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Former UMass Lowell cross-country Jeremiah Karanja died in the middle of a walk while on a visit to Seattle.

06/20/2015
Boston Globe
By Kevin Cullen

There wasn’t a seat to be had at St. Andrew’s Church in Wellesley the other day, and people managed to laugh and cry remembering Connor Darcey, because life works that way, belly laughs one day and tears the next.

Connor Darcey was a terrific young man and it didn’t seem right, and it certainly didn’t seem natural, that a 21-year-old kid was dead, the victim of a car crash in the North End. It takes our breath away when someone dies so young.

But it seems even more unfathomable when that young person, like Connor Darcey, was an athlete, so fit, so teeming with energy.

When an athlete dies young, the shock seems deeper, the slap of the reality of our own mortality sharper.

It feels the same way in Lowell today, because Jeremiah Karanja is dead and no one can believe it.

Jeremiah Karanja and Connor Darcey had very different backgrounds — Jeremiah, the urban immigrant African kid who ran track; Connor, the Penn State lacrosse goaltender from one of Boston’s nicest suburbs. Connor was a star. Jeremiah was not.

But they were very similar in that their teammates loved them because of who they were, not what they did.

Jeremiah was 12 when he left Kenya and moved to Lowell. He carried with him the Kenyan’s burden: Everyone assumed he could run like the wind, because the Kenyans are the best long-distance runners in the world. In fact, Jeremiah was far from a natural.

“We used to say we had the slowest Kenyan,” said Ruben Sanca, Jeremiah’s cross-country teammate at University of Massachusetts Lowell. “We all laughed about it. Jeremiah laughed, too. But you know what? He was the best teammate you could ask for. Everybody loved Jeremiah, because he worked so hard, was so positive. It was impossible to be down around him.”

Phil Maia was his cross-country coach at Lowell High.

“I had him all four years,” Maia said. “Most coaches, most programs, have a Jeremiah Karanja athlete. The kids who make up your teams, 98 percent of them are Jeremiahs. They try their best, they learn, they pull for their teammates. They are the kids that make teams.”

Gary Gardner, Jeremiah’s cross-country coach at UMass Lowell, said the most impressive roadwork Jeremiah put in was walking 6 miles to and from school every day to save on bus fare. He had missed a deadline on some paperwork, lost his residency status and financial aid, and had to hold down a job to pay for college. For two years, Jeremiah ate lunch with Gardner in Gardner’s office.

“He just needed a place to hang out,” Gardner said. “We talked about his background, how he grew up, what coming to America meant to him. He was such a good kid, a local kid, that we gave him a chance. He never scored a point for the team . . . but his determination, his life story was inspiration. We all felt better being around Jeremiah.”

Sanca grew up in Dorchester and was one of the best Boston schoolboy long-distance runners. At UMass Lowell, he was an All-American, a real talent. But he identified with Jeremiah. Like Jeremiah, Sanca was 12 when he moved to the United States from Cape Verde. He went on to run in the Olympics.

Sanca appreciated Jeremiah as a teammate for the intangibles he brought, things that had nothing to do with talent. “He just never quit,” Sanca said. “He had stress fractures on his legs, and he fought through it.”

If Jeremiah worked hard on the track, he worked harder in the classroom. He made the dean’s list routinely. He graduated with honors and went on to a doctoral program in chemistry at the University of Buffalo. He was 26 years old, in his fourth year of that PhD program, when he went to visit his aunt in Seattle last week. He went out for a walk and bent down to tie his shoe. He suddenly had trouble breathing. It appears his aorta ruptured.

Ruben Sanca has spent the last week helping Jeremiah’s family raise money to cover his funeral expenses and return his body to his native Kenya (www.gofundme.com/jeremiahkaranja).

Sanca still can’t get used to the idea that Jeremiah is dead.

“If you knew him, you’d understand,” Sanca said. “I never saw him mad or unhappy. Never.”

Phil Maia said he thought about Connor Darcey even as he was remembering Jeremiah. He was struck by how their teammates talked about them, in ways that had little to do with what they did in their respective sports.

Jeff Tambroni, Darcey’s lacrosse coach at Penn State, got up in the church in Wellesley and said this was not an end, just a different stage, in the relationships between Connor’s family and his teammates.

Phil Maia can relate to that. He still thinks, often, about Julio Faria, the terrific pole vaulter he coached at Lowell High who died in 2009 from a brain aneurysm after a car accident. The picture of health one day, dead the next.

“It’s terrible when anyone dies young. When an athlete dies young,” Maia said, “it does seem more shocking. You remember them as so healthy, so vibrant. They seem invincible.”

On Saturday afternoon, Maia and his wife Trish were getting ready to attend the wedding of one of Phil’s former runners. The kid’s all grown up now. On Sunday, Phil and Trish Maia will attend Jeremiah Karanja’s memorial service at the Kenyan Community Presbyterian Church in Lowell.

“A wedding one day, a funeral the next,” Phil Maia said. “I guess that’s life. It’s what all families deal with, and these kids become part of your family. I can say that, but it doesn’t make losing any of them any easier.”