Throughout this nerve-racking reconstruction of a decades-old school shooting, Dylan Alphenaar, a student journalist at Cornell University, is attuned to small, devastating details. During a reporting trip to Low Rise 7, where a half-dozen students were held at gunpoint and two roommates, Young Hee Suh and Erin Nieswand, were murdered, Alphenaar and a friend simply talk their way into a building without ID. “It turns out, it is about as easy to enter the dorm as it was 42 years ago,” writes Alphenaar. A sharp piece of reporting that doubles as a plea against forgetting.
In the past few months, I asked several of my friends if they had heard of this tragedy. Almost every person I asked knew next to nothing. They had either never heard of it or were only vaguely aware of the details. If they had any information at all, it was largely inaccurate. In historical newspapers and even court records, it is constantly confused that Kim and Young Hee were dating or that Kim was a “spurned lover.” If my friends knew anything about this tragedy, it was through this lens. But this is a cruel misrepresentation of the facts. Kim was an obsessed stalker who harassed a teenage girl before killing her and her roommate.
More picks about gun violence in American schools
After All This
“When twenty first graders were slaughtered and the country responded without a national gun-buyback program, national red-flag laws, universal background checks, a national wait period, a gun registry, an assault-weapons ban . . . we became complicit.”
The Teacher in Room 1214
“When a gunman killed two of her students, Ivy Schamis was the only adult in the room. Her journey through guilt and healing sheds light on the impossible role of American teachers.”
Guilty: Inside the High-Risk, Historic Prosecution of a School Shooter’s Parents
“A Post reporter embedded with Michigan prosecutors as they pursued homicide charges against Jennifer and James Crumbley, whose son killed four students at Oxford High.”
