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On the morning of May 28, 1995, Sinedu Tadesse, a junior at Harvard, stabbed her roommate, Trang-Ho, forty-five times while Trang lay sleeping in her bed in their Harvard dormitory. By the time police arrived, Sinedu had hanged herself in the bathroom. Unlike most killers, the Ethiopian student left a detailed diary of her emotional state in the years leading up to the killing.
Unlike her roommate, Sinedu was not a popular student. She had difficulty finding a roommate and was elated when Trang-Ho agreed to share a suite with her. But they did not get along, in part because Trang's boyfriend frequently slept over, and Trang was looking for another roommate. Sinedu found the humiliation intolerable:
You know what I fear? I fear that shitty cringing feeling that accompanies me…. Should my rooming thing does [sic] not work out in a way that makes me hold my head high & speak of it proudly. (Thernstrom)
If she could have, Sinedu would have inflicted this terrible cringing feeling on her roommate. Only that, it seems, would have made her feel better, and that, she knew, was impossible: “Our situations would never reverse, for me to be the strong & her to be the weak. She'll live on tucked in the warmth & support of her family while I cry alone in the cold.”
It was a situation made worse, or at least more pathetic, by the way so many seemed to confuse them, regarding the roommates as virtually identical non-western exotics. Even at the memorial service, Harvard's minister could not seem to keep victim and executioner straight, referring to both as victims, asking the Lord to forgive them both. “Media accounts made them sound like twins: nice, petite, hardworking foreign-born premed junior biology majors.”
Unable to become Trang-Ho, Sinedu decided to kill herself, while taking Trang-Ho with her. Only that would feed her hatred. “The bad way out I see is suicide & the good way out killing, savoring their fear & [then] suicide. But you know what annoys me the most, I do nothing.”