By Paul A. Anthony, Editor in Chief

For Rob Sommerwerck’s best friend, the memories are a free-flowing stream.

The Mountain Dew and strawberry Pop Tart he’d eat in 9 a.m. Astronomy.

The green soda can tab necklace, each tab representing one all-nighter.

The hat, worn backwards, with pins stuck to the strap.

“I have so many memories,” said Katie Rowan. “I could gush for hours.”

Sommerwerck was 20 years old when the car he was driving was hit broadside by a truck April 15, killing him instantly in the maze of orange construction markers on East Highway 80 near Loop 322.

His friends remember him as tirelessly unselfish, breaking curfew to give lifts to those who needed them and always making friends-shaking hands, saying hi.

“He’d always light up around people,” said Danny Thompson, Sommerwerck’s roommate. “He was always smiling.”

Thompson, freshman business marketing major from Coppell, said Sommerwerck’s absence leaves a hole.

“The hardest part was going in my room,” he said. “The things that kind of annoyed me about him-I missed them.”

Thompson and Rowan, sophomore technical theatre and electronic media major from Arlington, are quick to recall Sommerwerck as “quirky” and friendly, unselfish almost to a fault.

“He was a great guy everyone should’ve gotten to know,” Rowen said. “I miss that because he won’t be doing it anymore.”

Thompson agreed, adding that “he had the biggest heart of anyone I’d ever known.”

Sommerwerck, freshman from Cypress, was an undeclared major taking classes in the Department of Theatre, and his death stunned the many friends he had there.

“I kind of thought it was a sick joke at first,” said Allison Organ, freshman theatre major from Cypress. She knew Sommerwerck in high school.

“He was just a really fun guy,” Organ said. “He had a tendency not to show up on time, but it was hard to make him stop working when it was time to leave.”

Another friend, Megan May, sophomore English major from Anaheim, Calif., said Sommerwerck’s death was made all the more tragic by the kind of person he was.

“He never did something that wasn’t out of love or for other people,” May said. “He was one of the truly good people.”

Sommerwerck was remembered Saturday in Spring and Tuesday in a memorial Chapel. A week after his death, friends say it’s gotten a little easier-but not much.

“I think about him all the time,” Rowan said. “It’s nice to know everybody’s behind you and everybody loved him.”