Thomas Rolfes, 25 
 
 Killed May 7 
 
 'I lie awake wondering how he spent the last hours of his life' 
 
 Thomas Rolfes first visited the New Orleans area as a high school student when he joined his father on a volunteer trip in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "He really fell in love with the people," Ron Rolfes said of his son. 
 
 Nearly a decade after Thomas Rolfes fell for the city on that trip and made the decision to attend Tulane University for college, his family was in town searching for answers after the 25-year-old man's body was found with a gunshot to the chest May 7 morning near the intersection of Claiborne Avenue and Amelia Street. 
 
 "Right now it's just a horrible, horrible dream," said Ron Rolfes, of St. Louis, two days after he received the news. "We know it's reality, we're just trying to close the loop on that." 
 
 Thomas Rolfes was in town over the weekend with his fiancee, Elizabeth Fried, 24, to look at wedding venues. He had proposed to Fried last month in Colorado, his father said, and they planned to get married in New Orleans, where the couple met as Tulane students. 
 
 The oldest of four children, Thomas Rolfes planned to wed Nov. 11, 2017, the same date of his parents' wedding anniversary, Ron Rolfes said. When he moved to New Orleans to attend Tulane, his father said, he "did not know a soul," but would meet his future fiancee there and "was proud to call Tulane his alma mater." 
 
 Ron Rolfes said his son and Fried had planned to eventually move to St. Louis, where Rolfes grew up and most of his family lives. Thomas Rolfes worked for Clayco, a design and contracting business with offices across the country, where Ron Rolfes spent his career. Most recently Thomas Rolfes was living and working in Greenville, S.C., while on assignment with the company, his father said. 
 
 The family has said Thomas Rolfes was last seen by friends around 2:40 a.m. May 7, a Saturday, at Ms. Mae's, a bar at the corner of Magazine Street and Napoleon. Video footage taken from the Delta Fuel gas station on Louisiana and Claiborne Avenue -- about two blocks from where the body was found -- shows Thomas Rolfes less than an hour later, buying items around 3:30 a.m. 
 
 New Orleans police received the call about what turned out to be Rolfes' body around 4:30 a.m. 
 
 Any parent would surely have wonderful things to say about a child they've lost, Ron Rolfes acknowledged. Still, he said wanted those who never met his son to know that Thomas Rolfes was "truly a really fantastic" man. 
 
 Friend traveled back to New Orleans exactly a month after her fiance's death to beg the public for any new information about his case. 
 
 "I lie awake wondering how he spent the last hours of his life," said Fried, during a press conference outside the gas station where he was last spotted. "Was he scared? Did he suffer? Why did this have to happen to such an incredible human being? Not knowing this haunts me everyday." 
 
 Staff writer Jonathan Bullington contributed to this report. 
 
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 Corey Harris, 36 ||||| Last updated 10:30 p.m., May 9, 2016: 
 
 Thomas Rolfes’ friend Stephen Grantham told him to wait on the street for a minute as Grantham ducked back into Ms. Mae’s bar early Saturday morning. 
 
 The pair planned to cap a night out celebrating Rolfes’ recent engagement to his sweetheart, a fellow Tulane University graduate, by grabbing a bite to eat. 
 
 “When I came out, he had vanished. He was gone,” Grantham, 27, said Monday. “And that’s the last time that anybody else of our friends saw him.” 
 
 Grantham did not know it yet, but he and Rolfes’ fiancee, Elizabeth Fried, were about to be plunged into a dark mystery that remains unsolved. 
 
 About 4:36 a.m. Saturday, police received a report that a man’s body had been found on Amelia Street, just on the river side of South Claiborne Avenue. The man, eventually identified as Rolfes, had been shot in the chest. 
 
 Detectives canvassed door-to-door near where Rolfes’ body was found and unloosed a trained ATF Labrador dog in search of spent shell casings Monday, but few new details were released about the investigation into the death of the 25-year-old construction project manager, who had returned to the city where he attended college to plan his wedding. 
 
 Police Superintendent Michael Harrison told the press he believes Rolfes was the victim of a robbery. 
 
 Detectives are leaning heavily on the fact that Rolfes’ wallet was missing and that he appeared to have defensive wounds on his hands. 
 
 “At some point the robbery turned deadly,” Harrison said. “By the injuries of his hands, it appears there may have been some type of struggle.” 
 
 Many questions, however, remain unanswered. The first is how and why Rolfes left Ms. Mae’s, an all-night bar near Magazine Street and Napoleon Avenue. 
 
