The Short Life and Sudden Death of Germain Vigeant

Since it was shut down three years ago, the Bunge grain elevator has towered over southeast Minneapolis’s Como neighborhood with an almost gothic foreboding—a destination for taggers, vandals, urban adventurers, and young partyers who would explore the blighted relic of the agricultural industry, sending empty bottles of Rolling Rock crashing from its heights. It was a place eyed with annoyance and apprehension by many who live in the neighborhood’s modest homes and apartments.

Germain Vigeant (pronounced vy-jent) had always looked at the massive towers with curiosity. The twenty-year-old University of Minnesota student, who lived in a rented house three blocks away, loved the wild graffiti, the forbidden allure of broken windows and rusted pipes, and the prospect of telling stories after scaling the metal staircases to the top. As she stood near the towers at 3 a.m. on an unseasonably warm night last January, she looked once more at the white silos and wondered. She was flush from a night of partying with friends. She was standing next to a boy she liked—a boy who liked her. The boy knew the towers. He could get her to the top in no time, he said. And so the two of them walked toward them, slid open an unlatched door, and began to climb.

Fifteen minutes later, Germain lay dead at the bottom of one of the silos. The Hennepin County medical examiner ruled the death accidental, caused by the profound trauma of an unbroken fall more than 100 feet onto concrete. A contributing cause, according to the medical examiner, was acute alcohol intoxication—or, as a headline later put it more bluntly, “STUDENT IN FATAL FALL WAS DRUNK.”

That reeling image no doubt stuck with those who knew Germain only from the news. She was the drunk girl who fell off the grain elevator, an example held up in high school health classes to warn about alcohol use, another tragedy thrown off by the apparently rising tide of college drinking that has led to the well-publicized deaths of five Minnesota college students in as many years.

To those who knew Germain, however, the portrait couldn’t have been more unfair. Germain, who drank no more—and often less—than most students, didn’t climb or fall because of too much beer, they say. She climbed those silos because of who she was, because of her passion for adventure. She fell, they insist, because she had had the bad luck of stepping directly into an open hole in the dark.

But the story of Germain Vigeant’s short life and sudden death doesn’t fit neatly into either view. It’s the story of a charismatic, big-hearted girl from St. Paul’s East Side who had finally figured out her direction in life when a single misstep ended it. It’s the kind of story dreaded by parents who watch with clenched hope as their children leave the protection of home to face a world of risk and choice at college—by parents who hope those kids will survive a few missteps because they’re lucky enough, unlike Germain, to fall inside the odds.

Laurel Vigeant woke up unusually early on Sunday, January 29. It was 6:30 a.m. and still dark outside as she read the newspaper at her kitchen table and looked up to see two police cars and an unmarked Jeep stop in front of her modest East Side home.

She had been scouring the paper for coupons, preparing for the usual Sunday dinner with her three kids and maybe a few of their friends. Laurel never knew how many guests might show up. Her kids had always been “pretty social,” as she puts it. All of them had attended the University of Minnesota, a twenty-minute drive from her house, and all were likely to call that day to ask if a roommate, a boyfriend, or a new acquaintance could join them for dinner. The more the merrier, she always told them.

Friends were especially important to her youngest, Germain, whom the family nicknamed “Hooter” when she was a baby. Since middle school, the lithe and active girl with a big smile had routinely shown up at her mother’s door with friends of all kinds. Some were known and solid; others were new and wild looking, often troubled and in need of friendship. Laurel took them in without question, offering a pizza, a Coke, a willing ear, a place to hang out—if only, at times, to keep her youngest daughter close at hand.