Bound for U.S. and His ‘Georgia Peach,’ He Died in Brussels

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/world/europe/brussels-attacks-bart-migom.html

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Bart Migom was on his way from Brussels to Atlanta on Tuesday to see the woman he called his “Georgia peach” and “partner in Christ.”

Mr. Migom, 21, met his American sweetheart five months ago at a fitness retreat in Georgia. Since then, he and Emily Eisenman, also 21, had been posting selfies and portraits with each other to Instagram and Facebook. He bought her Belgian chocolate for Valentine’s Day, and she declared herself “Googly-eyed.”

“Distance means so little when you care about someone so much,” he wrote on Instagram.

“I couldn’t wish for anything more this Christmas,” Mr. Migom said in another post, adding: “Blessed to the highest degree.”

Ms. Eisenman, a student at the University of North Georgia, said she last heard from her beau on Tuesday, when he was on the train to the Brussels airport. She never got the follow-up text message she expected confirming that he had his boarding pass in hand.

On Friday, Howest, a university in Brugge where Mr. Migom was studying marketing, confirmed in a Facebook post that he had died in the terrorist attack at the airport’s departure hall. “More than ever it is important to support each other, to find comfort and strength in our memories of Bart,” Lode De Geyter, the university’s managing director, said in the post.

In the hours after the attacks, Ms. Eisenman was in constant touch with Mr. Migom’s family as they tried to ascertain whether he had survived the blast, she told CNN. “Bart told me that he would get in touch with me every step of the way,” she said in another interview, with NBC News. “His last words on the phone call was that ‘I love you.’”

On Wednesday, she asked her Instagram friends for prayers as she awaited word.

“I guess I didn’t know how much one person can love another until you just don’t know where they’re at,” she said.