Life Story: Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne Was ‘A Purple-Lycra’d Superhero’

This “Life Stories” profile is part of a collection of articles remembering Vermonters who died in 2024.

Snow swirled on a blustery, bitterly cold Saturday in January as more than 900 people packed the University of Vermont’s Ira Allen Chapel to celebrate the life of Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne. Several of Jarlath’s friends and relatives remarked that he would have loved the miserable weather and might have even stripped off his shirt and bicycled through the snow in Lycra shorts. An extreme athlete whose idea of fun was pushing himself to the edge of his physical endurance — in triathlons, Spartan races, even family outings — Jarlath embraced suffering; it only drove him harder.

He did nothing half-heartedly. His younger daughter, Maeve, 13, remembers hiking with her father to the summit of Mount Mansfield, descending the other side, then climbing back to the top and returning halfway down before camping for the night. She was 6 at the time.

After Jarlath died unexpectedly on January 6, his son, Gus, 18, tried to envision his father relaxing in heaven. “But for some reason I was never really able to picture it,” he said. Instead, Gus imagined his father as Sisyphus, the mythological Greek character who angered the gods and was doomed to roll a boulder uphill for eternity. “My dad, he would love that.”

Jarlath, 49, was a beloved, larger-than-life figure at UVM. A retired U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, he ran the university’s Spatial Analysis Lab for 12 years and founded the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Team, UVM’s nationally renowned drone program. The aircraft carry high-resolution cameras and infrared equipment for creating maps, videos and 3D landscape models used by researchers, engineers and land-use planners.

Despite qualities that could make him seem intimidating at first — his Herculean build, his reputation as a challenging professor, his professional achievements and extreme athleticism — Jarlath was widely admired for his humility, integrity, playfulness and commitment to helping others succeed.

“Jarlath directly inspired thousands of people to be better human beings,” fellow UVM professor and close friend Chris Danforth said. “He did impossibly hard things, not to show us how strong he was, but how strong we could be.”

Jarlath Patrick Macbeth O’Neil-Dunne was born in Somerset, England, then raised in Mahwah, N.J. The oldest of four siblings, he was bullied as a child and struggled to make friends. His brother Aengus described him as “an asthmatic, pudgy kid” who was terrible at sports and “atrocious” at running well into his teens.

Then Jarlath developed an astonishing work ethic. Inspired by the story of long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine, he started running every morning before school and on weekends. He became obsessed with fitness and nutrition. By his senior year of high school, he was a state-ranked runner. Aengus suspects that Jarlath trained so hard because their father died in his forties when they were just teenagers.

Jarlath studied forestry at the University of New Hampshire, where he took up rowing. Jason Blackburn, who met him during their first year, remembers their first season of rowing together. It ended with an abysmal record, capped by a humiliating defeat when their boat zigzagged down the Connecticut River in a race against Dartmouth College.

“Jarlath would joke that we would have won if we’d only remembered to row straight,” Blackburn said. By their second season, however, “A hero emerged, a purple-Lycra’ed superhero.”

“Make no mistake. We were still terrible,” Blackburn continued. “But we were finally a team.” The esprit de corps that Jarlath inspired became a theme throughout his life.

He met Julie Hathaway, his future wife of 24 years, in their final months at UNH. Among her earliest memories of him was his hard-to-place British accent. Though he left England as a baby, she said, “Jarlath would joke that he used [the accent] when he met me, so he had to keep it up for the rest of his life.”

Jarlath had already committed to joining the U.S. Marines when the couple started dating. After college, Hathaway moved to Boston while he attended USMC Officer Candidates School, in Quantico, Va. It was there that Jarlath met Capt. Michael Ferrito.

“Jarlath definitely stood out,” Ferrito recalled. “On weekends, when we were stuffing our faces with doughnuts and beer, he’d be doing pull-ups, push-ups and sit-ups.”

Ferrito remembers one grueling, eight-mile training march, which required their company to haul artillery on foot. As the temperature rose into the 90s and the humidity went “through the roof,” he said, several Marines collapsed from heat exhaustion.

“I felt myself being overcome. Then I saw Jarlath blast by me, not only with his 68 pounds of individual gear and weapons but an entire 100-pound mortar system strapped on his back,” Ferrito said. “I knew at that moment he wasn’t just a stud but an absolute beast.”

