Campus mourns teammate, friend

Kyle Ambrogi's name is still on the mailbox outside his old apartment on South 40th Street.

Inside, the TV is still blaring a sports game and Budweiser posters still cover the walls. Enough energy drinks to supply the entire football team lie stacked in the corner.

But the four seniors living here say that the house feels empty without their fifth roommate.

He isn't coming home, and it is enough to make these hulking football players break down and cry.

That fifth roommate was Ambrogi, a Wharton senior and star running back who came to Penn a little over three years ago, straight out of St. Joseph's Preparatory School in Philadelphia.

On Monday night, he committed suicide.

Two days before, Ambrogi led the Quakers to victory in a game against Bucknell. Scoring two touchdowns and helping to secure the game, Ambrogi seemed like he was on top of the world.

"He looked fine," football Head Coach Al Bagnoli said after the team came together under a gray sky for a shortened practice yesterday. "That's the tragedy."

But the 21-year-old, whom friends called "bubbly" and "positive," had been suffering.

"He'd been dealing with his own little personal battles," Wharton senior Rob Mattar said of his former roommate.

"Did we see it coming? I don't think anybody would say they saw it coming."

While friends and coaches say they did not know the extent of Ambrogi's depression, they did know something was wrong.

"We'd been monitoring the situation for quite a while. A lot of different people were monitoring. All indications ... were that he was on an upswing," Bagnoli said.

Another of Ambrogi's former roommates, Wharton senior Scott Pickett, said that Ambrogi had been especially upbeat the past few days and that it looked as if he was "doing really well."

Then, on Monday night, police responded to a call from a home in the Philadelphia suburb of Havertown, according to Lt. Charles Moore of the Haverford Township Police Department. Ambrogi was found dead at around 9 p.m. in his family's home. Delaware County Chief Medical Examiner Frederick Hellman declined to give the cause of death.

On campus, news of the suicide spread to his football teammates.

About 40 football players gathered at Ambrogi's house, standing outside in silence.

"Obviously everyone's in shock," Mattar said. "But everybody came together."

At Ambrogi's old high school on Tuesday, teachers found themselves crying in the hallways.

"He's one of those people who breaks the old, untrue stereotype about athletes not being good students," said Ambrogi's high school Spanish teacher, Frank Raffa, who recalled that Ambrogi once wrote an entire spanish composition about his mother, Donna.

Friends remember Ambrogi as a 210-pound football player who loved The Simpsons, iced tea, cooking and giving hugs.

"I hadn't seen that kid mad once in my entire life," said Mattar, a former football player who first met Ambrogi during his freshman year.

Many of Ambrogi's friends are on the football team and were barred by the University's Athletic Communications Department from commenting, but Mattar said the loss has hit everyone hard.

"We haven't slept in a long time, that's for sure. I don't think anybody really has," he said.

This is the first suicide at Penn since the spring of 2002, when a Wharton senior killed herself in her Sansom Street home.

Penn officials said that the school is well equipped to help students cope with the tragedy and that they are focusing on making students aware of on-campus counseling resources.

"We're asking students to be extra-diligent in looking out for one another," Associate Vice Provost for University Life Terry Conn said, adding that it sometimes "takes students a few days to process [tragedies like] this."

A wake has been set for Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. in Havertown, Bagnoli said. The funeral is planned for Monday.

The Ambrogi family declined to comment yesterday.

For now, Ambrogi's roommates continue to make daily trips to Havertown to visit Donna Ambrogi and Kyle's brother, Greg -- a Wharton sophomore who also played on the football team.

Greg was absent from yesterday's practice, but the other members of the squad were running, throwing and tackling just like usual. The Quakers will face Columbia in New York on Saturday, and the season must go on.

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