Berkeley Student’s New Beginning Ends Tragically

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.”

For this protective behavior, Bissell suffered fatal chest wounds that he later died of at San Francisco General Hospital. Earlier this week, San Francisco Police Department detained two men in connection to the killing, and the investigation is ongoing.

According to those that knew him, Bissell’s final selfless act was the last one of a too-short life filled with kindness.

“He was gentle and would do anything for anyone,” said Hodgkin of the young man she’d known since 7th grade.

“I never saw Casey get angry or raise his voice to anybody,” said Dorothea Vaneckhardt, his paternal grandmother.

The son of Kevin Bissell, a general contractor in El Dorado Hills, and Wendy D’Arcy, a massage therapist in Placerville, Bissell became the eldest of four after his mother remarried and had more children with her second husband. According to friends, he was an easy-going caretaker of his younger siblings, 21-year-old Nick D’Arcy, 18-year-old Jenny, and 12-year-old Josh.

“He loved his family a lot,” said Hodgkin.

Vaneckhardt remembers lively games of Scrabble with her grandson, who would be quick to Google difficult words, always concerned about the veracity of spelling and definition. He’d also engage his grandmother in thoughtful political discussions. Recently, he would share the latest thing he’d learned from the economics classes he was taking at Folsom Lake College and later Berkeley City College.

“We knew he’d be a success because he was an excellent student,” said Vaneckhardt, who adds that Bissell was a straight A student.

In addition to his family, Bissell had a cultivated a second family of close-knit friends from his time at Cedar Springs Waldorf School in Placerville. A small school, with a senior class of just 17, Bissell remained in touch with most of his classmates well after graduation.

Earlier this year, Bissell, his brother, and two of his former classmates from Cedar Springs, Hodgkin and Quincy Adamo moved to Berkeley together. The group became a tight foursome, almost always together, always ready for an inside joke and knowing reference to the TV show New Girl. Young and in a new city, Hodgkin said their life kind of felt like a sitcom itself.

Bissell was often the one in the group pushing them to activities outdoors. An avid skier, he thrilled at the opportunities to take weekend trips back to the mountains close to where he grew up. Or, on a nice days, he would encourage trips to the beach.

More than anything, Bissell’s life felt full of promise.

“He was always dreaming real big, and he was really going to go after those dreams,” said Hodgkin.

In addition to his studies to go into law, or possibly the State Department, according to his grandmother, Bissell was also a writer. Vaneckhardt spoke fondly of a Tolkien-inspired novel called the Secrets of Winzer he had worked on since he was 16 and self-published on Amazon. His friends say that Bissell often spoke of going back to it, editing it, and even writing a sequel.

According to his mother, Wendy D’Arcy, almost everything appeared to be going right in her son’s life.

“He was very happy, he was so excited to be moving onto the next phase,” she said.

His grandmother says that there’s no immediate plans for his funeral but that some of his ashes will be scattered in a ceremony in Butte Meadows, “a place in the mountains Casey loved.”