Baltimore Sun News Paper Articles

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'Brilliant Student' Mourned
Warmth and Joy of Slain Johns Hopkins Senior Recalled

By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 30, 2005; Page C06

After Linda Trinh made her first trip to her parents' native Vietnam last summer, she returned to the United States deeply moved by the children she met at an AIDS hospice. The Johns Hopkins University senior penned them a poem. Don't feel sad about my departure, she told them.

"I thank you for all of your smiles," she wrote.

Yesterday, at the Silver Spring church where Trinh taught Sunday school, a priest recalled her words and said they served as her own farewell to the more than 700 family members, friends and schoolmates who gathered to mourn her a week after her death.

Trinh, 21, was found asphyxiated last Sunday in an apartment building across the street from the university campus in Baltimore. The slaying was the second in the Johns Hopkins community in nine months. Police have made no arrests in the case.

The standing-room-only Mass for Trinh was held at Our Lady of Vietnam Roman Catholic Church, a distinctive yellow concrete structure with a curved, red pagoda-style roof built in a Vietnamese design. Floral wreaths decorated the outside walkway. Two easels displayed large color photographs of her smiling face, surrounded by family and friends. Another color photo sat atop her white coffin.

Trinh's family had fled communist Vietnam, spending a year in refugee camps before arriving in the United States in 1983. Trinh's parents live in Silver Spring. Her father, Quy Trinh, is a machine mechanic, and her mother, Hoan Ngo, is a machine parts worker, a family member said. Her older brother, Quang, is a University of Maryland graduate.

Trinh grew up surrounded by many relatives, said cousin Tung Huynh, 38. He remembered snapping photos of her as a young girl dressed up in the traditional Vietnamese ao dai, a long, flowing tunic. "Now I am preparing the picture books for her funeral," he said.

The service was conducted in English and Vietnamese, with several Vietnamese Catholic hymns sung by a choir. As the plaintive melodies filled the church, many of the older Vietnamese bowed their heads and wept.

More than 100 students, faculty and administrators from Johns Hopkins also attended the Mass, including President William R. Brody.

The Rev. Tam Tranh, who gave the homily in English, described Trinh as a "brilliant student with such a good heart." Her strong desire was to use her talents to help the unfortunate, especially those in Vietnam, he said.

Trinh was a 2001 graduate of Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, where she earned straight A's in the rigorous International Baccalaureate program and lettered in gymnastics and volleyball.

At Johns Hopkins, Trinh studied biomedical engineering. One of her goals, she wrote in her application for her senior engineering project, was to bring better and more affordable health care to cancer and AIDS patients in developing countries.

She was also a former president of her sorority and former member of the university's volleyball team. A devoted daughter who called her parents almost daily, Trinh kept track of her many ambitions on a colorful diagram, a goal map. One of them was to learn to cook Vietnamese food for herself.

In his eulogy, Brody said Trinh had worked in a research lab, devising ways to use digital mammography to bring breast cancer screening to poor women.

"We have all lost a golden glimpse of the future," he said.

Turning toward Trinh's grieving family, Brody spoke of a doctor at Johns Hopkins whose 6-year-old son died of leukemia after many months of struggle. He offered the father's words as a benediction, his voice cracking with emotion:

"May we all find peace in the shared hope that our children who brought us such joy with their short lives are now a host of angels, loving us still, feeling our love for them . . . and knowing that they are safely locked forever in our hearts."

After the 90-minute service, Trinh's brother, his face grim, led the way. Family members supported her father, who sobbed deeply. Her mother held a small golden crucifix.

After the cars drove away, a former volleyball teammate hugged her friends, clutching a miniature volleyball in her arm.

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By Richard Irwin and Lynn Anderson
Sun Staff
Originally published January 25, 2005

A Johns Hopkins University student whose body was found Sunday afternoon in her Charles Village apartment was the victim of homicide, the state medical examiner's office determined yesterday.

The slaying - the second in the Hopkins community in nine months - stunned students and administrators and prompted university President William R. Brody to announce tighter security around the high-rise apartment building where 21-year-old Linda Trinh was found dead.

