Donovan Graduate Dies After Roof Fall At MIT

CAMBRIDGE, MA — A 2011 Monsignor Donovan graduate fell to his death early Wednesday trying to climb a roof on a building at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, authorities said Friday.

Nicholas Paggi, 24, died about 3 a.m. Wednesday, said Jeremy Warnick, a spokesman for the Cambridge Police Department. Warnick referred further questions to the Middlesex County District Attorney's office.

Elizabeth Vlock, spokeswoman for the district attorney's office, said Paggi's body was found on Memorial Drive outside of the Great Dome on the MIT campus in Cambridge. His death is not considered suspicious, Vlock said, adding that no additional information will be released.

Paggi, a 2015 graduate of MIT, was the valedictorian of the 2011 graduating class at Monsignor Donovan. He graduated from MIT as a double major, receiving bachelor's degrees in computer science and physics, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was working as a software engineer at Ab Initio Software, according to his profile.

A report by CBS Boston quoted Helga Paggi, Nicholas Paggi's mother, as saying he slipped going up one side after having come down another side of the roof of the dome, which is famous in the Boston area.

A report by The Tech, an online publication, said Paggi was an accomplished computer programmer and as a student worked at MIT’s D-Lab developing new technologies to help impoverished nations. The director of the group, Rich Fletcher, said Paggi was a brilliant programmer who had worked on the group’s mobile health apps and wrote “difficult multi-threaded Android code that no one else could do.”

“He was a thoughtful and patient mentor to the other students in the group,” Fletcher said. “Nick was well-read, had a great sense of humor, and I always enjoyed having conversations with him discussing the future of technology and artificial intelligence. The world has lost a kind soul and great thinker. We will miss him very much.”

Paggi's LinkedIn profile includes a recommendation from Sean True, director of machine learning at Smartvid.io, where Paggi worked in September 2014. True wrote: "Nicholas worked with my group over the summer, on a set of not well defined problems, that he solved with grace, style, and good humor. We're going to ship all the code he produced, and are delighted to have it."

Paggi sailed in the Sunfish class in the Barnegat Bay Yacht Racing Association and won the Pine Beach Yacht Club's New Jersey State Junior Sunfish Championship twice, winning the 13-and-under title in 2006 and the 14-and-over title in 2007. He also was a member of the MIT sailing team, according to The Tech report.

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