The New Yorker:

A junior premed student took the life of her closest friend, then her own. She left behind a shocked campus, unanswered questions, and her diary.

By Melanie Thernstrom

Harvard’s commencement is among the most festive in the land. By the first week of June, new grass has been patched on to the square of lawn between Widener Library and Memorial Church. World eminences are invited to speak, and they come—Mother Teresa, Colin Powell, Václav Havel. As the seniors are welcomed to the company of educated men and women, their parents clap and cry. The most touching sight is the immigrant parents: you can see in their faces that everything they journeyed to this country for has been accomplished in a moment.

There is talk this year of what should be said about two girls who will not be graduating with their class—Sinedu Tadesse and Trang Ho. It is a year this week since they died, but their deaths still have the quality of hushed taboo they had from the start. On the morning of Sunday, May 28, 1995, Sinedu Tadesse, a junior from Ethiopia, stabbed her roommate of two years, a Vietnamese junior named Trang Ho, forty-five times while Trang lay sleeping in her bed. By the time the police came, Sinedu had hanged herself in the bathroom, and both girls were dead.

Within a day, dozens of local and national reporters had descended on the campus. The last comparable crime at Harvard had occurred in 1849. “The questions were endless,” Newsweek wrote. “Could Harvard have intervened? Why did Tadesse snap? Were there unseen warning signs? Why does evil exist?” The headline in the Times called it “a puzzle whose central piece may never be found.”

Go to link