The victim was studying to become a child psychologist. The boy on the bridge was 12
There was no way she could have seen him, the boy on the bridge.
Marisa Harris was driving her Ford Escape down a Northern Virginia highway, heading home after a peaceful afternoon hike at Burke Lake in the state’s Fairfax County..
Her boyfriend, Perry Muth, was stretched out in the passenger seat as they cruised east on Interstate 66 toward the bridge, an overpass suspended across the busy highway.
It was October 2017, their first fall since graduating from college. She was in graduate school, and he was working at a nonprofit organization for veterans. They spent Saturdays together.
It was a day off for the boy on the bridge, too, but from Thoreau Middle School in the Virginia county. He was in seventh grade, in a building with nearly 1,000 students, where for the first time he had a short blue locker he had to find between classes and more homework than ever before. He lived in a cramped Fairfax County apartment just a 15-minute walk from the Cedar Lane overpass.
Marisa, 22, was on her way to spend another evening with Perry, watching Season 2 of “Stranger Things” and studying. She was always studying. She had a plan: earn her master’s degree in clinical mental-health counseling and become a child psychologist.
She’d be joining the field at a time when the number of children hospitalized for thinking of or trying to kill themselves has more than doubled in the past decade, even for kids under the age of 14. The boy on the bridge was 12.
What led him there would always be a mystery to Marisa’s family, even after police and prosecutors came to their conclusions. There was no fence on the part of the bridge he’d reached. There was a pedestrian sidewalk, and beside it, a three-foot, two-inch-tall guardrail. But there was nothing to stop the boy from climbing over it.
And nothing to stop him from jumping – just as Marisa’s car reached the spot below.
– – –
An hour later, her parents were accelerating down the highway, too, desperate to reach Virginia’s Inova Fairfax Hospital. Marisa was their only child, their brown-haired, dark-eyed daughter, who laughed at scary movies, who baked cheddar biscuits three times bigger than the ones at Red Lobster, who volunteered with children who bit her and pulled her hair, then came home talking about how much she wanted to help them.
Her parents knew only that there had been an accident, which later, wouldn’t seem like the right word for it at all.
At the hospital, the 12-year-old was being treated for life-threatening injuries in the ER. His family, who did not respond to repeated requests to participate in this story, would soon find out how they were caused.
Behind another door, Perry, who was somehow uninjured, pleaded with a police officer for information about Marisa.
“What’s going on? Is she okay?” he asked. “Just tell me she is breathing. Just tell me something.”
Marisa was brought to the hospital, too, he’d been told. Perry, 22, had frantically called his mother and Marisa’s mother, telling both to come right away.
He couldn’t explain what happened. They had been on the highway, about to emerge from beneath an overpass. It felt to Perry as if he had blinked, closing his eyes for just a fraction of a second, and when he opened them, everything was wrong.
The SUV was like a convertible. Glass from the windshield was everywhere. The roof was partially collapsed in. The top half of the steering wheel had snapped off.
Behind it, where Marisa should have been, was a boy, covered in blood, with a bone sticking out where it shouldn’t have been. Police would later conclude that he had been trying to kill himself. Now he was staring at Perry, terrified.
Marisa, Perry suddenly realized, was beneath the boy. Her seat had been knocked flat back. Her eyes were closed. Perry shook her, trying to wake her. Nothing.
The car, which had been going 55 miles per hour, was still hurtling down I-66.
“I reached over to grab one of her legs and tried to put it on the brake,” he would remember later. “Then I was like, okay this isn’t going to work, so I grabbed the steering wheel. I waited for a long, straight stretch, and I just rammed it into the Jersey wall.”
The rest happened fast. Pushing himself out the passenger side door. Waving for help. Strangers telling him to calm down. A firefighter leading him to an ambulance. He was put into a waiting room and told, “When we can update you, you’ll know.” Then the minutes turned agonizingly slow.
After an hour and a half, Perry grew furious and started to yell. The officer with him sent for another officer, whose job it seemed to be to tell him: “Okay. Yes. So. She has died.”
Sometime after the dizziness and the black spots in front of his eyes, after feeling that he would vomit or pass out, or both, he was moved into a different room, one with tiny tables and tiny chairs. A room for children. His phone buzzed.
A text from Marisa’s parents: “We just pulled up. Coming in now.”
A state trooper was waiting to talk to them. From where Perry sat, he could hear Marisa’s mother start to scream.
– – –
This is what Leigh Miller and Patrick Harris remember being told: The 12-year-old who crashed through your daughter’s windshield is alive. Because he is a minor, that is all we can say.
Marisa was not at the hospital, it turned out. She’d died on the highway. There was nothing to do, the couple learned, but go home to the Olney, Maryland, townhouse where they raised Marisa, and face all that came next:
– Talking to reporters, as the story of such a bizarre crash spread from local reports to sensational tabloids, People magazine and viral news sites in dozens of languages.
– Fielding messages from strangers who wanted to send them money and setting up a fund for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
– Collecting Marisa’s personal items from her totaled car. Jumper cables. Flashlight.
