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OPINIONS ON CURRENT READING: Murder and Suicide at Harvard
ONE MORNING IN May 1995 Sinedu Tadesse, a 20-year-old black Harvard College junior from Ethiopia, went to the Dunster House bedside of her sleeping roommate Trang Phuong Ho. Sinedu then stabbed her roommate 45 times. A wound through the left ventricle of the heart and two to the lungs were each capable of causing death. As her roommate lay dying, Sinedu barricaded herself in the bathroom. Before police arrived she committed suicide by hanging herself by a rope from the shower curtain rod. She had purchased the rope days earlier, cut it to the precise length required to hang herself, and neatly stored the remaining portion in a cabinet. Police concluded that both the murder and the suicide were not an act of momentary passion but planned well in advance.
A new book, Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder, analyzes the people and events surrounding this murder/suicide. The author, Melanie Thernstrom, is a white Harvard graduate who has taught creative writing at Cornell, Harvard, and Boston University. She combines a strong skill in investigative journalism with a knack for storytelling. She is the daughter of Stephen Thernstrom, professor of history at Harvard, and Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who are the coauthors of the new book America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible -- Race in Modem America.
In 1974 Sinedu Tadesse was born into a middle-class Ethiopian family. Her father, who had been educated at the American University in Beirut, was the headmaster of a government-operated school. Sinedu's family belonged to the elite Amharas ethnic group of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. Just before Sinedu was born, Selassie was overthrown. A rebel group called the Derg came to power and instituted one-party communist rule. Under the Derg, the educated elite were imprisoned or executed. Sinedu's father was jailed without trial for two years.
Over the past two decades Ethiopia has gone through a bloody civil war resulting in the independence of the province of Eritrea, numerous famines, and the overthrow of the communist regime. Today, Ethiopia remains one of the poorest nations on earth. Sixty percent of the population fives in total poverty. Life expectancy is less than 50 years....