By Harry Minium
When he found his wife lifeless on their bathroom floor, Tony Lucas put his angst and fear aside, called 911 and then began performing CPR.
He was in shock – his mind would not allow him to accept the fact that she was likely already gone – so he pressed on her chest and breathed air into her lungs in a desperate effort to bring her back to life.
"One of the toughest things I've ever experienced," he said, his voice trailing off.
When the EMT crew arrived minutes later, they also began efforts to revive her. As he backed away to give them room, he remembers thinking, "Ok, the professionals are here. We'll get her to the hospital and do whatever we have to do, and things will be OK."
But after ten minutes, an EMT member approached Lucas and said Sarita Wright Lucas had been pronounced dead. She was just 33 years old when she passed on Sept. 21, 2014.
He was angry when he was told, "there's nothing else we can do."
"In my state of mind, I was like, 'you guys didn't even try.' I was so hurt.
"It was the grief speaking. It was the frustration. A bunch of emotions run through you.
"I didn't want to accept it."
Eventually, he accepted her death, as well as the loss of his unborn daughter. Sarita was six months pregnant when she passed. Claire Lucas, the baby she was carrying, did not survive.
Sarita Wright Lucas
"My attachment to my daughter wasn't quite the same as it was to Sarita, but it was difficult," he said. "I never held her, but I felt her kick."
Sarita, he added, "was looking forward to being a Mom. And she would have been a great Mom."
Tony and Sarita met as freshmen in college and they were instantly smitten. Their love was so strong that they remained a couple and, got married, despite dating from long distance for nearly six years.
She was a rising star in the Delaware Attorney General's office, and he was as an assistant coach on the University of Delaware football team. They envisioned setting down roots in Delaware.
Lucas heard stories about how others in similar circumstances let grief destroy their lives. But that wasn't him. He fought his pain and depression, got into counseling, and faced the future with as much optimism as he could.
He told himself that someday I'm going to move forward and be happy again.
And he was so right.
Now the running backs coach at Old Dominion University, Lucas remarried two years ago to Natasha Harrison, who he met in college and who came to his aid when he was grieving.
Not only is he again a husband, he's also a father.
On May 15, Natasha gave birth to a 7-pound 2-ounce girl at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. Her name is Sage Lucas and her dad can't stop smiling every time he holds hers.
"Being a father is so awesome," he said.
His journey back to becoming a husband and finally a father six years after Sarita's death is a remarkable story of courage, perseverance, Christian faith and the power of finding love again.
Sarita and Tony Lucas met during orientation at Columbia University, an Ivy League school in New York City, and quickly became a couple. He attended Columbia and she attended Barnard College, an affiliate school.
Four years later, they were still a couple and remained so as they pursued their careers.
They both found jobs in New York. A few years after graduation, she left New York to go to law school in her native Boston while he continued to work at a law firm.
"I stayed behind and tried to figure out my life," he said.
Lucas had also planned to go to law school, but found he wasn't as passionate about his work as he originally thought.
He played in flag football leagues, even coached a little, and could not get the game out of his system.
So, at 28-years-old, and against the advice of many of his friends, he took a huge leap of faith, quit his job and became a football coach.
He was hired by Trinity College near his hometown of Bloomfield, Conn., where he worked two seasons and earned a master's degree. He then went to Bowling Green for a season and then to Georgetown for two more.
All the while, he and Sarita remained a couple and saw each other on weekends when they could.
"We were separated for so long," he said. "But I still knew she was the one I wanted to marry."
During his second year at Georgetown they finally married, moved in together and began building a life together. When he landed a job at Delaware, he felt that they were finally living out their dream.
Sarita had goals that didn't necessarily include getting rich. She eschewed lucrative offers from the private sector to join the Delaware Attorney General's office.
"People told her, 'You can make so much money,' and she would always say, 'No – this is my passion,' " her mother, Wanda Gee He , told the News Journal in Wilmington.
She quickly won fame as a hard-working and fair prosecutor who took on difficult cases, including homicides, assaults and domestic abuse. She was usually the first to show up to work in the morning, always wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, and usually the last to go home.
"She was very passionate, very determined, very focused and a good person," Lucas said.
"It was her mission to help people."
Sarita Lucas died on a Sunday, a day when college football coaches begin preparing their teams for the next game. Sarita told Tony she wasn't feeling well when he left that morning to head to the office, but neither thought it was anything to be alarmed about.
He called her shortly after 6 p.m. see if she was coming to campus for a weekly family dinner with the team. When she didn't answer, he suspected something wasn't right and drove to their house.
