Professor Van Ry

The Boston Marathon bombings last month hit the home of some of the world’s greatest universities. As the terror and violence played out in America’s education and research hub, each twist and turn seemed to touch on the very campuses that draw the best and brightest from across the globe.

Lu Lingzi, a graduate student at Boston University who was originally from the Chinese rust-belt city of Shenyang, was one of the three victims killed by the bombs. Her death was front-page news across China and drew condolences from President Xi Jinping, whose daughter had studied at Harvard.

Meanwhile, the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, unknowingly played host to one of the suspects, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. With what was described as an almost eerie sense of normalcy, the student reportedly spent the day after the bombing on school grounds: He worked out at a campus gym and ate at a dormitory grill.

Once the two suspects began their frantic flight from the authorities, the violence extended to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a campus police officer was shot and killed. A carjacking victim, forced to drive the suspects around, was a Chinese citizen who had moved to Boston for graduate studies at Northeastern University and had since become an entrepreneur, according to his interview with The Boston Globe. <Read more.>

Via Joyce Lau, D.D. and Lara Farrar, The New York Times.