As detectives searched for clues to his slaying in Brooklyn, Mark Fisher's college
friends and family members filled a rural New Jersey church for a tearful funeral yesterday. The 600-plus mourners who packed
Our Lady of the Lake Church in Sparta, N.J., sobbed and leaned on one another for comfort as Fisher's father delivered an
emotional eulogy for the son who lay in a mahogany coffin at the foot of the altar. "Mark never bragged about his accomplishments;
he was a humble and modest person," Michael Fisher said. "He loved his mother and sister and admired his brother.
He was a joker and a funny guy. "He always made me happy in my life. Usually, a son learns from his father; I learned
a lot from him. My heart is broken. I will miss him dearly. Mark, no one will ever replace you, my son. I love you."
Fisher, a 19-year-old honor student and athlete at Fairfield University in Connecticut, was found dead on a Ditmas Park street
Sunday morning. He had left his college pals in Manhattan to go to a Brooklyn house party. Police believe a fight over a girl
at that party may have led to his killing. Fisher's older brother, Michael Jr., recalled the Christmases he and Mark spent
together as they grew up, playing with their model train set. "This was Mark's holiday," he said. "I don't
know what Christmas will be like without him." "I wish we could have known him longer," said Brendan Rueter,
20, a junior at Fairfield University who played with Fisher on the football team's defensive line before the team was disbanded
because of budget cuts. After the service, groups of students, their eyes rimmed in red, watched as the hearse pulled out
of the church parking lot on the Newton-Sparta Road. Fisher, a football star and dean's list student, was killed on his first
trip to Brooklyn, hours after leaving an upper East Side bar with a woman he had just met, police said. His body, riddled
with five bullets and wrapped in a towel, was found on a leafy block in Ditmas Park around 6:45 a.m. Sunday. Cops have interviewed
several potential witnesses, including the owner of the home where the party took place, but no arrests have been made.
