'He Was Determined To Do Things That Were Great': Family Remembers MIT Graduate

TOMS RIVER, NJ — From the time he was little, Nicholas Paggi had a love of learning and never stopped pushing himself and striving for more.

"He read 'War and Peace' when he was in the fifth grade," his mother, Helga Paggi, said.

"When we would go sailing, while everyone else was putting on sunscreen and jumping in the water, Nick was packing a book in a plastic bag in his life jacket," his youngest brother, Alex, said.

His dad, John, remembers Nick surprising him with math skills that few 4-year-olds possess.

"I had to go to work and he was with me," said John, who works at Bell Labs in Holmdel. They had often quizzed Nick and his middle brother, Joe, on simple math problems. On this day, Nick (like most little kids) asked his dad how much farther they had to go.

"I told him we had to go to 114 (the Holmdel exit on the Garden State Parkway) and we were at 88, and asked him how far that was," John said. Nick thought for a few minutes and said 36. John said he told Nick he was close, but not quite there. "I was surprised," he said, "because had he said 25 or 27 I would have thought maybe he was counting." But moments later, Nick told him the correct answer: 26.

"I forgot to jack down the 11," John said Nick said. "I worked with Nobel Prize winners; this is when I realized how smart he was."

Nick Paggi, who was the valedictorian of the Monsignor Donovan Class of 2011, never took those smarts for granted, his family said Saturday. He doggedly pursued his future from the time he was young, studying when other kids were relaxing, focused on his hopes, dreams and goals.

That future, however, was cut short this week when Nick Paggi, 24, died after falling from the roof of a building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Paggi, a 2015 dual-major graduate of MIT, died early Wednesday. The Middlesex County district attorney's office said the circumstances were not considered suspicious. "It was one fatal mistake," his mother said Saturday.

Attending MIT was Nick's dream, Alex said. He had been accepted to some of the most impressive colleges in the country — Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins. He was offered a full ride plus some to attend Rutgers University, Helga Paggi said. But when the acceptance letter arrived from MIT — "It comes in this tube," Alex said — "His face just lit up with excitement. That was his dream school."

Going to MIT was everything Nick had hoped for, his family said.

"He thrived when he got to Boston," Alex Paggi said. "It was his home. He loved it there."

Not only was he able to pursue his love of physics and his passion for computers — Nick Paggi graduated with dual bachelor's degrees in physics and computer science — he was able to stay close to the other activity he loved deeply: sailing.

Growing up in the Toms River area, Nick and his brothers sailed on the Toms River and on Barnegat Bay, sailing small Sunfish sailboats as youngsters and moving on to larger sailboats as they grew older.

"Sailing was a release for him," Helga said. He liked the feeling of flying across the water, going as fast as he could in the sailboat. It was a release from the laser focus he usually had on his academics because "you have to concentrate on what you're doing when you're sailing," his family said.

"He loved being on the water," Alex said, and though Nick competed on the Donovan sailing team in high school and on the MIT sailing team, he stepped away after his second semester to focus on his studies. That didn't limit his access, however, because MIT students had free access to sailboats they could take on the Charles River. "He loved it," she said.

Alex said that when they were younger, there were times where their friends would be splashing around in the water, swimming and having fun, "and Nick would be sitting there on his boat, reading a book."

"His nickname was the Librarian," Helga said. "It was even on the back of his lifejacket."

And in some ways he epitomized that nickname.

"I remember when he was studying for the SATs he at one point locked himself in his room and learned 1,600 Latin words," Alex said, adding that his brother got a perfect score on the SATs.

In high school, he took every possible physics and physics-related class available, said Helga, who teaches at Donovan. And the summer before Nick went off to MIT, "he taught himself vector algebra" to give himself a leg up on his coursework, she said. He was technically a sophomore when he started his college career as a result, she said.

"While other kids were set on the present, he was always thinking years ahead of everyone else," Alex said. "And he never worried about what anyone else thought."

In poring through Nick's belongings, they came across a letter that Nick had written to his future self. It spoke of graduate school and having "an amazing job" awaiting him. That amazing job had happened sooner, Helga said. Nick had postponed graduate school temporarily to work and was working as a software engineer at Ab Initio Software, a job he loved, they said. His senior undergraduate research project was developing software that would allow a health care professional to take a person's pulse through facial recognition by holding up a smartphone or a tablet up to a person's face, his mother said, and he was continuing to work as a consultant on it after graduation.

She said the family had been told that work had recently been cited at a conference in San Francisco as an example of some of the up-and-coming technologies.

As much as Nick loved learning — his family found notebooks full of notes on various books he had read when they were going through his belongings in Cambridge — he was not one to spend every waking hour at the computer or with his nose in a book. Nick loved biking and was an avid runner, Helga said, and he enjoyed playing tennis, too.

"When he came home, he loved to go to Double Trouble," the state park in nearby Bayville, which is home to an old cranberry bog and several historic buildings. The park has walking and hiking paths and ponds popular with fishermen.

He was a tinkerer, too, once building a working model lighthouse for John for Father's Day.

"He wired it so it lit up," Helga said. "I had no idea he was doing it until he gave it to his dad." Nick was in fourth grade at the time, she said; that tinkering mind is what led to the patience for things such as writing the complex code necessary for the pulse-recording app that Rich Fletcher, director of the group, called a “difficult multi-threaded Android code that no one else could do.”

"He was witty. He was smart and so well-spoken," Helga said. And he had a dry sense of humor that never failed to make family and friends laugh, they said.

"He wanted to do well and he was determined to do things that were great," said Alex, who is working on efforts to get signs hung at the MIT sailing center and also at Island Heights Yacht Club, where Nick worked as a dock steward as a teen and where the boys spent much of their time sailing.

"He'll never be forgotten," his youngest brother said.

His funeral services have been set for Monday and Tuesday, Helga Paggi said. Visitation will be held at Anderson and Campbell Funeral Home, 703 Main St., Toms River, on Monday, May 1, from 3 to 5 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. A funeral Mass will be held at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Toms River on Tuesday beginning at 10 a.m.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to the Nicholas Paggi Memorial Scholarship Fund c/o Alexander Paggi, 30 Brooks Road, Toms River, NJ 08753.

Nick Paggi and his mother, Helga; Nick sailing. Photos courtesy of Helga Paggi