[MysticCat]

Bumping for another update, this time a positive one.

From the 1-23-11 News & Observer of Raleigh:

Playground captures spirit of UNC fraternity leader

CHAPEL HILL -- In a bright metal collection of slides and swings and monkey bars, Courtland Benjamin Smith's legacy is reborn.

Here, he is, and will be, the young man so beloved that his friends and family built, in his memory, a playground for strangers' kids in an affordable housing community near Interstate 40 in Chapel Hill.

"This is really who he was," said Frank Driscoll, Smith's friend and fraternity brother at Delta Kappa Epsilon at UNC-Chapel Hill. "This is the way we want him remembered."

. . .


During a ceremony Saturday morning, no one spoke of his final hours. More than 75 people huddled in the frigid cold and talked of the playful young man who loved children so much he meant to spend his career as a doctor treating those with heart troubles. They cut a ribbon, and fraternity brothers played with the first few dozen children who will spend their childhoods in Phoenix Place, an affordable housing community that Habitat for Humanity will enlarge to 50 homes in the coming years.

Smith's death jarred the community, and his loss consumed the fraternity that Smith led as president the year of his death. Grief can be an unwieldy burden, and for a group of 18- to 22-year-old men, it was nearly paralyzing. To cope, they got busy. They raised money to build a Habitat for Humanity House in Smith's memory.

Last winter and spring, Smith's fraternity brothers rolled out of bed on cold Saturday mornings and reported to a concrete slab that they were supposed to turn into a home. They picked up hammers and nails and banged for hours. They met the children, refugees from Burma, who would grow up there. They told stories about Smith and, in some moments, found a way to smile or to laugh. . . .