One by one, as guests passed over the open casket at Maurice Ferguson’s funeral, they had the same question.
Ferguson, who was found on the train tracks near the College Park Metro Station in the early morning of Dec. 3, didn’t look like someone who had been hit by a train. Aside from one deadly blow to the back of his head, his body was virtually untouched — no cuts, no bruises, not even a scratch.
“His face was pristine; it looked like he was just sleeping,” said Tony Gillus, a relative.
Since Ferguson died, his family has traveled to College Park from their home in Doylestown, Pa., several times, walking the tracks, searching for answers. They want to know why an upbeat, 21-year-old honors student is dead, and they hope the area near the tracks can provide an answer.
There is little on which everyone agrees and police can confirm. Ferguson was found alive on the tracks Friday morning and died in the hospital that evening. He had spent the previous night with his friends and was highly intoxicated.
But that’s where accounts of the evening begin to diverge.
Ferguson arrived at his friends’ Commons Building 6 apartment slightly inebriated at about 9:30 p.m. Thursday. He probably walked there from his own room in Commons Building 3 after changing into a black T-shirt for his friend Matt Melamed’s 21st birthday. As the night progressed, a few more guests arrived. The TV was on and Brian Calvery, another friend, ran back and forth between the bedroom and common room changing songs. The guests were spread out in their common room, beer cans in hand. They took a communal shot of vodka and decided to head to Lupo’s around 11:15.
Ferguson was trailing behind the group, according to Dave Scheer, another friend, and by the time he’d made it upstairs to the bar, someone realized Ferguson and friend Jamie Hollander were no longer behind them. Scheer phoned Hollander, who said they’d both been turned away by the bouncer. They had tried another bar and were again turned away. Ferguson was so intoxicated that he had presented his student ID instead of his driver’s license.
“That’s how out of it he was,” Scheer said.
Scheer and Hollander insisted Ferguson let them take him home, but he was determined to walk back to his apartment alone. Hollander was particularly concerned, Scheer said. When he saw a cab drive by, Scheer begged Ferguson to take it back home.
“He said, ‘No; who takes a cab in College Park?’” Scheer said.
Finally they conceded and watched Ferguson turn right onto Knox Road as they waited to get back into Lupo’s.
It was about 11:30 p.m., and it was the last time Scheer would see his friend alive.
Between then and 1:10 a.m., Ferguson would end up more than half a mile away, kneeling or standing on the right rail of the train tracks that run adjacent to the College Park Metro Station as a northbound train barreled along at 50 mph.
A conductor told police he saw a shadowy figure on the tracks, facing away from the train, and tried to break in vain.
According to Gillus, a cousin of Ferguson’s father, this is what police told the family from the conductor’s eyewitness account. Police cannot confirm any of the circumstances surrounding his death, except that the official cause of death is a head wound caused by the train.
The impact fractured the left side of the base of Ferguson’s skull, but he’d be alive until later that evening. Roy, a cousin and spokesman for the family who would not give his last name, said doctors saw no other cuts or torn flesh on the body. There were no other fractures aside from the broken skull caused by blunt force trauma. His body was in almost perfect condition, and almost everybody at the open-casket funeral would speculate that it was unlikely he was hit by a freight train.
“Just about everybody was saying there’s no way it was a train, not only just at the hospital,” Roy said. “A lot of people like that said they’ve seen train victims — a lot of them being doctors, undertakers, ministers — it can’t just touch you at the base of the skull and do no other damage.”
Considering Ferguson’s weight and the supposed speed and mass of the train, mechanical engineering professor Balakumar Balachandran said the scenario could be possible if Ferguson was hit at an angle — perhaps as he was struggling to get out of the way of the oncoming train.
“If he’d started moving away from the train, it’s possible,” Balachandran said.
Balachandran has not been a involved in the investigation, but was supplied information about the incident by The Diamondback.
He said Ferguson would have to have been hit at a very low angle and was probably propelled very quickly to the other side of the tracks, where he was found.
“He was traveling probably thousands of meters a second,” Balachandran said.
Another professor, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the topic, said he was not surprised that the body received no additional fractures or cuts. Odder than the condition of the body is “why his head was in the way of the train,” he said.
“I wouldn’t rule out that there’s no other way [that Ferguson was killed],” he said. “It would really depend on the exact circumstances.”
Maurice also had a .282 blood alcohol level, said Prince George’s County Police spokesman Lt. Steve Yuen — well above the legal limit of .08 and a fact family members view suspiciously.
“In that condition, you’re not going to stumble a mile and a half to two miles to this remote location; it’s a complicated area to get to,” Roy said.
“Can you make that path and not get all scarred?” Gillus said. “It’s as if he had a ride down here.”
The family’s qualms about the circumstances surrounding the death, namely the remote location where he was found and the almost perfect condition of the body, led his father, Mark Ferguson, to gather up the family in late December, Gillus said. They agreed the pieces of the puzzle did not add up, and since then Mark Ferguson has embarked on an improbable quest.
Mark Ferguson did not respond to repeated requests to speak with The Diamondback.
Gillus said that Mark Ferguson, along with his wife and daughter, gathered up friends and family to draft a letter that they sent out to various university administrators and distributed to students outside dining halls, imploring them to investigate his son’s mysterious death.
The letter details pieces of Maurice Ferguson’s last evening in College Park, alleging that his friends left him outside Lupo’s alone when he couldn’t get in and then later tried to go to Santa Fe Café.
The letter is filled with as many questions as it is with allegations, and according to Scheer, also just as many mistakes. He points out that the letter mistakes Melamed, whose birthday the friends were celebrating, for another friend, Matt Peterson.
The letter states that only Maurice Ferguson was given vodka, and goes on to ask if the friends “were playing a drinking challenge on him? What happened behind closed doors? Who purchased the liquor and when?”
But Scheer said no one made Ferguson drink anything against his will — almost everyone drank vodka toward the end of the party in the room — and the alcohol was purchased legally by him and his friends for the birthday celebration.
“He’d get that drunk all the time,” he said. “This gives the impression we were hazing him. It’s definitely attacking us.
“Anyone who’s close to him would know it’s totally false,” Scheer said. “It looks like a sloppy job. I don’t know who’s coming up with this; they didn’t do their research.”
Scheer said his friends tried to encourage Ferguson to go back home at least three times during the course of the evening.
“We all tried to take him home like a million times, but he kept saying ‘no.’”
The letter also said Maurice became rowdy while waiting outside Lupo’s, but Scheer said he was calm and relaxed, as usual.
Scheer stands by his version of the night. While he was drinking, he said he was not very intoxicated.
University administrators have seen the letter, but it is beyond their jurisdiction, said Vice President for Student Affairs Linda Clement. University Police cannot infringe on a Prince George’s County police investigation, said University Police spokesman Maj. Paul Dillon.
The medical examiner has not yet determined the circumstances of his death, said Shirl Walker, the examiner’s administrative aide.
For now, Mark Ferguson is trying to cope with his son’s death, and he still comes to the tracks searching for anything that might answer his questions.
“[Mark Ferguson] walked from Lupo’s to Santa Fe, just trying to see what his son would’ve thought, trying to see what his son would’ve seen,” Gillus said. “I hate to think somebody did something to him. Mark is a very strong man. Your child should never die before you.”
The rest of the family can only struggle through the pain and wonder what caused Maurice Ferguson’s death, Gillus said. There are too many inconsistencies, too many unresolved issues.
“If you’ve seen the body and if you go to where he was found you know somebody did something, somebody knows something, and it has nothing to do with the other things they’re saying,” Roy said.
