Digesting the death of Jasper Howard

I never knew Jasper Howard, but everything I've learned in the past 12 hours makes me wish I had. Howard has been painted by his coaches, his teammates, those who knew him best as a genuinely nice kid. I don't doubt it for a second. And Howard was just that, a kid. Despite the fact that he had a child on the way and despite the fact that he may have been one of the most responsible students on this campus, Howard was just 20 years old, cut down in the prime of his life.

For me, the real travesty in all this lies in the setting. Howard was at the Student Union on a Saturday night. I've often joked around with friends for being lame for hanging out at the Student Union on a weekend night. Howard wasn't out getting hammered at Celeron or Carriage, he wasn't out doing all the terrible things that so many of us undergraduates do every weekend, he was celebrating a win and doing so at a campus sanctioned event, a place where he felt safe. Storrs is a far cry from Miami, Fla. where Howard calls home. Howard and his family thought by coming to UConn on a football scholarship he could escape the violence and danger that surrounded him as a teenager, grow, mature and make something out of himself with a college education. Sadly, he'll never get the chance.

We've lost not just an athlete, but a fellow member of the student body. Howard was a brother, a son, a teammate, a friend, a classmate, a mentor and a father-to-be. While I'm pretty low on the totem pole when it comes to the media, I felt and still feel intrinsically bonded to Howard as we both were UConn students. Though I never shared a class with Howard, and with my horrible coordination never had a chance at sharing the same football field as him, I feel we were connected.

Writing my memorial piece for tomorrow's Daily Campus was the hardest thing I've had to in my short journalistic career. I can't even imagine what his family and friends and those who actually knew Howard are going through. I pray nothing like this ever happens at UConn in the foreseeable future. One of the reasons that I loved coming to UConn so much was the safety I felt on campus. I often thought about going to city schools because "there was more to do" but I felt so safe, so secure here in Storrs. I figured that everybody here was a college student, we were all responsible adults, nothing bad could happen to us. Especially if we kept ourselves safe and played by the rules. Howard played by the rules and now he's dead.

Just to think that when I got the UConn text message alert at 3:30 a.m. I rolled over and went back to sleep. As I lay sleeping in my room Howard lay dying at St. Francis Hospital, away from his family. Randy Edsall was called in after 4 a.m. to identify the body which was, as he put it, "Losing one of my sons."

It makes you realize how precious life is. Almost eerily, Howard mentioned that you had to play each play like it was your last. Those plays in front of 40,000 at Rentschler Field on Saturday would be his last. Seeing Howard in the interview room following UConn's win over Louisville nobody, Howard included, could have known that he would be lying dead less than 12 hours later.

While these words may sound familiar, trust me, they come from the heart. Live each day to the fullest, take full advantage of the opportunities presented to you and live each day as if it were your last. Whether you are a football fan or not. Whether you go to UConn or not. It doesn't matter. One of our is dead, and we don't know who did it, and more importantly we don't know why. I feel this is the kind of situation where even if we find out the who, we may never know the why. Howard appeared to have no ill will toward anyone, how could anybody want to murder, in cold blood, a kid who seemingly did nothing but enjoy living life to the fullest.

It's a shame it takes something as tragic as this for us to come together as a university but we must grow and become stronger from it. So I implore you, don't hesitate. Make up with those who you've had silly fights with, don't be too embarrassed to compliment that cute girl in the corner on the dress she's wearing, run that extra mile at the gym, read those extra 10 pages of your textbook. Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, don't look back and think: What if? I'm sure Howard never did.