One of the fliers the family posted before Gregory’s body was found.

DEDHAM, Mass. –– The new blue shirt and soft green tie that Gregory Hart intended to wear Monday for the first day of his new job still hung in his closet.

His younger sister Victoria, who had convinced Gregory to buy the tie, smoothed it with her palm as she talked about how it complemented her brother’s eyes.

His father, John, had placed Gregory’s trophies from the Norwood Little League on the bureau. He joked about the boy’s choice of lime-green wall color, a specially mixed paint, to make his bedroom look like a giant Xbox game.

“He was just a big kid,” Hart’s mother, Marianne, said wearily.

His older brother J.P. sat on Gregory’s rumpled bed and suddenly put his head in his hands. Victoria reached for him.

“Crying’s not helping,” she said.

“I just want the police to stop saying it’s an accident,” J.P. said. “Whether they find out who did it or not, I just want them to stop saying it’s an accident.”

Gregory had helped his father hang the gutters on the 100-year-old house on busy Bussey Street, then left Saturday evening to visit former college friends in Providence. They were going out to the Red Room, a small “dive bar” near an overpass in the heart of the city. When in Providence, this is where Gregory and his friends sometimes went, followed by a walk or taxi ride to the nearby International House of Pancakes when the bar closed.

Sometime after 1 a.m. on Sunday, friends later told police investigators, Gregory stood up and walked out of the bar alone.

That was the last that anyone saw Gregory alive. On Tuesday afternoon, his body was found by friends, mostly submerged in the Woonasquatucket River, pinned in the heavy current by a downed tree.

In the state medical examiner’s preliminary determination, it appeared that Gregory had drowned. (See accompanying story.)

His family doesn’t believe it.

Inside the red house they’d moved into a month ago, Gregory’s family grieved and raged Thursday about his death.

This wasn’t the life they were leading just a few days ago. On Sunday, they had planned to go to the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Marianne Hart was making corned beef. Gregory and his father would visit a Dodge dealership to look for a new car.

Nothing prepared them for this, Victoria said.

In one room, Victoria monitored a Facebook page they’d created when they began the search. They fielded calls from reporters from Boston and Providence, and others, such as a private investigator offering to help.

They had barely eaten or slept since Sunday afternoon.

When Gregory didn’t call or come home that day, his family knew something was seriously wrong. They filed missing persons reports in Providence and Dedham, distributed “missing” fliers with his picture, called police departments and hospitals throughout Rhode Island. They searched the area, checking trash containers and alleyways, walking the streets and by the railroad tracks.

They sought TV’s attention on Monday, and on Tuesday morning, organized another search party of 40 to 50 people. The police were organizing their own.

It was Gregory’s friends who found him. John Hart grieves that it had to be the young people, not the police, to find his son. And the family burns with anger at the Providence police, blaming them for moving too slow, too late.

“If the Providence police did their job, we’d have found him sooner,” J.P. Hart said.

They don’t believe he drowned. He was a certified diver.

“The fact that they say he just fell in the water is insulting,” J.P. Hart said. “We think someone threw him in there.”

But they don’t know why anyone would want to hurt him.

Underlying everything is that this isn’t the way life was supposed to go for Gregory.

He was 7 when he told his teacher he wanted to make a million dollars and give half of it to the poor. He grew up to study economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, choosing a financial career because he never wanted to worry about money, his brother said.

J.P. said he almost hated introducing girls to Gregory, because he knew they’d fall in love with him. He was handsome and funny. “He just liked to make people laugh,” J.P. Hart said. “He’s never been in a fight –– never needed to.”

Most of all, the family wants to know what happened. Hart’s grandfather, Robert Corkery, of Canton, said later that he had taken out a $2,700 ad, to run in Friday’s Journal, offering $5,000 “or more” to anyone with information that could lead to the conviction of whoever was involved in his grandson’s death.

On Bussey Street, Victoria brushed her mother’s hair as they prepared to leave for an interview on a Boston television station.

“This ain’t going away,” said her father. As for the police, he said, “I’m going to be a thorn in their sides. …

“We had a jewel stolen from us. … It’s not going to be pushed under. I want answers.

“My son was murdered.”

With reports from Tom Mooney

amilkovi@projo.com

Editor's Note: Comments have been closed on this story because an overwhelming number of readers were making inappropriate statements that violate our comments policy.