Promising Yale grad killed in car accident

An ambitious Yale graduate who wrote pieces for The New Yorker and The New York Times was killed in a car accident over the Memorial Day weekend that seriously injured her boyfriend, another Yale grad, who's from Centerport.

Marina Keegan, 22, who planned to move to Brooklyn to pursue a career in writing, died in the rollover crash Saturday afternoon in the Cape Cod town of Dennis, according to Massachusetts State Police. She and boyfriend Michael Gocksch, 22, graduated from Yale five days earlier.

According to police reports, Gocksch was driving his 1997 Lexus ES300 when it drifted into a guardrail. The car then careened back onto the road and rolled over at least twice before stopping. Keegan, of Wayland, Mass., was pronounced dead at the scene. Gocksch was taken to Cape Cod Hospital and was listed Monday in stable condition, according to authorities.

A person who answered the phone at Gocksch's family home Monday said the family was too distraught to comment.

Speed was "not a factor in the severity of the crash," according to a police report, and Gocksch and Keegan were wearing their seat belts.

Keegan, a writer for Yale's campus paper, had interned at The New Yorker, where she secured a post-graduation job as an editorial assistant. In November, she wrote a piece for The New York Times about corporate recruiters visiting her campus and was interviewed on National Public Radio about the story.

She served as president of the Yale College Democrats, with Gocksch serving as vice president.

"They worked really well together," Nicole Hobbs, treasurer of the group, said in a phone interview. "He was always there, supporting everything she did. They're just both really great people, who believed in the issues they were fighting for."

In her last piece for the Yale Daily News, Keegan wrote about the possibilities that awaited graduates.

"What we have to remember is that we can still do anything," she wrote. "We can change our minds. We can start over."

"The notion that it's too late to do anything is comical," Keegan wrote. "It's hilarious. We're graduating college. We're so young. We can't, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it's all we have."