Friends of the victim, a senior biomedical engineering student and former Hopkins volleyball team member whose family lives in Silver Spring, hugged and wept last night in the lobby of The Charles, at 3333 N. Charles St., where Trinh had shared a second-floor apartment with two roommates.

Some of the women were in the Alpha Phi sorority with Trinh, who was formerly its president.

In an e-mail message sent to students shortly after 7 p.m. and posted on the university Web site, Brody said that he was writing with "very painful news."

"This is the second time in less than a year that our undergraduate community and the university at large have suffered such a tragic loss," Brody wrote. "We do not know what happened. But we do know that words cannot begin to convey the grief and outrage we all are feeling."

Police officials said last night that they were without conclusive leads and had no suspect or motive.

In the meantime, security at the sprawling North Baltimore campus will be tightened, Brody said. A guard will be stationed around the clock at The Charles, and city police will step up patrols in the area, he said.

"We are working very closely with Hopkins University staff members and students who knew the victim in order to find the person or persons who committed this heinous crime," said Detective Donny Moses, a city police spokesman.

One of the roommates found Trinh lying unconscious about noon Sunday and called police, Moses said. The roommate, whose identity has not been released, had just returned from her job as a waitress. A third roommate was away on vacation. The spring semester begins Monday, and many students are still away on winter break.

Trinh was pronounced dead at the scene, and her death was ruled "suspicious," as there was no immediate evidence of foul play, Moses said.

However, after conducting an autopsy and determining that the cause of death was asphyxiation, the state medical examiner's office ruled Trinh's death a homicide. Police received the autopsy report about 5:30 p.m. yesterday, Moses said.

Police officials declined to detail the manner of death, where the body was found in the apartment, or how long Trinh had been dead.

The door to the sparsely furnished apartment was covered in fingerprint dust last night. From Charles Street, the apartment appeared to be illuminated by a single floor lamp.

Students who live on the same floor said they had seen a number of uniformed police at the apartment in recent days. They said they had smelled a strong odor of natural gas emanating from Trinh's end of the hall Saturday night. At least one neighbor called building maintenance, but it was unclear last night whether anyone had checked Trinh's apartment.

"It was so coincidental that we smelled the gas and then the police were there," said Katie Chunka, 21, a senior English major who lives a few doors away.

Word of the slaying spread rapidly as students learned of the president's messages, and students called each other and parents to tell of the tragedy. The Hopkins community recalled the slaying of another student in the Charles Village neighborhood nine months ago.

Early on April 17 , a man entered the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house in the 2900 block of St. Paul St., and the bedroom of Christopher Elser, 20, a Hopkins junior from Camden, S.C., and stabbed him in the chest and arm when Elser confronted him. The killer fled with a computer. Elser, a student in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, died the next day at Maryland Shock Trauma Center.

Despite police having someone they called a "person of interest" as a possible suspect in the case and an announced reward of 50,000, no one has been charged with Elser's murder.

"There is no reason to believe Mr. Elser's death and that of Miss Trinh are in any way connected," Moses said. He declined to elaborate.

Anyone having information concerning Trinh's slaying is urged to call homicide Detectives Chris Beiling or Joseph Phelps at 410-396-2100.

Those who knew Trinh said she was popular and well-liked. In his e-mail, Brody said she was "widely admired, liked and respected," and that her loss "diminishes all of us, even those who did not know her, because her contributions as a student, leader, colleague, and, most important, friend, have helped to build the Johns Hopkins we love so much."

On a Web site called Thefacebook.com, where college students post profiles to keep in touch with friends, Trinh said she liked "singing very loudly and off-key in the car" and that she enjoyed watching Nip/Tuck, a television series about a Miami plastic surgeon. She included her photo - with long, dark hair, dangling earrings and an exotic flower behind her ear.

Students who live in The Charles say that it is possible to get inside without a key. PJ Pub, a burger and nachos bar popular with Hopkins students, is located in the building's basement, and students said that a back hallway links the bar with the apartments.

Still, many thought they were safe in the building, located across Charles Street from a university entrance road.

"I feel like when I come back to the apartment, I should have someone with me," said Chunka. "As safe as I think this place is, you have to be careful."

