A Concord native and her boyfriend drowned in a flash flood while vacationing in Puerto Rico
Maya Lane Robinson and Mark Keffer were celebrating their four-year anniversary.
A young couple celebrating their anniversary in Puerto Rico were killed when they were caught in a flash flood earlier this month.Maya Lane Robinson, of Concord, Massachusetts, and Mark Keffer, both 22, drowned Oct. 11 in the Espíritu Santo river, the river of the Holy Spirit, at El Yunque National Rainforest.The couple was staying in a rental apartment through Airbnb and booked a tour of the rainforest on Oct. 11 through the vacation rental site, according to MassLive. They left for the tour around 8 a.m.They were caught in the flood later that afternoon, El Nuevo Dia reports. The tour guide survived and reported the couple missing.Robinson’s mother, Duana Hamilton, of Concord, told MassLive she became worried when she didn’t hear from the couple that day.“I don’t usually worry about them,” Hamilton told the publication. “This is not normal for them they’re more cautious.”The couple met at Georgetown University, according to the obituary for Keffer, who was born in Houston but moved at a young age to London. They crossed paths a few weeks into their freshman year, and Keffer was “enthralled” with Robinson from the moment they met, his loved ones wrote.
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“They did almost everything together from that point on,” the family wrote of the couple. “They were on the rowing team together, they sang together in the Capitol Gs, they ate most of their meals together, and they studied together. They had a lot of fun together—they liked to watch horror movies, seek out quirky ice cream flavors and hang out. Mark could often be seen in a Hawaiian shirt, probably given to him by Maya. They were ambitious, always talking about what their futures might look like. They were considering graduate school and possibly founding a startup.”
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The couple was living in New York City at the time of their deaths. Robinson worked in finance at BlackRock, and Keffer worked as an analyst at Ion Group.
Robinson, a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, majored in mathematics and computer science at Georgetown, while Keffer received his bachelor’s in psychology and art, according to the university’s student newspaper, The Hoya. The couple had graduated in the spring.
“Maya was smart, stubborn and full of tenacity,” computer science professor Jami Montgomery told the newspaper. “I was truly grateful to know her and am sorry that others will never get to know Maya’s kindness and rich spirit.”
Art history professor Elizabeth Prelinger told the student publication she was so impressed with Keffer’s artistic ability that one of his paintings hangs in her home.
“He had things that he needed to say about his observations of the natural world and human existence, but the pictures also spoke for themselves as objects of beauty and fascination and imagination,” she told the newspaper. “He was so deeply imaginative, and I think that this also has something to do in his interest in psychology.”
The young couple was always together, she said.
“Where one was, the other was,” the professor told The Hoya. “They were inseparable.”
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