Victoria Hart said her older brother Greg was very smart – an economics major at UMass-Amherst who taught himself to play the guitar and “wanted to go far.”
“That’s why he always tried so hard in high school and was always on the honor roll,” she said Tuesday night, hours after Greg Hart’s body was pulled from a shallow river in Providence. “This isn’t right. This isn’t my brother.”
After desperate days of searching for Greg, John Hart appeared to take some consolation from finding his 23-year-old son. “At least I get to bring him home,” he said.
But the family could make little sense of the circumstances of Greg’s death as they grieved at their Bussey Street home Tuesday night.
Greg drove to Providence Saturday, going with friends to the Red Room bar that night. They took a cab there, and Greg was last seen alive when he walked out the door there at about 1:40 a.m., on Sunday, his family said.
In the ensuing days, Greg’s 2003 Mustang remained parked in front of a friend’s house. The windshield wipers were left up, his family said.
“He would have had them down if he was driving,” said his grandmother, Marlene Corkery. John Hart said Greg would have shut the blades off because he took good care of his car.
“That’s his baby. And he wouldn’t do that. Never leave the wiper blades up,” he said. “That don’t rhyme at all.”
There are many stories flying about concerning the events of Saturday night, including some sort of altercation that took place at the bar, at 1 Fox Place, Greg’s family said. Providence police have said little, and did not return a call for this story.
John Hart said Greg went to the Red Room with at least two friends, but he is not even sure that Greg left the bar around 1:40, as a bartender has said. As of Tuesday police had not found the cab company they used, he said.
“He could swim, and he was a good diver,” John Hart said as he met reporters outside, as the last light of the day faded away. Greg recently took an exam to become a Navy aviator, but was about to start a job locally at Meditech.
“They were going to fly him around the country to sell software to hospitals,” John Hart said. “Everything was coming up roses all of a sudden.”
“He was going to start Monday. He was out celebrating with his friends,” said Bob Corkery, who called his grandson a brainiac. “The friends who were with him say he didn’t have much to drink at all.”
John Hart said he “wasn’t getting any reaction from the Providence Police Department.” About 30 people went to Rhode Island Tuesday, passing out fliers and searching for Greg. Friend Ryan Gearty said that afternoon he and Corey McColgan were driving near an IHOP that supposedly fits into the events of Saturday night when they saw Greg’s uncles near the water of the Woonasquatucket River. About five minutes later, Gearty found Greg in the shallow rushing river, near Kinsley Street.
McColgan said the autopsy would say whether he drowned, or was unconscious before he hit the water. His body was recovered a few miles from the bar – and upstream from it, as John Hart pointed out.
Greg grew up in Norwood, graduating from Norwood High School in 2005. His family lived on Washington Street, and only moved to Dedham at the end of January. He graduated last year from UMass, just turned 23 on Feb. 21, and seemed to have a bright future.
“He was very bright. On dean’s list four semesters in a row,” said his girlfriend, Bridget Prisk, who met him freshman year in college when they lived down the hall from each other. She said Greg was really excited about his new job, “because he’s really good with people.”
His sister, who is three years younger, said Greg was passionate about reading, music and dogs, and that he paid $700 for his puppy MacBeth, rescuing from a now-closed Dedham pet store.
“MacBeth was a clearance item. Greg bought him. Greg saved him,” said Victoria Hart, who cried often as she talked about her brother.
Just last week, she said, MacBeth ate out of her hand for the first time after Greg dropped a little bit of scrambled egg on the dog’s ear. “He took it out of my hand, and we were all shocked.”
Greg also leaves his mother, Marianne, and an older brother, JP.
Victoria Hart recalled that when she was in second grade, Greg accidentally hit her on his backswing as she was picking up a Wiffle ball. She needed 14 stitches and still has a scar over her left eye. “I came home, and Greg was lying on the couch,” she said. “He was sweaty, shaking and crying. I could tell he really thought he hurt me bad.”
She and Prisk sorted through photos from Greg’s life in the living room Tuesday night. Among the memories, they found a thank-you card from Greg’s first-grade teacher, Miss Drake. “Greg, Thank you so much for the chocolate covered cherries,” she wrote. “They tasted very good!”
The next room over, in the kitchen, John Hart focused on the one bit of certainty he got Tuesday, however awful it may be.
“He’s going to be coming home, that’s the main thing,” he said. “I could be sitting here with Marianne for years with nothing.”
Dedham Transcript staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com.
