of robbing the place, seemingly knowing that the Long family abjured banks and kept a large amount of cash in the house. They stole guns and ammunition, some jade objects, and money.
They also stole Maggie Long’s life by tying her to her bed and setting the bedroom on fire. The forensic autopsy showed she died with soot in her lungs. She had been set afire while still alive.
Almost six years later, the murder has not been solved. No suspects have been apprehended.
The loss of her best friend hit Susie hard. We didn’t see her for a very long time. But, we’d run into her mom occasionally, and she’d tell us Susie was trying hard to cope with the loss. How, I wondered, does a teenager cope with such a loss? How would Susie ever escape from the horror of Maggie’s death?
Over the next few years, we’d see Susie, now with a driver’s license, driving herself to school. Most of the time, she’d just wave and sometimes stop. When she stopped, we’d talk about this or that, but never about Maggie. And it wasn’t that we weren’t curious about how she was handling the tragedy. Still, instead, we felt it probably wasn’t our business. We were, after all, almost strangers to her, just two old guys who’d happened to move in up the hill.
Susie eventually graduated high school, and, about that time, her mother brought her to our place for a few minutes. I’d gifted a picture of a bobcat imprinted on acrylic to her. She thanked me for that while David surprised her with a rousing rendition of Pomp and Circumstance on the piano.
Susie and her mom didn’t stay long at our house. And that was probably the last time I saw her. We nodded at each other when she left and observed that she had changed. She wasn’t the Susie we had known before the tragedy.
When I finally spoke to Susie’s mom about how she was doing by now, her mom said Susie was in some Bible-centered Christian college in Spokane. Then, not too much later, her mom told us Susie was getting married in Spokane.
And, again, we haven’t seen her since that day she stopped by after her graduation.
I can understand if Susie’s dreams for her future were shattered in December 2017. Did moving to Spokane and immersing herself in her religion trump what she dreamed for herself in Boston and beyond? If it did, I understand that too.
God bless her. And I wonder how many others were so affected by Maggie’s death? Maggie Long was a young woman who gathered everyone to her soul. And how many had gathered Maggie to theirs?
Click on the below image, listen to the audio, and explore the site for Maggie’s story.
