With a tremor in his voice, the college roommate of Minghui Yu—the 24-year-old statistics graduate student who was assaulted and then struck and killed by a car earlier this month—struggled to reach his departed friend.
“If you can still hear our whisper, please know that you are not alone, since we are always together,” said fellow University of Science and Technology of China graduate Yang Feng at Columbia’s memorial ceremony.
Friends, family, and administrators gathered in Low Rotunda to commemorate Yu’s life in speeches and shared memories Friday afternoon. Flowers and photographs had been placed around the rotunda, and a slide show projected on a large screen displayed pictures—with his friends, with his girlfriend, in front of Alma Mater, and one of him as a child. In the photograph of Yu as a little boy, he was seated in an airplane labeled “China.”
“We have lost from a community of scholars, a talented and respected and popular young colleague,” University President Lee Bollinger said. “But I am not only president of the University today, representing teachers and students. I am also a parent, and I can only say, on behalf of all the close friends and members of the community that, as a parent, we want to express our deepest condolences to the parents of Minghui.”
Speakers included China’s Deputy Counsel General Yong Shi, Columbia University Chinese Students and Scholars Association President Jian Zhang, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Dean Henry C. Pinkham, University Chaplain Jewelnel Davis, and statistics department chair David Madigan.
“Minghui was a kind and gentle person and an utterly brilliant student. We were just getting to know Minghui when he was taken from us,” Madigan said. He added: “I mourn the loss of one of the most promising students I have ever met. Minghui was a student in my class this semester and last semester. He mastered the material with consummate ease, and all the material seemed easy to him.”
On April 4, Yu was walking home along Broadway between 122nd and 121st streets when he was allegedly assaulted by a 14-year-old identified by authorities as “Sheldon J.” Upon fleeing the attack, Yu ran out into the street, where he was struck by a passing SUV. Yu was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Hospital later that evening.
Following the news, his parents traveled to New York from their home in China to mourn the sudden death of their only child. After about a week spent in the city receiving condolences from friends and Columbia officials, parents Aihua Qi and Zhaofu Yu were finally prepared to plan the ceremony memorializing their son.
Fellow statistics Ph.D. candidates Rachel Schutt and Tyler McCormick read aloud words from Yu’s colleagues. “My office is next door to his office. Sadly now when I walk past his office door, I never see him working there,” one student wrote. Another addressed Yu directly, “You left behind a huge space, far from being empty, because it is full of memories of warm thoughts and love.”
Bollinger captured these sentiments: “When we have lost someone close to us, we always have some moment or something that—a phone call, a recollection, a time of day—that stays with us as a kind of infinite memory and a memorial for the person we’ve lost.”
Later, he quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.”
At the end of the service, Yu’s mother was led off behind the rotunda, hunching over with vivid despair as she walked, surrounded by her husband, Zhang, and others whose hands touched her back with the hope of offering comfort.