As Chunka talked, her mother called from out of state to make sure she was safe. It was a scene played out many times between Hopkins students and their parents.

Down the hall in another apartment, Christina McCarthy, 20, a junior English major, had just gotten off the phone with her mother and father in New Hampshire. McCarthy said her father was so upset that he called the university's campus security to make sure his daughter would be protected.

"It's a shock, especially after what happened with Chris last spring," McCarthy said, referring to the Elser slaying. "Everyone expected security to be stepped up. There is no reason for security to be lax at all. We don't know how the person who did this got into the building. It's just a shock."

McCarthy and her roommate, Ellen Minnihan, 21, a junior chemistry major, said they decided not to rent a rowhouse because they thought an apartment building would be safer.

"You feel like it is a dorm here," Minnihan said. "Hopkins police patrol the area. We are in such close proximity to the campus. We were in and out of our apartment the night this might have happened. We could have run into the person who did this. ... I can't even imagine what [Trinh's] friends are going through."




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By Dan Thanh Dang and Jason Song
Sun Staff
Originally published January 26, 2005

There were so many things Linda Trinh had yet to do over the next five years.

For her parents, the bubbly and devoted 21-year-old planned a visit to the Vatican. For her brother, she envisioned the two of them on a golfing trip in sunny California. For her friends, she resolved to call every month and make time for girls' night out.

After all, the Johns Hopkins University senior was extremely busy with plans to land a research job or scholarship this year. Trinh figured she needed more hands-on experience before accomplishing her next step, earning acceptance into Stanford University's School of Medicine by the summer of 2006.

Her death on Sunday cut short each of the moves Trinh carefully plotted on her Goal Map 2009, a colorful diagram of five year's worth of personal and professional dreams. Some were uplifting and some were lofty, but anyone who knew Trinh also knew it was all attainable for someone who had already completed a similar set of ambitions in 2003.

As charted, Trinh's graduation from Hopkins this May would open the door to what was supposed to be the next exciting phase in her life.

"All those plans were cut short here," Quang Trinh said tearfully yesterday, slamming his hand down on the diagram where his younger sister's plans, all penned in pink, began. "She can't do those things anymore."

"We are devastated."

The Trinh family mourned yesterday, still reeling after learning that Linda was found dead in her North Charles Street apartment. Still numb to the thought that someone had killed her. Still in shock that so much promise would go unfulfilled.

Baltimore homicide detectives said yesterday that they're searching for Linda's killer. Meanwhile, a steady stream of aunts, uncles and cousins drifted in and out of the family's Silver Spring home to remember and grieve. At school, her friends and co-workers tried to make sense of her death.

But none of it made sense.

How could it when everybody was so sure that Linda was going to do things, big things, in life?

She already had a good head start, said her father, Quy, 58, a military officer who was shipped off to prison camp at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

In a tale similar to other Vietnamese immigrants, it would take eight years, an escape by boat and a year of living in Malaysia and the Philippines before Quy would be able to move his family in 1983 to Maryland where his wife, Hoan, had family. They settled in what would later become a Vietnamese enclave in Silver Spring in May 1983 with their only son, Quang, now 25. Linda was born several months later.

Throughout her youth, Linda's drive and endless energy were evident, her family and friends said.

Trinh lettered in gymnastics and volleyball at Montgomery County's Springbrook High School, according to Principal Michael Durso.

She was also involved in the Latin and French clubs and tutored other students. "I'm looking at her transcript right now and I don't see a single 'B' on it," Durso said.

"If you were told you could order a daughter, you would order someone just like Linda. I can't think of a single flaw," he said.

There was almost nothing Linda didn't accomplish on her Goal Map 2003.

Straight A's, check.

Junior or Senior Princess, check on both.

Get accepted to the Johns Hopkins University, check.

Carefully choose a career before college, check. Linda wanted to be a doctor.

The only thing Linda didn't quite nail was learning how to cook Vietnamese cuisine. But she could make a mean plate of pasta.

As with most families seeing their only daughter off to college, the Trinhs worried about Linda living alone in Baltimore.