Jarlath loved endurance sports and frequently tried to convince others to join him, with mixed results. His brother St. John remembers visiting Jarlath at Camp Pendleton, near Oceanside, Calif. There, Jarlath thought it would be fun for his brother, a self-described “non-fit, awkward teen,” to sea kayak in rough surf, “a new sport Jarlath had taken up, because the Marine training didn’t seem challenging enough,” St. John recalled. “I immediately got knocked over, because I wasn’t an adult Marine.

“Everything he did always seemed to exceed the norm of whatever was achievable or possible,” he added.

In 2000, Jarlath and Julie moved to Burlington to attend graduate school at UVM. They married the same year, settled in the New North End and started a family. By then a reservist, Jarlath was called up for several military deployments. Because of his training in the use of drones and advanced spatial imagery, Jarlath was sent to Kuwait in 2002 to codirect the Marines’ intelligence assets during Operation Iraqi Freedom, a prestigious assignment for a junior officer. Essentially, his job was to search for weapons of mass destruction.

“It was pretty scary,” Julie said. “Were there chemical weapons? Biological weapons? Nobody really knew.”

Upon his return, in 2004, Jarlath became a geospatial analyst in UVM’s Spatial Analysis Lab. There, he gathered, compiled and analyzed data and aerial imagery that enabled city planners to assess their urban tree canopies, wildlife biologists to measure habitat loss, and structural engineers to document riverbank erosion and bridge damage.

He became the lab’s director in 2012. The following year, in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene, Jarlath applied his military know-how to creating UVM’s drones program. The drone-assisted research has played a critical role in helping communities recover from natural disasters, including Vermont’s recent floods.

“We didn’t know what drones were in 2013 or how to use them,” said Adam Zylka, team leader at the spatial analysis lab. Jarlath grew the program to its current level of 15 full-time employees and 50 students and recent graduates.

Jarlath also focused on making the team racially and ethnically diverse, offering opportunities to people from groups traditionally underrepresented in the field. As Zylka put it, “We don’t look like other teams in the drone industry.”

“Jarlath truly understood the value of investing in people and treating them well,” Ernest Buford, a research specialist at the lab, said. Once, after receiving what he considered a disproportionately large pay raise, Jarlath mailed checks to his entire staff so that they could share in his good fortune.

“He might have been the best supervisor at UVM,” Buford said. “His spirit of openness permeated the lab.”

As did Jarlath’s sense of humor. To honor his colleague and friend at January’s memorial service, Buford donned a neon yellow bike helmet and red and white Lycra as a “fellow MAMIL,” an acronym Jarlath coined for “middle-aged men in Lycra.”

Jarlath loved making people laugh, be it with groan-worthy dad jokes or his terrible dance moves, for which he never felt embarrassment. Aengus said Jarlath’s sense of humor often served a higher purpose, either to remind himself and others to not take themselves too seriously, or to challenge institutional groupthink.

While deployed in Kuwait, Jarlath started an underground weekly newspaper on the base called A Surrealist Look at Camp Commando. Posted inside the Marines’ portable toilets, Jarlath’s newspaper offered humorous commentary on military life.

Another time, he mail-ordered a flowery outfit, including tiny shorts and tank top, which he wore in the desert during his deployment. “His commanding officer called him in and asked him about his sexual orientation,” Aengus said. Jarlath’s reply: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

While many people have described Jarlath as a superhero, “He was also very human and had his weaknesses, like all of us,” longtime family friend Meredith Breiland said. He could be extremely competitive, for example, though his kids pointed out that he was his own favorite competition.

“As long as we went out and did our best, he was always proud of us,” Maeve said.

And when they failed, she said, her father often told them, “Find the laugh in something you failed at.”

One summer, Julie recalled, Jarlath visited his mother to help power-wash her house. He immediately leaped into the job without researching how it’s done.

“Shingles started flying off, and the ones that stayed on were etched so badly that they had to re-side the house,” she said. “As Jarlath would say, ‘Good initiative, bad judgment.'”

Jarlath had another weakness: an undiagnosed heart defect. While Nordic skiing with friends on January 6, he collapsed and died from a heart attack.

He is survived by his mother, Mairi O’Neil-Dunne; siblings, Aengus, Iona Munjal and St. John; wife, Julie Hathaway; and their three children, Ailsa, Gus and Maeve.

“He could be stubborn. He could be obsessive at times. He had a difficult time acknowledging social norms about spontaneous yoga,” Blackburn said about his friend’s propensity for doing stretching exercises in public. “In the grand scheme of things, however, his idiosyncrasies were a small price to pay for the full Jarlath show.”

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This article appears in Dec 25, 2024 – Jan 7, 2025.

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