Weeks before 18-year-old Wheaton College freshman Tomassino Offer was fatally struck by a freight train in Illinois on Sunday shortly after attending church, his father said he always knew his son “belonged to his Heavenly Father first.” “Our faith in Jesus tells us that this is where God wants him to be.
It was God that opened the door to Wheaton, and God alone who shut the doors of other opportunities,” Benny Offer, a real estate agent and motivational speaker, wrote about his son on Facebook after moving him into his dorm room at Wheaton College on Aug. 17.
“We are his parents, but in truth we have always known that we have been the stewards of Tomassino these last 18yrs … that’s hard to accept sometimes … but we know deep down he has always belonged to his Heavenly Father first,” he said. The freshman, also known as Tommy, who was from Washington Township, Michigan, was killed by an eastbound Union Pacific freight train at about 10:30 a.m.
Sunday, after leaving church with a friend, according to ABC Chicago. A Metra spokesperson told the news outlet that the teenager attempted to cross the tracks near Main St. after one train passed and didn’t see the train that hit him coming from the opposite direction. The Rev. Santos Castillo of St.
Michael Catholic Church told ABC Chicago that he spoke with the late Wheaton freshman just before he left church on Sunday with his friend, and he understood they were heading to Chicago. Castillo added that Offer was Catholic and attended Mass at the parish every Sunday.
"I definitely saw him before he left, and he just waved at me, and together with his friend Joe, they were here together, and who would have known that was the last time