"To let a young girl leave the home was hard," said her uncle, Toang Thien Ngo, speaking in Vietnamese. "But she studied hard and was so smart. We had to believe she would be OK."

Over the next four years, the Trinh clan would drive to Baltimore every weekend, usually Sundays, to visit Linda. They would bring her favorites - fried rice, fried noodles and sometimes crabs.

The Trinhs had nothing to fear, it seemed. Linda excelled at Hopkins and quickly made friends.

She played volleyball until her junior year, when she quit the varsity squad to concentrate more on academics. At the time, Trinh told the student newspaper, the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, that her biomedical engineering classes didn't leave time for sports.

That year, staying true to her focus, Linda was one of 16 students awarded a Vredenburg Scholarship. The grant, which would cover housing and travel, allowed her to visit her parents' homeland for six weeks with them. From July to August, Linda spent time in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City studying breast cancer detection and AIDS-related dementia.

She came home with a new goal, Quy said.

"She didn't want to be a doctor anymore," Quy said. "She said she didn't want to just treat one person or a couple thousand people. She wanted to help thousands. She wanted to save people's lives. She wanted to be a researcher and find a cure for cancer or other diseases."

True to her word, Linda began pursuing that goal.

This past summer, Linda began research on a project about adult stem cells for assistant professor Hai-Quan Mao. She struggled with some of the nuances in the beginning but "she was happy and she was making progress," Mao said.

Graduate student Greg Christopherson, who oversaw some aspects of Linda's research, said he believed that she might have been able to eventually publish her work, a rarity for undergraduate students.

Things were progressing just as Linda had planned. She was finding time not just for school, but also family and friends.

In the last week before her death, Linda visited her family Jan. 15. She had just spent two weeks home for Christmas, but had returned to Hopkins a week early to continue her research.

At home, Linda went to a cousin's birthday dinner. The next morning, she stayed just long enough to spend time with an aunt visiting from Vietnam before heading back to school.

Friends and family said while it might have sounded like Linda was the stereotypical Asian who was all work and no play, Linda was far from one-dimensional. She was the former president of Alpha Phi, a sorority on campus. She enjoyed having a good time, too, Christopherson said.

"Tuesday is the day we're dragging our friends away from their books," she told him.

So on Jan. 18, Linda and Christopherson and four other friends went to PowerPlant Live! for College Student Night. Linda forced a shy engineering student to come and dragged him onto the dance floor, Christopherson said.

"At first, he was uncomfortable because it's not the type of thing engineering students do, but she forced him to have a good time," he said.

Linda rarely drank and didn't that night because she often turned bright red after consuming alcohol, Christopherson said, recalling, "She'd put her hands on her face and ask, 'Are my cheeks blushing?'" After the club closed around 2 a.m., the group went back to Charles Village where they watched the comedy Starsky & Hutch until 4:30 a.m. The shy undergraduate had class at 9 a.m. but "I don't think he minded because of Linda," Christopherson said. "She could have that type of effect on people."

It was the last time Christopherson saw Linda.

Last Thursday, she e-mailed her parents to explain why she had not called for days - unusual since they talked almost every day. In her e-mail, Linda said she had lost her cellular phone's battery charger. She asked if they could bring her a new one the following weekend.

"We were worried," Hoan Trinh, her mother, said. "'Don't worry,' she said. 'Everything is fine.' And we didn't worry anymore."

The Trinhs never made it to Hopkins on Sunday. They dug out of the weekend snowstorm to attend church Sunday, but when they got home, 50-year-old Hoan said she did not feel well.

Quy decided to visit his daughter Monday instead, with the charger. He and his son spent the early evening playing Ping-Pong in the basement.

Everything was a blur after that. First came the call from the police just after 7 p.m. Sunday. Then, a visit from homicide detectives. Hoan screamed in grief. The family wept. Family and friends have trickled in and out since then.

Except this time, instead of talking about future plans and goals, the Trinhs are quietly discussing how Linda will be buried this weekend.

"Our whole family feels like life has stopped," Quy said. "How on earth could this happen? My God, what has happened?"

