On the day of her passing in February of 1988, Kimball recalls staying home sick that day and starting to feel better around 5 p.m. She received a phone call around 6:50 p.m. from McIntosh, asking if she wanted to go to the dance club with her and a couple of other friends.
“I told her I was not going to be able to go out, there was no way that my mom and dad were going to allow me to do that after I had been sick all day.”
“‘Are you sure that I can’t see you for just five minutes Pat? That’s all I need,’ and I said ‘Yeah I’m sure,’” Kimball continues. “Then she said ‘Pat? You’re the best, never forget it, and I’ll see you soon.’”
By 7:04 p.m., Kimball says, the ambulance had shot down her street. She lived at the top end of the same street as McIntosh, with her house at the bottom end.
“When the ambulance went by, I just got this really unsettling feeling that I couldn’t really figure out,” she describes.
Kimball recalls shaking off those bad feelings and going to bed. When she woke up in the morning she prepared to call McIntosh after breakfast.
“I went over and I start dialling her number, and I hadn’t even finished when I received a knock on my door from another friend, who came and said ‘Patti, it’s Aprile.’ I said ‘I knew it, I knew there was something wrong. What hospital is she in?’ and she just shook her head and told me it’s worse than the hospital, and at that point I knew exactly what happened,” says Kimball.
McIntosh had a congenital heart condition; she had multiple holes through the chambers of her heart, and had been in and out of hospital for many years according to Kimball.
While walking to catch the bus, she collapsed.