Halfway heaven by Melanie Thernstrom

Author:Melanie Thernstrom [Thernstrom, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Tadesse, Sinedu, Ho, Trang Phuong, 1974-1995, Murder -- Massachusetts -- Case studies
Publisher: Plume
Published: 1998-06-19T19:00:00+00:00

HALFWAY HEAVEN

both hand & leg-cuffed to a couch stuck in the ground. Sometimes even if a bomb falls beside me, I would be scared at first and then not even bother to see what happened.

The two solutions reflect Sinedu's ambivalence about the source of her problems. She sees the basic solution to her isolation—the one that appears in both the good and the bad solutions—as self-annihilation. But the "bad" solution, suicide, involves taking sole responsibil-ity for her unhappiness. The "good" solution, on the other hand, involves avenging herself against all those who rejected her.

Although Trang is mentioned in the passage, her fury focuses on Adey Fisseha, a popular Ethiopian-American classmate. Adey was, ironically, a member of the African Students Association who spoke about Sinedu at the large informational meeting four days after the deaths, and recalled Sinedu as "nice." She told me she considered Sinedu a friend she didn't know well but with' whom she was always on cordial terms. She had no idea that in Sinedu's mind she was part of the conspiracy of all those who had rejected her, against whom she was planning revenge—revenge which in the spring of her junior year came to be directed solely at Trang.

Like many people contemplating suicide, Sinedu sought help to dissuade her from her plan. Although three separate Harvard officials told me that Sinedu never sought help of any kind, in fact she had been seeing a counselor at the University Health Services, Dr. Douglas Powell, since freshman year (a fact Harvard was surprisingly successful at keeping out of the press, despite the extensive coverage of the case.) Dr. Randolph Catlin, the director of Mental Health Service, was quoted in Boston magazine as speculating

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