Still dealing with death

Hill's loved ones struggle after tragedy

January 31, 2008|Bob Hohler, Globe Staff

NEW ORLEANS - Alone with her memories near the mighty waters in the Mississippi delta that swallowed her home, her city, and then her only child, a Patriots mother grieves.

In a Texas town 500 miles away, another woman mourns the same lost soul, the father of her 2-year-old son.

Eight months after Marquise Hill of the Patriots accidentally drowned in the lead gray depths of Lake Pontchartrain in the lap of New Orleans, the women he left behind - Sherry Hill and Inell Benn - have little to say to each other, their relationship strained by the knotty conflicts that often develop when a person of considerable means dies without a will.

But the Patriots are their bond, and the women - Southerners by birth, New Englanders in football spirit - will find each other at Super Bowl XLII Sunday in Glendale, Ariz., as Hill's former teammates try to fulfill a prophesy he shared in the final days of his short life.

Sherry Hill conveyed her son's vision to the team during his wake in New Orleans, the Katrina-crippled metropolis he was helping to rebuild before he died.

"They were the last words my son told me about the team," she said in her modest home in a subdivision on the outskirts of New Orleans. "He told me, 'Mama, Coach [Bill] Belichick and Mr. [Robert] Kraft got the missing piece. They got Randy Moss. We're going to be unstoppable this year.' "

Team owner Kraft, who called Hill's mother Monday to invite her to the Super Bowl, reminded her how deeply the Patriots were touched by her sharing her son's prophesy with them. Hill was 24 when he died.

"That lifted my spirits," Sherry Hill said. "I'm sure I will feel a lot of sadness and happiness because I know my son will be there in spirit."

The Patriots have honored Hill by wearing decals of his No. 91 on their helmets and dedicating their quest for football perfection to him. Kraft, who paid for the Patriots to travel to Hill's funeral, also picked up the bill for the services, burial, and headstone. And players throughout the NFL, led by Jarvis Green of the Patriots, Hill's boyhood friend, donated money and pledged to help care for Hill's son, Ma'shy, who was born seven months after Hill helped the Patriots win their last Super Bowl in 2005.

"They have been supportive and protective," Benn said in her small apartment in Round Rock, Texas, as she prepared to drop off Ma'shy at day care on her way to a college study group. "They know the things we're going through because they're feeling a lot, too."

Ma'shy, whose name is derived from shortened versions of Marquise and Sherry, sleeps with a large oil painting of Hill, wearing his Patriots jersey, on his bedroom wall. The boy is too young to know much about his father.