Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1997 by Joshua Wolf Shenk

Dunster House, where I lived as a Harvard student from 1990 to 1993, was a caricature of Harvard's style, combining ineptitude and authoritarianism. House officials had a copy of the desperate letter that Tadesse had written to strangers -- a letter that includes the phrase "if I live" -- but it's unclear what they did with it. Karel Liem, the senior faculty member in charge of Dunster House, told police he had read the letter, then denied to Thernstrom ever having seen it. After the deaths, Liem told Boston Magazine that "I had no inkling there was a problem" Liem's deputy, the house's "senior tutor," was out of town at the time of the deaths -- though the term was not yet over, she was already on vacation. Meanwhile, Dunster House tutors who talked to Thernstrom later retracted their comments, saying they feared being fired. In a previous controversy, Liem had fired tutors who spoke to The Crimson. Afterwards, his contract was extended.

It should be said that Trang Ho, a victim unfortunately overshadowed by her murderer, seemed to thrive at Harvard. And whether the school deserves "blame" is a complicated question; Tadesse's path to that Sunday morning is a thicket of familial, biological, and social problems.

Still, Harvard is held to a higher standard by its own asking. It is a community, Harvard president Charles Eliot said in 1869, that "stands firmest for the public honor." But stonewalling and zealously denying responsibility hardly seems like the honorable course in the aftermath of two student deaths. Though Harvard is steeped in history -- the lectures of Emerson, the scholarship of William James, the education of John Kennedy -- many there don't seem to understand that unflattering, even horrific, history may be the most important to remember, so that it doesn't repeat itself. Sinedu Tadesse and Trang Ho would have graduated in June of 1996. At the commencement exercises, they were never mentioned.