By Daniel Hirsch

Casey Bissell was about to start a new chapter of his life. Having just finished finals at Berkeley City College, he was out with three roommates to celebrate the start of something new. Bissell had been accepted to UC Berkeley as transfer student and looked forward to taking the classes he needed to apply to law school.

But as Bissell and his companions—among them two of his oldest friends and his younger brother Nick D’Arcy—emerged from the Casanova Lounge where they were celebrating Saturday night, an encounter was waiting that would tragically end the 25-year-old’s life.

A man on the street, who by many accounts was highly disturbed and erratic, was shouting expletives to the crowd exiting the Casanova Lounge after last call. When the verbal altercation turned physical, Bissell and his friends tried to flee the scene, but the man came after them wielding a large kitchen knife. Bissell reportedly stepped between his brother and the attacker.

“What happened that night was an act of heroism,” said Taylor Hodgkin, one of Bissell’s roommates there that night and D’Arcy’s girlfriend, “I know that he would never let anything happen to his brother.”

READ MORE