Police first reported that she died of an apparent heart attack. An autopsy revealed she died of eclampsia, a condition that raises the blood pressure of pregnant women, even those who don't have high blood pressure.
Her passing was a major news story in Wilmington, Delaware, the state capital, and Newark, Del., where the University of Delaware is located.
The late Beau Biden, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden, was the Delaware attorney general at the time and worked closely with her.
"She was an incredibly committed and accomplished deputy attorney general and a beloved colleague and friend to many," he said at the time.
Her funeral in suburban Boston drew hundreds of well-wishers.
Lucas stunned the Delaware coaching staff when he went back to work a week after she died. Co-workers urged him to take more time off, but he refused.
"I pretty much had to go back to work," he said. "I thought it would be harder for me to just sit around and feel sorry for myself with my thoughts and feelings. I just needed to be as close to business as normal, as busy as possible."
Eric Ziady, then Delaware's athletic director, pulled him aside and said it's OK if you come back to work. But please, go see a counselor.
"He got me hooked up with a social worker," Lucas said. "That absolutely helped.
"There is such a taboo with people when it comes to mental health issues, anxiety and depression. Me being such a proud man, I never thought I would sit down with someone and share my feelings.
"I allowed myself to be open and share everything I was thinking."
The counseling sessions helped change his perspective.
"I know now that Sarita had a short life, but she had a good life," he said. "She was put here to accomplish great things, and even at a young age, she was very successful in her career, married and she was a Mom.
"She had the opportunity to feel life within her."
When Natasha Harrison heard of Tony's loss, she immediately called him. By then, she was a physician and was working at West Virginia University. She had been in relationships but had never gotten married.
They became friends when both were college freshmen, and it was a strictly platonic. Tony was dating Sarita and Natasha someone else, so they talked about their dating lives, personal problems, challenges in school and their dreams, mostly over the phone.
"I remember that he was a better friend to me than I had been to him," she said. "I felt like this was my chance to be a friend to him when he needed one."
And he indeed needed a friend.
"She was invaluable to me as I worked through Sarita's death, and she remains invaluable," he said. "There was never an ulterior motive throughout our friendship.
"After Sarita died, she said 'there are going to be some people and their intentions may not be pure.
"You're vulnerable right now. You're a good guy. If you're going to date, make sure it's the right time and be careful.'
"She looked out for me."
Years earlier, when they were college seniors, he told Natasha that the only two women he would ever consider marrying were Sarita and Natasha. "She just laughed when I said it," Tony Lucas said.
"She was a voice of reason through college. She would tell me about her dating situations, and I would give her advice and try to help her. We all have problems, struggles, when we're young and in college.
"We kind of grew up together."
They were very close by the time they graduated, and that's when Natasha decided to create a little distance.
"I thought maybe we were too close," she said. "I thought his focus should be on Sarita."
She stopped calling him as much and eventually, they spoke only once or twice per year.
That changed once Sarita died.
"By that time, I had been a physician for a while and had seen what people go through when they lose someone," Natasha said. "I told him, if it was OK with him, I'd like to start checking on him regularly about a month out."
Just as she predicted, about a month after Sarita's death, many of the people helping him deal with his grief were no longer calling. She began checking on him weekly, and then their calls began to become more frequent.
As they talked, she realized what she had been missing after she decided to put some distance in their relationship.
"I forgot what those conversations with him were like," she said. "I forgot how much I enjoyed our friendship and just what a good guy he is."
As they continued to talk, "the conversations became longer and longer," she said.
And she remembered what he said in college – and she and Sarita were the only women he would ever consider marrying. "So many years later, that made a big impression on me,'' she said.
Once he got a break from football, he visited her in Morgantown, W.Va., "just to get away for a weekend," he said.
Their relationship was still platonic but seeing each other after so many years apart had an impact on them.
"All through our friendship I really didn't think he was that attractive," she said, laughing.
"He had a girlfriend that became his wife, so I never looked at him that way.
"When I took the so-called blinders off, I realized he was everything I wanted in a partner."
At first, they were hesitant to turn their friendship into something more. They both wanted to make sure he was healthy enough emotionally for another relationship.
And they both knew the quickest way to spoil a good friendship is to become romantically involved.
Nonetheless, they began dating in 2015, nearly a year after Sarita died. And once they took the plunge, they were all the way in.
"I think once we decided to date and realized we were in a relationship, I think we knew immediately it was headed toward marriage," Natasha said.