Funeral services for Linda Trinh will be held at 9:30 a.m. Saturday at Our Lady of Vietnam Roman Catholic Church, 11814 New Hampshire Ave. in Silver Spring. Relatives and friends may gather at Hines-Rinaldi Funeral Home, 11800 New Hampshire Ave., tomorrow and Friday from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.



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By Ryan Davis
Sun Staff
Originally published January 26, 2005

The Johns Hopkins University senior suffocated over the weekend was found face down in a partially filled bathtub and there were no signs of forced entry into her apartment, city police said yesterday. "This does not appear to be an absolute random act of violence," said Maj. Richard C. Fahlteich, who oversees the homicide detectives division. "It does not appear someone just wandered into that building."

One of Linda Trinh's roommates discovered the 21-year-old Sunday inside their apartment on the second-story of a high-rise across the street from the university.

The second killing of a Hopkins student in nine months set off a new wave of concern yesterday on the campus and in the surrounding neighborhood. But many said how they react to the killing will depend on what police find - and if, indeed, the killing was not an arbitrary act of violence.

"You ask the question, 'Is it random?'" said Kip Elser, whose son was killed last year by an intruder inside an off-campus fraternity house. "If so, there's a serious, serious security problem around the university."

The university has responded to Trinh's death by hiring a security guard for the private, off-campus apartment building. City police announced that they have stepped up patrols in the area. However, the university's director of security said yesterday that the school is waiting to learn what led to Trinh's death before more security adjustments are made.

Trinh, a biomedical engineering major from Silver Spring, was the former president of Alpha Phi sorority, a former volleyball team member and a university research assistant.

"We've turned up nothing significant going on in her life that would have explained this," said Acting Chief Antonio Williams of the Baltimore Police Department's Detectives Division.

Trinh's roommate last saw her about 3:30 p.m. Saturday, police said. When the roommate arrived home from work Saturday night, she didn't have a key and couldn't get inside, Williams said.

She told police she spent the night elsewhere, Williams said.

About 12:30 p.m. Sunday, a building employee let the roommate into her apartment, Williams said. That's when she found Trinh, half-clothed in the tub, police said.

She had a bruise on her face, and police didn't rule out the possibility that she had slipped and her death was accidental.

Medical examiners, who ruled on Monday that her death was a homicide by asphyxiation, were trying yesterday to determine her time of death. Police were investigating whether she was sexually assaulted, Williams said.

It was not yet clear whether Trinh was alive Saturday night when a building maintenance man entered her apartment, police said. The employee entered the apartment about 11:30 p.m. after another resident reported smelling natural gas.

He found the oven running with the pilot light out, turned off the oven and lit the pilot light, police said. The man told police he never walked farther into the apartment than the kitchen, Williams said.

Police said they were pursuing several leads yesterday, including a sighting inside the building of someone who may know Trinh. They were also reviewing surveillance video, Williams said.

The killing occurred inside The Charles, 3333 N. Charles St., a 10-story brick apartment building that is home to numerous Hopkins graduate and undergraduate students. It overlooks the Homewood Campus' east gate, a courtyard and the august marble sign "The Johns Hopkins University."

Police agreed yesterday with students' assessments that it is easy to get inside the building without a key - a concern raised almost a year ago about other area residences.

On April 17, a man entered the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house in the 2900 block of St. Paul St. and awakened Christopher Elser, who confronted the man. The intruder stabbed the 20-year-old from Camden, S.C.; Elser died the next day.

His killing, which remains unsolved, touched off numerous security changes around the campus, including a closed-circuit camera system that is scheduled to begin operating in about six months, university officials said.

Wes Tolbert, the director of field operations for the nearby Charles Village Benefits District, said yesterday that some crimes have increased in the 100-block area near the Homewood campus.

Robberies and aggravated assaults were down from 2003 to 2004, but burglaries increased from 125 to 212, shootings increased from two to 14, and larcenies increased from 273 to 607, he said.

"There's a certain amount of frustration and anger," he said.

But learning that the most recent homicide might not have been a random attack has tempered the spread of fears generated by the Elser killing.

"It's a different crime than the other one," Tolbert said. "It's a homicide. It's not a break-in."