Benjamin Andrew Petty was born on March 22, 1982 in Baltimore, Maryland.  He learned to talk at a very early age.  On the other hand, walking seemed to be a bit more of a challenge.  Like most babies, he began pulling himself up and holding on to furniture to walk.  One evening at his grandparents’ house, someone had the idea to give him a piece of string to hold, and he began to walk with a person leading him with the string.  Even after the person dropped the string, Ben kept holding on to his end of the string, and, for a few moments, was walking around holding the string!   

 

 

         

Soon Ben was walking fine without the aid of string (or anything else).  His family moved from the Woodlawn area to Catonsville.   There he attended Woodbridge Elementary School.  Ben loved school and was an excellent student.  He also loved sports, and played Little League baseball in the Edmondson Recreation Council.  Cal Ripken, Jr. was his hero.  Later in his Little League career, he was determined to be a pitcher, so he spent hours practicing at home until he could throw a curve ball.  The hard work paid off, and he made the pitching roster, but, most of all, he loved being part of the team.

 

After elementary school, Ben attended Johnnycake Middle School which became Southwest Academy while he was there.  From there he went to Woodlawn High School and participated in its engineering magnet program.  Among other things, the magnet program gave him the opportunity to shadow an engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and work on a satellite project.  Also, Ben and other students at his high school built a solar-powered vehicle and traveled to Topeka, Kansas to race it two years in a row.

 

 

Ben joined the golf team in high school and for three consecutive years received the team's "Most Valuable Player" award.  In his senior year, he worked part-time at the Diamond Ridge-Woodlands Golf Course.  He had interests other than sports in high school,  including editing the yearbook, contributing to the literary magazine and producing the morning announcements. Ben was honored as Woodlawn High's top student-athlete in his senior year. 

 

In high school, Ben also became a big fan of the Dave Matthews Band.

 

After high school, Ben enrolled at the University of Maryland at College Park where he was accepted into the Honors Program after receiving the Maryland Distinguished Scholarship.  He was later accepted in the University’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and became a member of  Phi Eta Sigma and the Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society.  In the Spring semester of 2001, as a freshman, he earned a 4.00 grade point average.  In his sophomore year, he served as an intern for Congressman Steny Hoyer.                    

 

 

 

Ben remained an avid sports fan.  In the Spring of 2002, he and a group of friends traveled to Atlanta to cheer the Maryland Terrapins basketball team on to its first national championship.  He also joined the Delta Chi Fraternity and served on its Executive Board.  

 

 In the Summer of 2002, Ben worked as a counselor at a children’s day camp.  That Fall semester, he attended the University of Massachusetts in Boston as an exchange student.  When he returned to the University of Maryland from Boston in early 2003, he worked briefly as a research assistant for the National Bureau of Economic Research, proofreading State constitutions for a National Science Foundation project. 

In February of 2003, Ben became ill.  He was diagnosed with mononucleosis, a common illness caused by the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV).  He developed a rare and often fatal complication of EBV called virus-associated hemophagocytic syndrome (VAHS), a type of histiocytosis. He was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on February 14, 2003 and died on March 2, 2003.