Kindness for Victim Wasn’t Too Late

It’s not often in this cynical world that a story of simple, unadorned humanity jumps off the newspaper page. The kind of story where nobody is playing an angle, nobody is trying to get anything and nobody is looking for credit.

I think we had one earlier this week.

It told of a group of 30 people in a Foothill Ranch apartment complex who held a candlelight vigil Sunday night to memorialize a man many of them barely knew, if at all, before he died last week in a mountain lion attack.

And while the vigil was meant to say something about the dead man, it also said something about the people who held it.

Something very good.

What it said was they weren’t going to let Mark Reynolds’ death go unnoticed. He had only lived in the complex for three months, but he’d made an impression. And because, as one of them said, they weren’t sure if he had a family, they were assuming the role and ensuring that he didn’t die forgotten.

Our story said some neighbors knew him as “the bike guy,” a commentary both on the passion of his life and how we don’t get to know people’s names in our fast-paced cosmopolitan world.

But that didn’t mean that Reynolds’ neighbors were going to ignore his death.

What struck me was their decision to give his death -- and, therefore, his life -- more attention. No one would have been surprised if the neighbors had done nothing. As they noted, he’d lived there only briefly; it wasn’t as though he was a long-standing member of their community of apartment dwellers.

And while some talked in generalities about him being a “super-nice guy,” one girl was able to flesh it out by saying that Reynolds had given her young brother some money as a reward for knowing his spelling words.

What they probably didn’t know is that Reynolds was a native of St. Joseph, Mo., and was 35. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1991 and was on the volleyball team. The obituary in his hometown paper said he was a competitive cyclist who rode in the “expert” category throughout Texas, California and Colorado.

The obit said Reynolds “valued family, friendship and had a true passion for life.” He leaves behind parents, a sister in Missouri and numerous other relatives.

Scott Kampmeyer of Newport Beach was Reynolds’ Delta Upsilon fraternity brother and roommate at the University of Missouri but lost contact with him afterward. Kampmeyer didn’t even know Reynolds was living in Orange County, nor did he realize he’d been the cougar’s victim, even after hearing his name in the first news accounts.

I ask Kampmeyer about the neighbors’ tribute. “I’m glad he was able to make his mark on them in such a short time,” he says.

Kampmeyer remembers Reynolds as a laid-back guy who didn’t blow his own horn, despite being a “champion” racer. “He might catch your eye because he’s got the nicest bike in the neighborhood, but once you got to know him, you’d know he was a guy of substance, too,” Kampmeyer says. “Just real genuine, one of the coolest guys you’d ever meet.”

As someone who didn’t know Reynolds, I was touched by the neighbors’ acknowledgment. As someone who did, Kampmeyer appreciates it.

“I was kind of concerned that being an out-of-towner, he wouldn’t get the proper memorial he deserved,” Kampmeyer says, “because I just didn’t know if people knew him that well out here. But when I saw the candlelight vigil from people who might not have known him that well, it was touching for me to see they’d do something like that.”

People came that night to honor Mark Reynolds. And so they did.

In my book, they also honored themselves.

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.