Ashley Barr remembers one question Jamie Wood would always ask her – the one question that demonstrated what kind of classmate, student and person he was.

“He would always say to me, ‘What’s the point in learning something if you’re not going to fully engulf yourself in the material?”’ said Barr, a first-year student at Syracuse University’s College of Law.

Barr has studied alongside Wood in the College of Law since August, and the two became close friends.

Wood died Wednesday of ulcerative colitis, which causes inflammation and ulcers in the colon, said Gail Wood, Jamie’s mother. Jamie, 28, was studying at SU to be a patent lawyer. Barr and other students remembered him as a dedicated, hardworking student who valued his education above everything else.

Jamie’s funeral was held in his hometown of Pittsburgh Saturday morning. The College of Law created an online memory book for students and professors to leave memories, comments and condolences to Jamie’s family. In lieu of flowers, the family asked for donations to the College of Law in Jamie’s name, Gail said.

Although Barr only knew Jamie for seven months, she said the rigorous schedule of law school made him feel like a friend she had known for years. They became friends after Jamie called to ask her a question about an assignment, and they ended up talking for more than two hours about schoolwork.

“He went above and beyond,” Barr said. “When it was late in the hours and nobody wanted to do their homework or take the time to read every single detail, he was the one who took that time to make sure he knew those details.”

Jamie completed his undergraduate career at Pennsylvania State University with a degree in industrial engineering and remained there to complete his master’s degree in the same field, Gail said.

Gail said her son had an artistic side he didn’t often share with people. He would bring home beautiful artwork in high school but kept it to himself, she said.

“As he got older, he created in a different way as an engineer, through designing and things,” she said.

But Jamie’s focus at SU was to study, she said. When he first started taking classes in the fall, he was worried law school wasn’t right for him because he didn’t know much about law or understand material in some of his classes, she said. But after talking to a professor, he was assured that his background in engineering would help make him a successful patent lawyer, she said.

Aside from his dedication to his education, Gail said, her son also had a soft side. When he first finished his engineering degree, he went to North Dakota to work for Ingersoll Rand, an international supplier for transportation and agricultural industries, she said.

“He would call us and say, ‘Mom and Dad, there are these Labrador retrievers and these people just leave them outside, and it’s freezing,”’ she said. “We’d tell him to call the police, but Jamie would go over and comfort and feed them. He was kind of a macho guy, in a way, but he had a very tender heart.”

Matthew Nunn, a first-year law student, also said he saw a sympathetic side in Jamie. Nunn, an Ohio State alumnus, said he once invited his entire class over for a Penn State-Ohio football game. Many of the other students in the class said they would come but ended up staying home due to large workloads, he said. But Jamie, a Penn State alumnus, stopped by for the second half of the game even though he had work to do.

“The whole time I got the impression that he came because he knew it meant a lot to me to have someone who went to Penn State there,” Nunn said. “I didn’t get the impression that he was really that concerned about the game, but he just came because he knew it was important to me. I didn’t even know him that well at the time.”

 

Published on April 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm