While Maura was crying at her workplace in the Melville dormitory another puzzling event was taking place elsewhere at UMass. Around 12:20 a.m., a UMass junior, Petrit Vasi of Dorchester, was found unconscious in the road at the intersection of Triangle and Mattoon Streets in Amherst, about a mile and a half away from where Maura was working.

Vasi, an economics major, was presumed to be the victim of a hit-and-run but details remain murky. Interviewed several months later Petrit said he had been drinking and could not be certain if he had been struck by a car, or fallen out of a car.

"I can barely remember anything about that night," he told the Daily Collegian, the UMass college newspaper. Petrit did say that based on the location of his injuries he believed he had been hit by another vehicle.

Campus police said they had no information on how the incident occurred and no witnesses. Petrit was hospitalized for over a month and did not return to campus until the following semester. 

While speculation has focused on a possible link between the accident and Maura's demeanor and later departure, such a scenario is unlikely. To have been present at the scene of the accident Maura would have had to leave her work, walk to her car, drive downtown and return without her supervisor noticing.

As for her teary outburst, there is no evidence that Maura knew who Petri was, according to Helena Murray, a member of Maura's extended family. With nearly 20,000 undergraduate students, the odds are long that Maura, enrolled in the nursing school, could have known a student from a different undergraduate school. Nonetheless, it is possible that Maura might have heard about the accident that night since she was working for campus security.