In memoriam Daniel Barclay
March 18, 1985 - April 19, 2007

   
 

Text and videos of the gathering in celebration of Daniel's life (memorial service) Photos and writings Donate to memorial fund
Order DVDs and CD of video of memorial services and website files Newspaper stories Read and post memories of Dan

In the spring of 2007, Dan had received his bachelor's degree in economics and had just accepted a job with a large Boston financial advising firm.  He was only days away from completing his master's thesis in political science, and was looking forward to competing in the National APDA debate tournament that coming weekend.  He told a friend that he planned an "adventure" and bought an inflatable boat at Walmart.  Daniel was last heard from Sunday night April 8, 2007, when he chatted with his grandma on the phone, telling her about the presentation he was going to make the following night  in his Toy Design class. She said he sounded happy and upbeat, and said he would see her at graduation in a few weeks.  He chatted on AIM with his friends, his father and his sister, sent and received a few emails, read some political blogs, visited a few debate websites, and then stopped using his computer just before midnight, so it entered hibernation.

Monday night he didn't show up in his toy class and did not respond to emails or AIM.  His friends assumed he was holed up in a library someplace working hard on his thesis, so they didn't worry too much.  However, by Thursday night when he still hadn't communicated with anyone, his friends reported him missing to MIT Police and to his parents.  The police started an investigation and his mother flew from their home in the San Francisco area to Boston to help with the search.  After 11 days, his body was found in the surf off a Cape Cod beach, along with a battered piece of his boat and a bailing bucket.  The medical examiner reported that he drowned.

At summer Boy Scout camps, Dan learned to handle small boats on a small, placid lake, but he had no experience of the power of a large river, the tides, or the North Atlantic.  Daniel was re-enacting the opening scene of his novel, in which his intrepid American Revolutionary War-era hero takes his one-man boat into Boston's protected Inner Harbor and single-handedly attacks and sinks a British warship.  He was going to hang a  "fake bomb" sign on the USS Constitution, a Revolutionary War-era warship, moored  in Boston's Inner Harbor, to publicize his novel, but his boat got caught by the wind and current and he was swept out to sea.  The little boat couldn't handle the waves and swells of the open ocean, and it capsized.

Dan's thesis for his masters degree was a mathematical model for predicting the outcomes of US elections.  The model predicted a Democratic Party victory in the 2008 presidential election.  He used this model to place on-line bets on elections.  He made thousands betting on the 2004 presidential election, some of which he used in 2006 to purchase futures in Hillary Clinton for President.  Those futures quadrupled by the time of Dan's death.  Dan's family has since sold those futures to pay for grief counseling for Dan's friends.

We have set up a memorial endowment for the MIT debate team, and have installed a memorial bench at Menlo-Atherton High School, where he and his friends used to stand at lunch every day.  Dan is survived by his parents, Sue Kayton and Michael Barclay, his sister Rachel Barclay, and three grandparents -  Paula Kayton, Myron Kayton, and Eleanor Barclay.  

A gathering in celebration of Dan's life  was held at Menlo-Atherton High School on Saturday June 2, 2007 in the San Francisco area, and a memorial service was held at MIT in April 2007.  You can order DVDs with videos of both events, and a CD containing all the files on this website.  The transcribed text, videos and photos  from the June celebration are available online, and so are the streaming video of the 30-minute MIT memorial service. If you don't already have RealPlayer installed on your computer, you will need to install the latest version of RealPlayer to view the MIT streaming video. 

It is a tradition in our family for new babies to be named for the recently departed.  In November 2008, a newborn cousin was named Danielle in his memory. 

You can read and share photos and memories of Dan by posting them here.

There were many sides to Dan - check out some of the links below

Newspaper articles - some are more accurate than others, so take them all with the proverbial grain of salt.