Brother: Victim stabbed trying to stop fight

CONCORD, N.H. – Bates College lacrosse team captain Morgan McDuffee was trying to break up a fight between some Lewiston, Maine, residents and two members of the team when he was stabbed in the stomach, his brother said Monday.

“He really felt like they were his guys, he needed to help them,” said Dylan McDuffee, who was with his brother at the time.

Morgan McDuffee, 22, died early Sunday morning at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, shortly after the stabbing. Brandon Thongsavanh, 19, was arrested early Monday and charged with murder, and Dylan McDuffee said detectives have told him they expect to make more arrests.

Dylan, 20, a sophomore at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., went to Lewiston to visit his brother and watch the lacrosse team play Saturday, he said in a telephone interview from their mother’s home in Peterborough.

Early Sunday morning, the two brothers, Morgan’s girlfriend, Suzanne Andrew, and another woman friend were walking down Main Street to Morgan’s apartment when they saw a fight, Dylan said.

“We walked past it … then turned around and saw the two students on the ground, being kicked in the head,” Dylan said.

The brothers ran back to help the lacrosse players, Dylan said.

“I was yelling and trying to get the kids off the two Bates players. A little ways away, two kids started beating on Morgan,” he said. “We saw him on the ground, and then suddenly everyone was running away. We thought he got knocked down, but he was bleeding from the stomach.”

More Bates students, including Morgan’s roommates, poured onto the street from the surrounding houses and several called 911.

“Suzy lay [down] with him, and I was pretty upset,” Dylan said. “He looked up and he told Suzy he loved her – they were planning on getting married – and he tried to squeeze my hand, and I told him he didn’t have to.”

Then an ambulance arrived and the paramedics began working on him, Dylan said. Andrew rode to the hospital in the ambulance, while Dylan went in a police cruiser. By the time he got there, his brother was in surgery, he said.

“I never saw him alive again,” he said.

Morgan took the fall off from school to spend time in Australia with Andrew, a Bates junior who was studying abroad for the semester, Dylan said. Morgan needed only one more semester to graduate as an economics major, he said.

Earlier that evening, the three of them had talked about spending the summer together on Nantucket, where Dylan works as a caddy.

Lisa Freeman, Morgan’s mother, said Monday that her oldest son was “a prince.”

“Had he lived in another time, he would have been Sir Lancelot,” she said. “He was giving and kind and totally thought of other people before himself.”

The funeral will be held at noon Thursday at All Saints Church in Peterborough, she said. The family plans to establish a charitable fund in Morgan’s memory, she said.