"We talked about it. He knew I was looking to get married down the road and that he was hoping to get married again potentially.
"It was refreshing to have a dating experience where we knew the expectations when we started."
They were married on March 3, 2018, but as has seemed to happen through most of Tony's life, they began married life with a long-distance relationship. She worked in Morgantown while he coached at Temple, Elon and then ODU.
"Once our feelings started getting stronger, we both wanted to be with each other," she said. "It got harder along the way."
So, she gave up her job earlier this year and moved to Norfolk a few months after Tony began working at ODU..
ODU head coach Ricky Rahne first heard Tony's story a couple of years ago at a coaches' convention, when he interviewed Lucas for a position at Penn State, where Rahne was the offensive coordinator.
"Tony had worked with my brother-in-law at Georgetown, so we knew each other," Rahne said.
"When I talk with someone during an interview, I ask about their life story and their family. He shared his story with me then and it was an obviously difficult thing for him to overcome.
"I continue to learn more about what happened as we work together."
Lucas didn't get the job at Penn State, "but he was the first one I thought of when I came here," Rahne said.
Lucas has one of the key recruiting positions on ODU's staff – he's in charge of recruiting the 757 area.
"Tony is very levelheaded," Rahne said. "He's recruited this area before and the coaches here know him.
"He's a good person who's going to tell people the truth. And he's thorough. He's a guy who can build relationships with people. I thought he was a perfect fit here.
"What he's been through, and how he's dealt with it, is such an awesome thing."
The decision to have a baby was not easy for Tony or Natasha. While Natasha is still relatively young, she is in her late 30s, pregnancy carries more risks at that age.
Lucas' perspective, of course, had been jaded by losing his first daughter.
"We were both fairly hesitant to try," he said. "Not that 39 is old, but we're older than a lot of people who have kids. We were dealing with some built-in risk.
"For me, the thought was there, 'what if we go down this path and it happens again?' I was on pins and needles throughout the pregnancy.
"The closer we got to the six-month mark, the more anxious I became. I thought, 'if we can just get through six months, I think we'll be OK.' "
During her residency in medical school, Natasha delivered nearly 100 babies, "so I have seen a lot of different things happen," she said.
"I made sure I was calm so he wouldn't worry. I made it clear to him that I'd let him know when he should worry."
By the time they got to the delivery room, Tony Lucas was at peace.
"I knew everything was going to be OK," he said.
Watching his daughter being born, cutting her cord, and then holding her shortly after delivery, was a spiritual experience, he said. He said a prayer of thanks as he held his daughter for the first time.
"It was so fascinating to see life come to be," he said. "The whole process was amazing.
"A lot of dads say they want a boy so he can be just like me. But the way my daughter looks at me, I feel so much love.
"Being a Dad is so much different, so much better than I thought it would feel. I cherish every moment of it."
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has made his job more difficult, it allowed him to work from home most of the spring and part of the summer. For the first few months "I was around her to enjoy almost every moment of her life. That was surreal."
When workouts began in June, he called his wife several times a day. He still does.
"She tells me, 'you miss her, don't you.' "
"Yes. I do," he responds.
Natasha says that Tony has been a great husband and father, not that she is surprised.
"He is very loyal and when he loves, he loves hard," she said.
"He likes to show his love to me very day. He's very patient and understanding. He tries to meet you where you are, and if there are things you struggle with, he bears that in mind and acts accordingly.
"He's just a good man."
He hasn't completely let go of his past. He is still an active booster of the Sarita and Claire Wright Lucas Foundation, which was founded in 2015 in Delaware to help women of color who are recent law school graduates and who aspire to become prosecutors pay for training programs for the bar exam.
"I wanted to memorialize her and I just remembered that her time preparing for the bar exam was so stressful," said Geer, Sarita's mother, when she announced the formation of the foundation.
"I wanted to be able to help other young women who wanted to make a difference."
The foundation has raised more than $100,000 and has helped nine women as they prepared for the bar exam.
He said in spite of the hardships he's endured, "I do thank God for the life I've had.
"I feel so fortunate to be a father, so fortunate to be married to my best friend.
"My experience is something I don't mind sharing. I feel like it's my calling to help people through whatever they might be going through, to realize that beautiful things come out of tragic situations.
"I went through adversity and heartbreak and I hope to inspire others that it can get better, that it will get better, that there's a way through."
Contact Minium: hminium@odu.edu
Minium: Six Years After His Wife and Unborn Daughter Died, ODU's Tony Lucas Recently Became a Father
