It was a familiar moment for Ed and Bonnie O'Neill. Their daughter, Kerryn, a graceful long-distance runner, had once again won her race, and they were rushing toward the track to embrace her.
What stopped them was the sight of Kerry, a girl of uncommon beauty, already joined at the finish line by a handsome young man.
"I had this feeling that we should let her alone," Mrs. O'Neill recalled last week, sitting in her daughter's tiny, childhood bedroom in Kingston, Pa. "You could just feel it."
The stranger turned out to be a fellow Naval Academy midshipman, George Smith. One year ahead of Ms. O'Neill at the academy, he would soon become the first love of her life, and she his consuming passion.
They seemed an impossibly perfect couple, each a striking combination of ability and magnetism, the very best of what the academy stood for. He was a bright, self-assured young man with a laugh that invited company. She, too, was quietly aware of her even more remarkable gifts, though never comfortable being the center of attention.
"They were the all-American couple," said Leslie Nicholas, one of Ms. O'Neill's high school coaches who met Smith when the couple visited Ms. O'Neill's hometown last summer. "When they walked away, I said to my wife, 'What a future they have -- young, Annapolis, talented, good-looking.' They seemed to have everything."
Yet, while the world saw a relationship full of affection and mutual admiration, their needs and desires were diverging. Ms. O'Neill emerged triumphant from her grueling years at the academy eager to test a seemingly boundless future. Smith, too, left the academy with a brilliant career beckoning but with one ambition apparently paramount: to make Ms. O'Neill his wife.
She yearned for independence; he wanted security. She needed to be let go; that was what he could not do.
"I rise with the sun in the morning and run with the sun going down in the evening," Ms. O'Neill told her mother a month ago, explaining her decision to break her engagement. "I want my freedom.'"
The conflict ended 11 days ago in a spasm of violence and lost promise that left not only the young couple dead in Ms. O'Neill's Coronado, Calif., apartment but also took the life of a third academy graduate, Alton Grizzard. The celebrated former Navy quarterback, whose future had looked as bright as theirs, died after apparently responding to Ms. O'Neill's call for support.
