Matthew Eric Jenkins, a 20-year-old from Shelby Township, Michigan, was struck and killed by lightning while running near the Celebration Hotel in Celebration, Florida, on Tuesday evening — just one week after moving to the state to begin the Disney College Program. The Osceola County Medical Examiner has confirmed lightning as the cause of death.
Matthew Eric Jenkins had been in Florida for barely a week. Twenty years old, freshly moved from Shelby Township, Michigan, he was standing at the very beginning of something — the Disney College Program, a rite of passage for thousands of young people chasing a piece of the magic every year. He never got past the first chapter.
On Tuesday evening, September 8, he went for a run near the Celebration Hotel on Bloom Street, the kind of ordinary errand that fills the in-between days of a big life change. Then the sky turned. A thunderstorm rolled in fast, the way Florida storms do, and Jenkins ducked under a tree for cover — the same instinct most of us would have. It didn’t save him.
The Moment the Sky Struck Back
Around 6:25 p.m., lightning hit the area. Nearby, a small group of strangers was sheltering from the same rain. They didn’t know Jenkins. They just saw a young man go down.
“As soon as I heard that, I started running and I came over here,” witness Felipe Costa told WESH 2 and FOX 35. “That’s when I saw the man.”
Costa reached him first. A woman he’d never met before joined moments later, dropping to her knees to start CPR. Two strangers, working in tandem, buying Jenkins every second they could.
“There was a lady behind me. She came and started CPR also as soon as possible,” Costa said. “We were just waiting until the first responders got there.”
First responders did arrive, and they rushed Jenkins to Celebration Hospital. Despite extensive efforts to revive him, he was pronounced dead. Hospital staff later told the medical examiner they’d found lightning exit wounds on his feet, according to documents obtained by The Post — the kind of clinical detail that makes an impossible story feel suddenly, brutally real. On Friday, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office confirmed what the community already feared: the medical examiner ruled that lightning killed him.
A Move His Family Called Life-Changing
Jenkins’ father told WESH 2 his son had arrived in Central Florida only the week before, chasing something the family already loved. They’d made the pilgrimage to Walt Disney World every year. Now Jenkins was going to live inside that world for a while, not just visit it.
He wasn’t only chasing Disney, either. He was training for the Chicago Marathon — a runner building toward something bigger, one ordinary jog at a time. It’s part of what makes the timing so hard to sit with: he was struck down doing the most routine version of a habit built for a much bigger goal.
His father had one message that mattered most in the aftermath — gratitude for the strangers who ran toward danger instead of away from it, who tried to save a son they’d never met.
Disney, for its part, folded Jenkins into its own family in its statement: “We are deeply saddened by the passing of Matthew. He had just begun his Disney College Program journey, and will always be remembered as part of our Disney community. Our hearts are with his family, friends and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time.”
A Number Nobody Wants to Be Part Of
Jenkins is now the fourth person killed by lightning in Florida in under a month, according to media reports and data from the National Lightning Safety Council. The state has long carried the nickname “Lightning Capital of the U.S.,” and late summer is when that reputation earns itself — but statistics rarely mean anything until they have a name and a face attached. Now one of them is Matthew Jenkins: a son, a runner, a Disney dreamer, twenty years old, one week into a new life.
