The morning Rhiannon McCuish died in a South Campus fire, her best friend told police the best way to identify her was by a claddagh necklace her father had given her that she wore almost everywhere.
McCuish, 21, a College of Arts and Sciences junior whom friends described as selfless and lovable, died Saturday morning when a fire consumed a 21 Aberdeen St. apartment where she was staying.
“She is an example for everyone to be a daughter and a sister and a friend,” said close friend Rachel Cannon, a Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences junior. “She had definitely gone through a lot of hard things in life, but she persevered, and she made us all appreciate what we have and appreciate ourselves.”
College of Engineering junior Cesar Lastra, who attended elementary and high school with McCuish in Mashpee, said the high school track runner and soccer player was one of the most popular girls in school.
“When [Mashpee community members] heard, we could not accept the fact that it was her,” he said. “For someone like her to have gone in that manner, it was just unbelievable.”
McCuish’s friends attended a Marsh Chapel gathering service yesterday afternoon to remember and grieve her death.
“I’m wearing the Red Sox hat for her. I’m actually a Yankees fan,” said McCuish’s Ashford Street roommate, Marissa Scatena, a CAS junior. “She could beat anybody in Red Sox trivia.”
McCuish, a psychology major at Boston University, played intramural soccer and worked at a School of Management office. She was a mentor for the Big Brothers Big Sisters Program, Cannon said.
“You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful, better person,” said McCuish’s best friend, Elena Quattrone, a SAR junior. “She was the glue of all of our friends. We told her all the time, ‘You don’t know how great you are.’ . . . She would just laugh it off.”
McCuish, whom her friends called Rhi, was the second of three sisters. Cannon said McCuish was extremely close to her own family, especially her older sister, Michaela McCuish, a School of Management senior.
“She put her friends and her family before herself at all times,” Cannon said.
Lastra said McCuish made everyone she met for the first time feel welcomed.
“She had one of those smiles that would brighten your day,” Lastra said. “She had the ability to turn a bad situation and make it better for the rest.
“Her kindness . . . she just had this characteristic, that even if you did not know her, you were in a sense welcomed by her, and you would be treated with the same respect,” he continued.
One of McCuish’s friends said she knew they would eventually become good friends from her first meeting with her.
“The first time I met Rhiannon, I knew she would be my best friend,” said SAR junior Elisse Sliwinski in an email. “She walked into my room in The Towers in the first week of freshman year and started singing to the music I was playing — Ashlee Simpson. From the first day I met her until the last time I saw her, we continued to grow close.
“I feel like I can’t tell you exactly what it was like to know her,” she continued. “If you met her, you automatically loved her. There is not one person that could say something bad about her . . . . I loved her with all my heart and always will.”
McCuish’s family was unavailable for comment yesterday.
Staff reporters Christina Crapanzano, Joseph Laflamme and Barbara Rodriguez contributed reporting for this article.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
