Tim was a “legacy” student—his father graduated from Notre Dame in 1941. Notre Dame then and now reserves a certain number of spots in its incoming first-year class for the children of alumni. The practice, in theory, ensures that the school’s culture carries on across the decades and through times of societal change.
But Tim was not a typical Notre Dame undergraduate. Though a faithful Catholic and an exceptional student, he was no great respecter of authority or tradition for tradition’s sake. According to Tim’s younger brother, Noel, before arriving at Notre Dame Tim somehow found time outside of his high school responsibilities to publish an underground newspaper that criticized U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which got him into “some trouble.”
On top of all this, and rather uncommon for Notre Dame legacies, Tim did not like sports, including football, which was ironic considering that in the fall of 1966—when he first stepped foot on campus, a year into the ground war in Vietnam—all anyone could talk about was Notre Dame’s football team. They went undefeated, rose to number one in the polls, and were crowned National Champions.
But on that sunny October day, half-way through his senior year, nearly four years into the Vietnam War, Tim was at the center of the protests he had read about, and he was about to take the first step across a threshold into an entirely other kind of trouble, a step that would eventually lead to his death a year and a half later.
On March 18, 1971, Tim was found dead from a single gunshot wound to the head at the corner of Cypress and St. Gertrude Place in Santa Ana, California. Beside his body was a .22 rifle he purchased earlier that day. The receipt was still in his pocket.
The autopsy found no drugs or alcohol in his system, and there were no other signs of trauma on his body, though they did find, written on his arm, two phone numbers: one was his parents’ number, though it was off slightly by two digits, and the other was that of close friends.
A brief police investigation concluded that the cause of death was suicide. He was 22 years old.
Telling the story of Tim MacCarry’s short life is fraught for many reasons, most of which are due to the fact that those who knew him refuse to believe he killed himself, but also because his life raises crucial questions about the complicity of colleges and universities in prosecution of wars and the death of innocents around the world. And that story is one that continues today.