 Rolfes, a St. Louis native who graduated from Tulane in 2011, had met up there with about 10 to 15 friends. 
 
 Grantham said the mood inside the bar was “really positive and vibrant. It was your typical New Orleans, Friday night, seeing-old-friends type of mood. It was great.” Both he and Rolfes had been drinking, Grantham said, but nothing out of the ordinary. 
 
 Grantham was the last of the friends to leave. He said that when he couldn’t find Rolfes, he assumed his former Kappa Sigma fraternity brother had decided to return to the Hyatt House hotel on Poydras Street, where he was staying with Fried. 
 
 “I just wasn’t worried about it. I thought it was no big deal that he went missing. Like an Irish goodbye,” Grantham said. 
 
 Grantham said he caught an Uber ride around 2:20 a.m., according to a receipt. 
 
 Fried said detectives had obtained surveillance video showing Rolfes leaving the bar about 2:39 a.m. Using credit card records during her frantic search for him later that day, Fried was able to trace Rolfes’ movements to a Delta Fuel gas station near South Claiborne Avenue and Louisiana Avenue Parkway about 3:30 a.m. The store is about a block from where his body was later found. 
 
 Surveillance video obtained by The New Orleans Advocate shows Rolfes, who was wearing a pink checkered shirt, entered the gas station’s store, selected two bottles of water, paid for them and left, all in a matter of seconds. 
 
 Having trouble seeing the video below? Click here. 
 
 
 
 Hussan Muntadhir, the store’s owner, said he had spoken with the clerk who sold Rolfes the water. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary during their brief exchange, he said. 
 
 But one thing did stick out to Muntadhir: the fact that Rolfes bought two water bottles instead of one. He speculated that Rolfes may have gone to the store with another person who remained outside and off-camera. 
 
 “The fact that we know that he bought two bottles of water raises more questions that our investigators are working very, very hard to answer, but right now we would only be speculating,” Harrison said. 
 
 Grantham said Rolfes may have decided to walk back to his hotel or else to try to find a cab on Claiborne Avenue. And it seemed possible to him that Rolfes was buying a bottle of water for someone else. That was just his character, he said. 
 
 “It wouldn’t surprise me that if he ran into a person or two and, if they needed help, he was helping them,” Grantham said. “That wouldn’t surprise me one bit.” 
 
 Harrison declined to say whether investigators found any shell casings on the scene or whether they believe Rolfes’s body may have been dumped there. He also declined to say who first reported seeing the body. But he said that while gunshots were reported elsewhere in the city about the same time, police received no reports of shots in the area where Rolfes was found. 
 
 That observation was seconded by one neighbor who reported hearing nothing despite having an open window. 
 
 Hesham Saymeih, 25, who lives above a cellphone store that faces the spot where Rolfes’ body was found, said he too heard nothing. Saymeih said he never sleeps through an alarm and was sure that the sound of a gunshot would have awakened him. 
 
 “I heard nothing,” Saymeih said. “I was surprised that a crime happened next to me. I was shocked.” 
 
 The shock reverberated on a national scale Monday as media in St. Louis followed the story and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney paid tribute on Facebook to Rolfes, who worked as a staffer for his 2012 presidential campaign. 
 
 Rolfes had worked as a sort of event planner for the campaign, said his friend Zach Monroe, 26. 
 
 “He worked on that campaign; I worked on a bunch of Democratic campaigns, and we were still best friends,” said Monroe, another former fraternity brother. “We’re all pretty devastated.” 
 
 Rolfes’ death seemed poised to give New Orleans yet another black eye just a month after the killing of former Saints player Will Smith. 
 
 But while that high-profile death sparked a national discussion about the violence endemic to New Orleans, Harrison said the city overall has seen a period of relative calm this year — at least in terms of homicides — recording a 33 percent drop. 
 
 Still, Harrison said, “one murder is way too many.” 
 
 He said he had spoken with Rolfes’ parents and fiancee Monday morning. 
 
 “As you can imagine, they are devastated over this tragic incident, and they can’t understand why this happened,” Harrison said. “No family should have to go through an act of violence like this.” 
 
 Police asked the public for help in explaining how Rolfes died. 
 
 Homicide Detective Drew Waldron, who is leading the investigation, said police have recovered “multiple” pieces of surveillance evidence, and he encouraged business owners to review footage for more. 
 
