Saving the Worst for Last

WRENTHAM — Jeffrey Cardin walked into a pub Thursday night near the modest cottage where he lived alone and told a stranger he was suffering through the worst day of his life.

He didn’t know the half of it.

Cardin, 48, said he had recently buried his sister, recalled Suzanne Bourque, who sat beside him at the bar.

To compound his heartache, the twice-divorced father of three continued, he had just heard that his best friend had been diagnosed with cervical cancer.

"He kept saying that his children were the only thing that made him feel good," Bourque said yesterday.

When Cardin left the Anvil Pub for the short walk home, the day he described as the worst day of his life also became his last. About 200 yards from the pub, Cardin was struck and killed about 9:40 p.m. on Shears Street by an automobile that left the scene.

Yesterday, the family of a 17-year-old girl contacted Wrentham police to say that their daughter, after seeing news reports, recalled that she might have struck something in the vicinity of the accident, according to Detective Sergeant William McGrath.

from the Boston Globe

Ah, she "might have struck something", eh? Or not. Whatever. Even a 17-year-old girl must have felt the impact of sending a 48-year-old divorced father of three shuffling off to the afterlife. Either she has such a flimsy grasp on reality she wasn’t sure if it had really happened, or she panicked. Either way, she’s in a world of trouble, and pain, and multiple lives will never be the same…..