Perry Muth sits with Marisa’s parents, Leigh Miller and Patrick Harris, and their dog, Max. I waited for a long, straight stretch, and I just rammed it into the Jersey wall.” “Then I was like, okay this isn’t going to work, so I grabbed the steering wheel. “I reached over to grab one of her legs and tried to put it on the brake,” he would remember later.

The car, which had been going 55 miles per hour, was still hurtling down I-66. Marisa, Perry suddenly realized, was beneath the boy. Police would later conclude that he had been trying to kill himself. The top half of the steering wheel had snapped off.īehind it, where Marisa should have been, was a boy, covered in blood, with a bone sticking out where it shouldn’t have been. Glass from the windshield was everywhere. 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. They had been on the highway, about to emerge from beneath an overpass. Perry, 22, had frantically called his mother and Marisa’s mother, telling both to come right away. Marisa was brought to the hospital, too, he’d been told. Harris, 22, of Olney, Md., was killed on I-66 when a 12-year-old boy crashed through her car in October 2017. Marisa Harris during her first semester at Towson University in 2013. “What’s going on? Is she okay?” he asked. His family, who did not respond to repeated requests to participate in this story, would soon find out how they were caused.īehind another door, Perry, who was somehow uninjured, pleaded with a police officer for information about Marisa. Her parents knew only that there had been an accident, which later, wouldn’t seem like the right word for it at all.Īt the hospital, the 12-year-old was being treated for life-threatening injuries in the ER. 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. Williamson/The Washington Post)Īn hour later, her parents were accelerating down the highway, too, desperate to reach Inova Fairfax Hospital. The view on Interstate 66 at the Cedar Lane overpass, where a boy went over the short railing and crashed into the car Marisa Harris was driving. But there was nothing to stop the boy from climbing over it.Īnd nothing to stop him from jumping - just as Marisa’s car reached the spot below. There was a pedestrian sidewalk, and beside it, a three-foot, two-inch-tall guardrail. There was no fence on the part of the bridge he’d reached.

What led him there would always be a mystery to Marisa’s family, even after police and prosecutors came to their conclusions. 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. She had a plan: earn her master’s degree in clinical mental-health counseling and become a child psychologist. Marisa, 22, was on her way to spend another evening with Perry, watching Season 2 of “Stranger Things” and studying. He lived in a cramped Fairfax County apartment just a 15-minute walk from the Cedar Lane overpass. 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. It was a day off for the boy on the bridge, too, but from Thoreau Middle School. She was in graduate school, and he was working at a nonprofit organization for veterans. It was October 2017, their first fall since graduating from college. Traffic heading east on Interstate 66, as seen from the spot where the boy jumped off the Cedar Lane overpass.

12 year old jumps off overpass