With storms bearing down Monday evening, F. Patrick Marlatt hustled his daughters out the doors at the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute on the University of Maryland, College Park campus, urging them to leave before the torrential rains and ferocious winds hit.
Within minutes, Marlatt would be buried under the rubble of the trailers that housed the institute, and his daughters, both students at College Park, would be dead, victims of a swirling wind that grabbed their car as they drove away.
Even before the College Park fire chief came to Washington Hospital Center to tell him the news, "I knew," Marlatt, his face scarred, said yesterday.
The tornado that raced through Prince George's and Howard counties just before dinnertime Monday, blowing roofs off buildings and felling trees with winds that gusted to more than 200 mph, destroyed two promising lives - one dedicated to safeguarding nature, the other to helping others, family and friends said yesterday.
Colleen and Erin Marlatt were more than sisters, they were best friends, they said. As the older sister, 23-year-old Colleen looked out for her baby sister. As the younger sister, Erin, 20, looked up to Colleen.
"My son, Michael, said, `Thank God they died together.' Because Colleen would have never left Erin," Patricia Marlatt, their mother, her face tear-stained, said yesterday at the family's home in Clarksville. "It's a blessing that the two of them are together."
Yesterday, in the living room of the family's two-story gray house on Triadelphia Mill Road, with a steady stream of sobbing friends walking through, Patricia Marlatt spoke of her daughters and of the series of tragedies the family has endured in the past two years - from her colon cancer to her brother's fatal heart attack last fall to Erin's brain surgery in January.
After a semester off to recover, Erin, a sophomore sociology major, had returned to College Park and had filled her schedule with fun classes, her mother said. She had just left a theater class where she was building props for campus productions when she popped in on her father Monday. Her shoes were specked with paint as she waited for F. Patrick Marlatt, the assistant director of the fire institute, to finish work so they could go home.
Instead, Colleen offered her a ride. Normally, Colleen, a senior environmental science and communications major due to graduate in December, would have left campus earlier - her classes ended before Erin's - but she stayed Monday to do computer work for a communications class.
