Cornell Student Found Dead In Gorge Two Days Before Graduation
Image by wikipedia
By Aiden Pink May 27, 2018
A senior at Cornell University in upstate New York was found dead in a nearby gorge on Friday, two days before his graduation ceremony.
Avram “Avi” Pinals of Newton, Massachusetts, had planned to attend medical school at the University of Michigan, the Cornell Sun reported Sunday. He majored in biological sciences with a concentration in neurobiology and behavior, and minored in music.
Police told the Sun that the cause of death is not yet determined but foul play is not suspected. He is the third Cornell student to die in the Fall Creek Gorge in a little over a year.
Pinals played trumpet in the university’s jazz band and wind symphony, was a philanthropy chair in the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, and often volunteered at a local community kitchen, the Sun reported. He had also worked as a field laboratory technician at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, a research trainee at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a research assistant at the University of Michigan Medical Center.
“Avi’s profound impact on others was undeniable,” the director of advising for Cornell’s Office of Undergraduate Biology, Beth Howland, wrote on Saturday night. “To say it is tragic for such a promising young life to be cut so short is an understatement.”
Pinals’s faculty advisor described him as “a young man with great intellect, a generosity of spirit, and a genuine interest in other humans their welfare,” according to an email from the dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, Gretchen Ritter.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
