When Stephen Pitcairn cried for help that night, Reggie Higgins answered.
Higgins, who had just returned home to Charles Village from a trip, ran into the street and, seeing Pitcairn on the ground and bleeding from his chest, started screaming for help himself. He called for his neighbors by name — "Jacques!" "Regina!" — and ran back inside briefly to call 911.
In the end, though, only Higgins would be there for Pitcairn, two strangers on St. Paul Street as cars drove by and nearby residents slept behind the aural wall of their air conditioners.
Higgins got down on his knees to support Pitcairn's head and hold his hand. He shushed the young man, who was struggling to both breathe and speak.
"Hang in there, the ambulance is coming soon, you're going to make it," Higgins told him, desperate to believe his own words. And then he made one more appeal for help.
"God, please!" Higgins begged. "Please take care of this man."
Having held his own mother's hand years ago as she died, Higgins could feel Pitcairn slipping away. "Help," the young man said weakly. "Mom."
It would not be until the next day that Higgins would learn Pitcairn had been talking on his cell phone to his mother as he walked home from Penn Station around 11 last Sunday night and was attacked, robbed and stabbed in the chest. Higgins didn't know that the man he held during his last minutes of life was a promising young research assistant at Hopkins who, at 23, would leave behind a wealth of friends and potential.
"I just kept thinking, you don't want to die alone," Higgins said. "You would want your loved ones around."
Quick friends
Pitcairn's family members were miles away — his parents in Jupiter, Fla., where he grew up; a sister he had just visited in New York, where they had been joined by his other sister. He had moved to Baltimore last June after graduating from Kalamazoo College in Michigan to take a job as a technician at a cellular research lab. While he had friends in the Washington area, he knew almost no one here.
But that soon changed. Lab manager Medha Darshan's first impression — "Wow, he's really young" — was quickly followed by a second one: "He sure is talkative."
They hit it off and, from adjacent benches in the lab, quickly became friends. She was a couple of months pregnant, and charged with training him to take over her duties when she went on maternity leave. Soon, she and her husband were having him over to their Arbutus house for dinner, or giving him a spare table for his computer in the apartment he rented in the 3000 block of St. Paul St.
"He would talk to people in the elevator, and then they would be friends," she said of her engaging new colleague. "He was always organizing something: poker nights, or to go out and get lunch, or to go to the market by Hopkins. He had this very open personality."
Pitcairn proved to be a quick study in the busy and often stressful lab, and "plunged" into his new job and city, said Daniele Gilkes, a postdoctoral researcher who worked with him. He had a gift for relationships that transcended all lines, she said, with friends who were "Indian, African-American, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani, Syrian … single, married, divorced with, without kids.
"Somehow we would be in a room together," she said, "celebrating birthdays, doing potlucks."
In a lab where researchers conducted experiments to better understand and treat diseases like breast cancer, co-workers said he knew when to lighten the intensity. He liked to play music, cracking up his colleagues with his unlikely taste — Japanese pop from the time he had spent working in a research lab there, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles.
He was also a sensitive colleague, Darshan said, remembering how she returned to the lab from a doctor's appointment one day, having learned she had a breech pregnancy and would have to have a Caesarean. Pitcairn could tell something was wrong and, while she hadn't told anyone yet, she found herself spilling the details to him.
"He said, 'Oh, that's really not a big deal.' Yes, with all the wisdom of his 23 years," she said with a laugh. And yet somehow it was reassuring anyway.
After she gave birth to her daughter in December, Pitcairn rushed to the hospital, baffling her mother and mother-in-law who told her as she was being wheeled out of the operating room that some tall, skinny guy was waiting to give her flowers.
"He was definitely wise beyond his years," she said. "I called him an old soul."
'Most complete person'
Former Hopkins President William C. Richardson has met numerous students in his decades in academia, but Stephen Pitcairn holds a unique place.
"Of the thousands of students, he stands out in my mind as the most complete person," said Richardson, who left Hopkins in 1995 to lead the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Michigan but ultimately returned to campus life as a professor at Kalamazoo. "He was just an extraordinary young man."
