Killing Worst Crime in Recent Campus Memory

When Sinedu Tadesse '96 stabbed her roommate Trang Phuong Ho '96 to death Sunday morning, it was by far the most violent crime involving a Harvard College student on campus in at least two decades, administrators and police said yesterday.

Several administrators interviewed yesterday, including Police Chief Paul E. Johnson, said they could not recall any instance in which an undergraduate had committed murder on or near campus. Johnson has been chief of police since December, 1983.

The most recent Harvard-affiliated murder victim killed near campus appears to be Mary Joe Frug.

Frug, a fellow at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute was fatally stabbed in Cambridge's Brattle St. neighborhood on April 4, 1991 as she walked to a nearby store to buy groceries.

Frug, the wife of Professor of Law Gerald E. Frug, was stabbed several times in the leg and abdomen. She died on the sidewalk and was pronounced dead shortly after 9:15 p.m. that same evening.

The attack on Frug occurred at the corner of Sparks and Brewster Sts. in front of the Holy Trinity Armenian Church Cultural Center--a wealthy part of the city that is home to Gov. William F. Weld '66 and many Harvard professors.

Frug's assailant was never identified or apprehended and the case remains unsolved, said Robert Kotowski, the president of Harvard's police union, in an interview yesterday.

Johnson said he could not recall another Harvard murder during his tenure. Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 and Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III added that they couldn't remember a College-related murder in the 1980s.

The late 1970s, however, witnessed the murder of at least one College student.

On November 16, 1976, several Harvard football players visited the Naked i, a club in Boston's Combat Zone, after a team dinner at the Harvard Club.

After the club closed at 2 a.m., the students began walking up Tremont St. towards their cars. About 16 or 17 of them became involved in an altercation, and two students were stabbed.

One of them, Andrew Puopolo '77, suffered extensive brain damage from a lack of oxygen after he was stabbed. After a 31-day coma, the star defensive back died of cardiac arrest.

In 1983, A. Keith Vaughn, a first-year business school student was arraigned on charges of strangling his wife, 23-year-old Princess Vaughn, to death in the couple's 17th-floor Peabody Terrace apartment.

Former Harvard Police Chief Saul L. Chafin said at the time that it was the first alleged murder on Harvard University property in at least eight years.