Maggie was born August 23, 1980, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and lived in this area all her life. She attended Haverhill Elementary School in Portage, and Cooper Elementary School in Plainwell. Maggie attended Plainwell Middle School and graduated from Plainwell High School in 1998. At the time of her death, she was a sophomore at Kalamazoo College.
Accomplished on the French horn, she played in the high school marching and symphonic band, and in the Kalamazoo College Symphonic band. She played basketball in high school and loved to play golf in the summer. She was a proud member of the Kalamazoo College women's golf team. She was hard working and determined at everything she tried.
The summer of 1999 she was proud of her work in construction with her Uncle Pete. Her interests were varied, including stamp and insect collections, classical music, playing the piano, a love of the outdoors and outdoor photography.
She was a loving daughter and her family remembers her as a good friend and confidant to many people, and was proud to see her blossom into a mature person with a loving heart. Maggie was a member of St. Augustine Cathedral and had completed confirmation in the spring of 1999.
Her family includes her parents and their spouses, Rick and Martha, and Bob and Sandi; her brother, Rob; her grandmothers, Luzia, Corinne, and Josephine; numerous aunts and uncles, many cousins and a special friend, Sarah.
Maggie died on October 18, 1999, in Kalamazoo and was buried from the Rupert, Durham, Marshall and Gren Funeral Home in Plainwell.
Her funeral Mass was celebrated at St. Augustine Cathedral in Kalamazoo, Michigan on Friday, October 22, 1999, and she was buried in a family plot at West Cooper Cemetery.
KALAMAZOO COLLEGE STUDENTS KILLED:
APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE
BY The Associated Press, October 18, 1999
KALAMAZOO, Mich. (AP) -- Gun violence has found its way to a close-knit private college here when a man killed his ex-girlfriend and then turned the shotgun on himself.
Neenef Odah, 20, of Seattle, apparently shot Margaret "Maggie," 19, of Plainwell twice before killing himself in his Kalamazoo College dormitory room, said Capt. Jerome Bryant of the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety.
Campus security discovered the students' bodies about 12:15 a.m. Monday in Odah's first-floor room in DeWaters Residence Hall, a three-story brick building that houses about 110 students.
The two had been dating on and off for a year, but were not dating at the time of the shooting, police said. Several students told police Odah had grown jealous following a dance where he apparently saw Maggie with another man, said Lt. Larry Belen of the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety.
Sarah, Maggie's best friend, said Odah wanted to have a serious relationship with Maggie but she was not ready to commit. They broke up this year. Sarah called Maggie "an extraordinary person... She was such a bright girl, she was so smart and she was kind to everybody."
Police received a call of shots fired from a student at DeWaters Hall. They found Maggie and Odah dead.
Maggie, a member of the golf team at K-College, was described as a bright, athletic girl with a promising future. She graduated in 1998 from Plainwell High School where she played on the girl's basketball team. She was a talented French horn player and a member of the National Honor Society.
"She was an outgoing person," said friend Kristie, a student at Howard University in Washington D.C. "She's an individual. She liked to do things her way and she didn't care about what others thought too much."
News of the deaths spread quickly on campus. Stunned students wept or walked arm in arm this morning. Classes and school events were canceled and counselors were dispatched to residence halls to assist in the grieving process. A campuswide e-mail notice was sent to all students, informing them of the deaths.
"From what I'm seeing, it's obvious that everyone's in shock," one faculty member said. "It doesn't make any sense to anybody."
