Thursday, 4:30 PM
Lincoln, R.I., native among the dead at Virginia Tech
By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff
Daniel Patrick O'Neil, who was killed Monday in the massacre at Virginia Tech and graduated from Lincoln High School in Rhode Island in 2002, was remembered today as a free-spirited folk musician who also was devoted to the environment.
O'Neil, 22, was a graduate student in environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. He graduated last year from Lafayette College in Easton, Penn., where he like wandering the campus playing a brand of music one friend called "subversive folk music."
He was driven and smart, and his senior year at Lafayette, he won a scholarship to study the effects of human development on local watersheds, said the friend, Allison Quensen Blatt, adviser to the college’s Arts Society, of which O’Neil was vice president.
"He used to come in and tell me how badly designed the college quad because it couldn’t handle runoff and how he could fix, it if he had the time and money," Blatt said. "He was very bright."
