| In the final week of her life, a Harvard junior named Sinedu Tadesse sent a photo of herself to the student newspaper. “KEEP this picture,” she instructed. “There will soon be a very juicy story involving the person in this picture.” By a certain tabloid standard, she was right. Days later, as most students took final exams and prepared to start their summer breaks, Sinedu fatally stabbed her roommate of two years, Trang Ho, then blockaded the door and took her own life. A year after the deaths, the writer Melanie Thernstrom looked at the roommates’ paths before and after they passed through the gates of Harvard Yard. Thernstrom had spent a portion of her own undergraduate years living in Dunster House, the dormitory where Sinedu and Trang died, but the similarities largely ended there. Unlike Thernstrom, who was then an instructor in Harvard’s English department and the daughter of a prominent professor, both young women grew up in acutely challenging circumstances: Trang as a child refugee from Vietnam, and Sinedu amid famine and violence in Ethiopia. Both struggled to acclimate to America and the Ivy League, although Sinedu’s diaries—recovered following her death—suggest a much harder struggle, which she took pains to conceal. Largely overlooked on campus during their lives, the pair became entwined by this horrific event, leaving in their wake devastated families, defensive university officials, and an enduring sense of regret. Thernstrom recalls her own exchange with Sinedu, following the student’s rejection from Thernstrom’s writing seminar. “In rethinking the brief incident, as I did often after her death, I wonder why I hadn’t been drawn to help her,” Thernstrom reflects. “Instead, I became one in a long line of people whom Sinedu Tadesse reached out to, and who did not respond to her.” | 
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