Nature & Nurture | Giving News

Kerrie, Pavlik, and Steve

Mourning Three Classmates, the Class of 1992 Created a Fitting Memorial The Kuzmier-Lee-Nikitine Endowment Fund

by Lisa M. Dellwo

Karen Kirchof remembers vividly the phone call she received from the State Department one autumn day in 1992. “They wanted Kerrie Kuzmier’s emergency contact information,” recalls the assistant dean for career services. “I was shaken to the core; I knew something bad had taken place.”

  Something had: Kerrie and her friend, Pavlik Nikitine, both recent graduates of the Duke MEM program, had died when their small plane crashed in a Costa Rican rain forest.

   Kerrie and Pavlik’s fellow students were still reeling from this shock when a third classmate, Steven Lee, died of leukemia in December 1992.

   “It was a tough year,” says Kevin Molloy, another member of the class of 11992 who is a scientist with the consulting firm Camp Dresser McKee.

  Nikki Grober-Dunsmore, now a marine ecologist with the Virgin Islands Biosphere Reserve, recalls, “We all came together for a ceremony and stayed at Kevin’s house in Mystic, Conn. Our nerves were raw, our dreams seemed confused.”

  They mourned the loss of their friends, but they also mourned the loss of their friends’ dreams and ambitions. Kerrie was working after graduation to integrate ecotourism with environmental preservation in Costa Rica. Pavlik was helping Wildlife Conservation International manage a wildlife preserve in Bolivia. Steve had been a Peace Corps forestry extensionist in Paraguay and hoped to continue working in international development. They were idealistic and they wanted to change the world. They had come to the Nicholas School to gain the tools and professional knowledge they needed to realize their ambitions. And then their lives were cut short.

   “They had done all this work,” Molloy says. “And it was just lost.” First at the weekend in Connecticut and then at the subsequent Field Day, the class of 1992 searched for a way to memorialize Kerrie, Pavlik and Steve. They decided to enable other students to continue the work their classmates had begun.

  And so the Kuzmier-Lee-Nikitine (KLN) Endowment Fund was born. Working with the school’s development office, the recent graduates raised money for an endowment that would allow Duke MEM and doctoral students to pursue internships working in conservation and sustainable development in Latin America or developing countries. Most of the early donors were the students themselves and the families of their deceased classmates.

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