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THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2019
volume
119,
issue
154
PROJECT
By Lisa Nhan @lmnhan24
hey’re hidden all over campus. You walk past them on tables, windows and stuck on escalator handrails circling over and over. With a label maker, Nicky Cumberland would make stickers of his and his girlfriend Clio’s names and hide them throughout campus for her to find, just small enough to notice and sometimes misspelled as “Nikki” or “Chleo.” “He put them in all the places I went to the most,” said Clio Harralson. “They’d randomly be on a doorway. I’d see my name and think, ‘There’s Nicky.’” Last October, Nicky passed away after injuries sustained in a fatal car crash returning from a Texas Cowboys retreat. He was 20 years old. But the stickers, hung up over a year ago, are still there. They make Clio smile every time she sees one. Those stickers are just one of the many signs that Clio and others point toward as they describe a gift and desire in Nicky to connect with others that “almost doesn’t sound real.” “It was a running joke with me and my close friends that when you were in your most stressed mood in McCombs, you’d walk around a corner and suddenly Nicky would just be there,” Clio said. “It seems so cheesy to me when I talk about it. But I’ve never met anyone else who actually will drop everything they have without caring just to go take care of other people.”
Love Like Nicky
After visiting Nicky in the hospital, Sofia Antillon, a family friend, sat down at her desk unable to do homework.
photos by pedro luna
| the daily texan staff
A B O V E : On the fifth floor of McCombs, Nicky Cumberland and Clio Harralson would
study together. There, Nicky left stickers of their names to mark the spots they sat at. illustration by jeb milling
B E L O W : Close up of the stickers Nicky Cumberland left at their study spot pictured above.
“Never lost a friend”
“Dad, I think I was put on this planet to help people.” NICKY CUMBERLAND
“I just had Nicky on my mind, and I started to draw his name,” Sofia said. “Then I came up with ‘Love like Nicky’ because I just feel like Nicky knew … how to love the people in his life, regardless of anything.” Sofia then drew the phrase and sent it to the Cumberlands. Shawn Cumberland, Nicky’s father, immediately felt that it captured his son. The phase is now on bracelets, t-shirts, in social media posts and almost everywhere people talk about Nicky. Recalling early memories of Nicky
“Nicky did all the little things that made other people feel good, but sometimes in exchange for his own sanity,” said Jake Reistroffer, Nicky’s middle school friend and roommate throughout college. One evening, while on the phone with his son, Shawn could hear the fatigue in his son’s voice. Nicky, a member of many organizations like Kappa Sigma and Texas Cheer, was also a triple major in business honors, finance and radio-television-film. Nicky was constantly spread thin. Shawn told his son, “Nicky, you can’t just keep helping other people all the time. You have to be a little selfish.” Nicky replied, “Dad, I think I was put on this planet to help people.”
in elementary school football games helping pick up anyone he tackled, Shawn said his son “always had deep empathy for people.” “I didn’t teach him that,” Shawn said. “That was innate. That was just part of his DNA.” Nicky didn’t like to reveal the sacrifices he made for others. When Clio’s great-grandfather passed away their sophomore year, he rushed to comfort her. It wasn’t until after Nicky passed that she learned he had gotten a bad grade as a result.
After his death, many people Nicky knew would introduce themselves to his father as Nicky’s best friend. “I thought, “Wow, how many times have I heard this, and why didn’t we hear about these people before?’” said Shawn. “There were just so many. He made people feel like they were cared for.” John Limbaugh, who has known Nicky since pre-K and roomed with him during their first two years at UT, said Nicky was dedicated to maintaining relationships. “Nicky said to me many times, and he really cared about this, that he’s never lost a friend,” Limbaugh said. “He’s never been friends with someone and then not been friends with them.” Limbaugh and Reistroffer are members of “The Heist,” Nicky’s closest friend group from early childhood. Shawn described the boys as second sons, due to the vast amount of time they all spent at the Cumberland house.
NICKY
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CAMPUS
Crews work to reopen ground floor of PCL after flooding By Nicole Stuessy @nicolestuessy
After the first floor of the Perry-Castañeda Library flooded last Friday, construction crews have been working to clean up and reopen the floor by late next week. Travis Willmann, UT Libraries communication officer, said a student
reported water entering the building around 10 p.m. Friday. Flooding on the ground level reached the map room, office spaces and the construction site for the Admissions Welcome Center. “We had people here almost right away,” Willmann said. “They were putting up barriers outside to keep any more water from flowing in, and they began getting
a hold of (the contractor) to start the process of making sure that we were able to clear all the water from the building.” Jill Stewart, associate director of Project Management and Construction Services, said because the storm dropped a large volume of rain in a short time, the new drainage system at the Admissions Welcome Center site was not equipped to handle
that amount of water. “This is not unusual or considered a failure of the system; it’s simply an in-progress state,” Stewart said in an email. “Due to the nature of incomplete work, the site had not been graded in such a way to purposefully direct water away from the Welcome Center site.” To prevent future flooding, construction crews made site adjustments including
creating a trench to redirect the water and removing caps from some of the new drain pipes, Stewart said. “These quick actions at the site, along with the rain slowing, allowed the drainage system to catch up with the volume of water,” Stewart said in an email. “The design and construction team will be evaluating drainage patterns in the area of the new Welcome Center
entrance in more detail.” About two dozen library employees have been relocated from ground floor office spaces as cleanup efforts continue. Only 10 library resources were damaged in total from the flooding, Willman said. “There were 10 maps that were damaged, but they were not damaged irreparably, so they were immediately
PCL
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