It started as a love story.

ASU students Cassi Reeve and Jeffrey Godbehere met on the bus between ASU West and ASU’s Tempe campus in 2000. She was studying speech and hearing science, and he was studying landscape architecture. They fell in love and got married.

Godbehere passed away a few years later, but in the short time he had with the Reeve family, he changed their lives – he was more than a husband, more than a son-in-law, more than a brother-in-law. He was someone they all needed at a fragile time in their lives. 

A decade after Jeffrey’s death, the family chose to honor his life and a place that means so much to all of them with an ASU scholarship. In 2018, the Jeffrey Godbehere Scholarship in Design was established and awarded to the first two recipients in The Design School in ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

‘A blessing to our family’

Tommy Reeve, one of Cassi’s younger brothers, still remembers the day his sister brought Jeff home. 

“The first day I met him I really liked him,” Reeve said, “and I just knew this was a really good fit for our family.”

When the Reeve children were teenagers, their father died.

“He committed suicide,” said Tommy Reeve, who is a Phoenix firefighter. “He was just an amazing guy, great dad. He obviously struggled inside.”

“It basically changed our whole path.” 

It was about one year later when Cassi introduced Tommy to his future brother-in-law.

“I became instant friends with him,” he said. “We did everything together.”

Reeve said Godbehere was only six years older than him, but he still served as an older male role model – something Reeve and his brother needed at the time.

“I think he just kind of took the place to where my dad was to me, but on a different level,” Reeve said. “He was really a blessing to our family.”

‘Staying in Arizona’

Cassi Reeve was not supposed to be on that ASU shuttle the day she met her husband. She had been studying at another college — until her father passed away.

“My sister was at San Diego State playing volleyball at the time,” Tommy Reeve said. “She got a scholarship to play there, and then she came back to help my mom. We all kind of ended up staying in Arizona.”

And Arizona State University ended up becoming a second home for the family.

“After my dad passed away, my mom needed to get a job that had health insurance and benefits for us, so she looked around and she found a job at ASU West, which was a blessing because we were able to go to school there for a good deal. Every single day I enjoyed going to school.” 

Like his sister, Reeve also met the person he would marry at ASU. After he and his wife graduated, they continued to visit campus and his mother at work. They brought their kids to her office, and she could brag about how proud she was of her grandchildren. His mother worked at ASU for more than a decade, planning programs and working with student workers. When she passed away from a rare form of breast cancer, the family started a golf tournament fundraiser to help set up a scholarship at ASU West in her name. 

“The reason that we stayed involved with ASU after my mom passed away is that it really became like a family for us,” he said. “Even though ASU’s a huge university it didn’t feel like it.”

Jeff Godbehere also loved ASU. He was a fourth generation Arizona native and graduated from ASU in 2001 with a degree in landscape architecture. 

“He loved ASU because their design program is really good, and he was really into design and into designing houses and the landscape part of it.”

Reeve said he remembers watching Jeff work on projects, with his drawings and pencils scattered around the house. He realized how passionate Jeff was about his education and his work, and when the family decided to honor Jeff’s memory, they wanted to also honor that passion.

Jeff Godbehere photos courtesy of Tommy Reeve