Shortly after 4 P.M. on Saturday, December 13th, 2025, Cláudio Neves Valente, 48, opened fire on a classroom at Brown University. He killed two students and injured nine. Cornell University’s student government—in conjunction with other Ivy League universities—hosted a vigil for the victims of the shooting on February 7th, 2026. At Cornell, the fact that this violence occurred at a peer university made it all the more unthinkable. It is then a shock that Cornell, a remote and seemingly peaceful school surrounded by steep gorges and miles of forests in Ithaca, New York, suffered a shooting just as deadly almost exactly 42 years earlier.
In the fall of 1983, Young Hee Suh, an 18-year-old Korean-American, entered her first year at Cornell in the School of Human Ecology. In her application to Cornell, she wrote: “I want and need to learn more about children and their ways of thinking so that I may be qualified to teach them to develop their talents and abilities.” Before her first semester, Young Hee spent the summer in a Korean immersion program for incoming students. That September in Ithaca, Young Hee moved into her new dorm in Low Rise 7 with a new group of friends and a place in Cornell’s Korean community.
When Young Hee was a child, her father was killed in Korea for his politics during Park Chung Hee’s military dictatorship. Young Hee, along with her now single mother, little brother, and older sister, fled Korea for America. Her family settled in an apartment on the aptly named Ithaca Street in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, NY. Acceptance to Cornell would not have been easy for Young Hee. As a high school student, she had to manage both caring for her younger brother, who had special needs, and working at the deli her sister operated, all while excelling academically.
On move-in day, Young Hee met her two new roommates Jane Niehaus and Erin Coleen Nieswand, along with her four suitemates, Diane, Melissa, Jeannie and Agnieszka. Young Hee, Jane and Erin shared a triple; three beds, three desks, and all of their things crammed into one tiny room. They decorated the triple with photos from home and clips of the cartoon character, Ziggy. Diane and Agnieszka each had a single, and Jeannie and Melissa shared a double on the opposite end of the suite.