Killed Teaching Fellow Is Mourned

Isaac J. Meyers, the Harvard teaching fellow who died on Monday, was the kind of person anyone could talk to.

“Whenever I was very blue—whether I just didn’t feel well or something went wrong at work or I just had a break-up—he was always there,” said Zoe Teegarden, a Harvard Hillel community member who said she was a close friend of Meyers. “Present. He was always present—that’s the perfect word to describe Isaac. He didn’t judge. He just accepted everybody.”

Members of the Hillel community held a vigil yesterday in Meyers’ memory, where Teegarden and a handful of Meyers’ friends told stories about his compassionate, offbeat personality. Hillel Rabbi Akiva Herzfeld delivered a religiously-focused eulogy, in which he characterized Meyers as a “beautiful” spirit. He said the death of Meyers—who was studying classics at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—was a “loss to the world.”

“Isaac was a person whose life in this world was filled with acts of tremendous ‘chesed,’ [or] goodness,” Herzfeld said. “It was a quick and sudden passing for someone with great promise for a long life dedicated to learning and scholarship.”

As Meyers was buried Wednesday in New York, new details emerged about the accident that took his life on Monday. According to Cambridge Police Department spokesman Frank T. Pasquarello, Meyers was crossing the street at the corner of Mass. Ave. and River Street at around 6:45 a.m. when he was struck by the rear tire of a Shaw’s tractor trailer, which dragged him 160 feet.

Pasquarello said the driver of the truck was “very distraught” after the incident.

As of Tuesday, no charges had been pressed against Shaw’s. The grocery store chain, which has several Cambridge locations, did not return requests for comment Thursday.

Gerald E. Zuriff, a psychiatrist who will offer grief counseling and support at Hillel, said at the vigil that Meyers’ unexpected death was “not supposed to happen.”

“I’m not sure how to react—I feel angry,” he said. “But I think that by dealing with this, we can rediscover what makes our community.”

Meyers was an integral part of the Harvard Jewish community, his friends said.

In between moments of tears and laughter, Meyers’ friends called him a “righteous person” who had taken to studying the Jewish faith—albeit in a “quirky” way.

Meyers would study Jewish texts sporadically, according to his friends, as he closely examined the etymology of individual words, sentence structure, and grammar.

Teegarden said she has organized a memorial project in the Hillel community, designed to let Hillel members learn religious texts “in the spirit of how Isaac learned.”

“It can offer us all a little bit of comfort,” Teegarden said.