Chapter Nineteen
NINETEEN
It is with great sadness that I am writing to share the tragic news that Laura Kim, a Columbia College senior, has passed away.
Laura was an exceptional student double majoring in economics and history.
Originally from Greenwich, CT, Laura planned to attend law school after graduation to work in the public health sector.
A passionate scholar, she had been working on a thesis about disparities in health outcomes between different socioeconomic groups in New York City.
Her friends and family have stated that there was nothing Laura wanted more than to improve the lives of others.
Outside of her classes, Laura was passionate about mentoring younger students and spent the past two years as a tutor for the Columbia Writing center, where students who worked with her described her as “gracious” and “kind,” always willing to help answer questions even outside of her shifts.
My deepest condolences go out to Laura’s parents, James and Nina, as well as the rest of her family and friends. A vigil will be held at Morningside Park on April 8th to commemorate Laura’s life of academic diligence and unwavering generosity.
We are not releasing any additional details at this time as a police investigation is currently underway. If you have any information about the circumstances surrounding Laura’s death, we ask that you please contact the police at the number below.
Eunjin burst into my room crying. Alex and Leah blew up the group chat. All over social media, people were posting heartfelt messages on Laura’s feed.
I can’t believe it was just two days ago when we were sitting in Ferris…
Laura, we never knew each other well, but I always wanted to tell you how smart and insightful you were…
The world has lost a brilliant human…
I wondered what people would post if I died. I wondered how many people would come to my vigil. I wondered what the official Columbia email would say about me. But most of all, I wondered:
Did I kill Laura?
—
I read the last paragraph of the email announcing Laura’s death as though it were a convoluted line from an academic paper. My eyes were dry and itchy, and I rubbed them until my contact lenses popped out. Then, I put on my glasses and continued reading.
My first thought was that with Laura out of the picture, my path to Harvard was finally clear. Harvard was down one Asian Female, so now they had the space to accept another—especially one who was a single mother and therefore not at all boring.
The only problem: I couldn’t exactly go to Harvard if I was getting charged with murder.
The email from the dean didn’t mention anything about the cause of death, which wasn’t unusual based on previous emails announcing the passing of a student.
But the email had also included a tip line for the police, which suggested that they suspected a crime.
I thought of Laura’s body after I pressed the button on the pepper spray, the helpless, desperate expression as she wriggled on the floor.
What were the chances that someone would’ve attacked Laura twice in one week?
I needed to find information about the fatality of pepper spray.
Then, I would research whether anyone had been convicted of murder for pepper spraying someone.
But the more logical side of my brain stepped in and forced me to sit in silence before I did anything that I would regret.
Anything I searched with my phone or computer would leave a digital trail.
The safest course of action right now was to keep all of my thoughts inside my head where no one could access them.
In the worst-case scenario, if someone was looking into me as a murder suspect, it wouldn’t help if they saw an internet search history full of questions that happened to be relevant to the crime.
If I were going to leave a digital trail showing I knew about the pepper spray, which the dean had never mentioned in her email, I might as well hand myself over to the police right now.
But I was getting ahead of myself. I still didn’t know whether Laura had died from the pepper spray or if she had died from something else.
I couldn’t rule out the possibility that her death had nothing to do with me.
Almost a week had passed since the party, and something else could’ve happened that caused her to die.
Everything hinged on the pepper spray, on whether it was even possible for Laura to die from that one incident.
My hands were shaking; all I wanted to do was open the laptop and look up the information that would determine whether I had played a role in Laura’s death.
I considered going to the library to look for a book on pepper spray, but even that was too risky.
I was worried that my searches in the online catalog would leave a footprint and that asking a librarian for help could appear suspicious.
There were too many unknowns, too many dark clouds shaped like question marks floating inside my head.
I tried to organize my thoughts by boiling what I knew down to a few key principles.
The first principle was that I could not change the events of the past. Understanding the possible complications from pepper spray could only provide hints as to whether I was responsible for Laura’s death; it could not change the fact that I had pepper sprayed her.
The second principle was that I needed to focus on what I could control.
I did not know that I was guilty. As far as I could tell, no one thought that I was guilty.
But if I started acting suspicious, if I started to let the guilt or worry visibly eat away at me, then I would increase the chances that someone would think that I was guilty.
This led me to the only reasonable conclusion: I needed to act as normal as possible.
I needed to act how any innocent student would act if they found out a classmate had died.
I had always been good at compartmentalizing.
My entire life I had trained myself to focus on goals that were bigger than today, bigger than this week, bigger than this year, to repress present urges in favor of the future I wanted.
And the future I wanted involved me not being in prison.
—
After twenty-four hours of mourning, the student body collectively seemed to decide that it was socially acceptable to speculate about the cause of Laura’s death.
Common theories in the rumor mill were the following: a suicide that her family refused to accept, hence the ongoing police investigation.
A drug overdose alone in her dorm. A fatal alcohol-induced fall.
Her dorm was sectioned off with yellow police tape.
Her suitemates were all moved to a different dorm.
I went to an electronics store and bought in all cash the cheapest laptop that they sold.
I spent an afternoon at the McDonald’s on 110th looking up all the questions I had stopped myself from researching the day before.
Pepper spray could be lethal in rare cases, usually when the victim had a preexisting condition.
But as far as I could tell, no one had ever been convicted for murder or manslaughter for pepper spraying someone.
This information did not make me feel better or worse.
Even if I were not convicted for murder, it still wouldn’t look great if the police found out I had assaulted someone with pepper spray, leading to complications that caused their death.
There were plenty of terrible things between no one finding out what I had done and getting sent to prison for life on a murder charge.
When it started getting dark outside I dumped the laptop in the McDonald’s trash can and poured the entire contents of my large Diet Coke on top.
I walked back to my dorm and scrubbed each of the three cans of pepper spray with a sanitary wipe.
I wrapped the bottles with a cloth bag so they wouldn’t make any noise as I was walking, then stuffed them into a large trash bag.
I put the trash bag into my backpack and took the subway to 72nd, tossing it in one of the public garbage cans on the side of the street.
I wondered whether the police would bring me in for questioning.
I thought back to the night of Laura’s death.
Had I left fingerprints? Probably from opening the various doors to the individual rooms, but it was a six-person suite, and there were different people’s fingerprints all over the place from parties and hangouts.
I did touch Laura’s LSAT books, but the detectives probably wouldn’t think to check them.
I mean, why would a killer want to study for the LSAT?
I went over the worst-case scenario: the police would find out that I had impersonated Laura to get into her dorm room around the same time that she passed away.
But I did not think that they could prove anything beyond that.
I wasn’t an idiot. I knew my rights. When they questioned me, I wouldn’t say a single thing.
The police might suspect it was me, but they wouldn’t be able to prove it.
—
I took a calculated risk and bought some Klonopin off a friend of Leah’s.
My reasoning was that illegally purchasing prescription benzos from a peer was well within the actions of an innocent Columbia student.
If someone asked, I would say that I was stressed out with classes and needed something to take the edge off.
The Klonopin helped me feel relaxed, stopped the dark possibilities from consuming me.
And I needed to act normal right now. I needed to ensure no one would think that I was guilty.