 Waldron can be reached at (504) 658-5300. M embers of the public also can submit tips through Crimestoppers at (504) 822-1111. ||||| UPDATED at 4:30 p.m. with information from New Orleans police and more details on victim's background. 
 
 A man who grew up in St. Louis and was found shot to death in New Orleans probably was the victim of a robbery, the police chief said Monday. 
 
 New Orleans Police Superintendent Michael Harrison told a news conference that Thomas Rolfes suffered injuries to his hands indicating a struggle and that his wallet was missing. He said Rolfes, 25, suffered one gunshot wound to the chest and was found dead about 4:30 a.m. Saturday on a major street west of the Louisiana Superdome and the city's business district. 
 
 A spokesman said police have no suspects. 
 
 Rolfes and his fiancee had met in New Orleans Friday to scout a location for their wedding because they both had graduated from Tulane University in that city. Rolfes worked for Clayco, a construction company, as a project engineer in Greenville, S.C., where he had lived for about a year. 
 
 He was the oldest of four children of Ron and Julie Rolfes of Town and Country. Ron Rolfes is a Clayco vice president. Funeral arrangements are pending through Kutis Affton Chapel. 
 
 Rolfes graduated in 2007 from De Smet Jesuit High School, where he participated in speech and cross country and was a member of the National Honor Society. 
 
 Rolfes and his fiancee, Elizabeth Fried, were staying at a hotel near the Superdome. The murder scene was on South Claiborne Avenue about halfway from the hotel to the Tulane campus. News reports in New Orleans said Rolfes had met friends in a tavern at Magazine Street and Napoleon Avenue, in the city's popular uptown area, and was seen on security video buying two bottles of water at a service station on Claiborne a block from the murder scene an hour before his body was found. 
 
 Ron "Tripp" Rolfes, one of the victim's brothers, said Thomas Rolfes had been out Friday night. “He actually just proposed to his fiancée,” said his brother. He said Fried had decided to stay in for the evening, and wasn’t with the victim when he was shot. 
 
 “She was devastated,” said Tripp Rolfes. 
 
 Clayco flew the family to New Orleans on Saturday on the corporate jet, Tripp Rolfes said. 
 
 The family appealed for help from the public in finding the killer. 
 
 “He was here to start the next chapter of his life. He was meeting his fiancée to visit venues for their wedding. It was the next chapter; our firstborn was marrying this beautiful girl,” his mother, Julie Rolfes, told WDSU. 
 
 Thomas Rolfes grew up in south St. Louis County in the Oakville area, and graduated from De Smet at age 16, his brother said. 
 
 “He was one of the smartest people I knew,” said Tripp Rolfes. “He was always a little bit older than what his birth date might portend. We called him our voice of reason.” 
 
 The Rolfes have two other children, Tanner and Tessa, both of Town and Country. 
 
 Thomas Rolfes graduated from Tulane with a degree in business in 2011 and went to work for Clayco in St. Louis. In a statement, the company said, "We have watched with pride as Tom became a loved and respected force in our organization." 
 
 Fried was originally from Rhode Island and works for an accounting firm. 
 
 On Monday, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney posted to Facebook that Thomas Rolfes had worked on his 2012 campaign. 
 
 Tim O'Neil of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
– A St. Louis man who visited New Orleans to plan his wedding in the city he loved was found dead in a street early Saturday morning. Police say the body of 25-year-old Thomas Rolfes, who went to a bar with friends on Friday night and was seen on surveillance video buying water at a gas station around 3:30am, was found at 4:30am, the New Orleans Advocate reports. He had been shot in the chest, and police say defensive wounds—and the fact that his wallet was missing—suggest he was the victim of a robbery, possibly as he tried to walk back to the hotel where he was staying with his fiancee. Police have no suspects, and Rolfes' family has pleaded for help finding the killer, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His father, Ron Rolfes, tells the Times-Picayune that his son fell in love with New Orleans as a high school student, when they visited the city on a post-Hurricane Katrina volunteer trip. He decided to attend Tulane University in the city, where he met his fiancee. They had planned to spend the weekend looking at possible wedding venues. "Right now it's just a horrible, horrible dream," the father says. "We know it's reality, we're just trying to close the loop on that." Rolfes was a 2012 campaign volunteer for Mitt Romney, who called the murder "heartbreaking" in a Facebook post. "A senseless and tragic loss," Romney wrote. "Thomas was a highly valued member of our 2012 campaign team. His warm smile and engaging personality lifted our spirits."