Alum Dies in Violent Break-In

A wife and husband who met as undergraduates in Adams House more than a decade-and-a-half ago were shot by an intruder in their New Orleans home this past Thursday morning, and one of the two, Helen W. Hill ’92, was killed in the attack.

Police found Hill dead and her husband Paul N. Gailiunas ’92 suffering from multiple gunshot wounds as he cradled his unharmed two-year-old son in his arms, according to a police report.

Gailiunas and his son were both taken to the hospital but have since been released.

Adams alums mourned the death of Hill, who was a beloved member of the House community in the late 80s and early 90s.

“She loved Harvard, and she loved Adams House,” said her college friend, Elijah F. Aron ’92. “In the pre-randomization days, it was a wild place. Even though she never did drugs or drank or anything like that, she loved being around alternative crazy people and everyone there loved her.”

“Adams House had a certain reputation that she thoroughly loved,” said her mother, Becky Lewis. “She worked at the Phillips Brooks House. She made animated films and took [Visual and Environmental Studies] courses...She tried to do it all.”

And, as friends recall, she succeeded.

“She’s just this wonderful spirit,” Keiko K. Morris ’92, Hill’s roommate through all four years of college, recalled.

Morris remembered her roommate has a “whimsical” character who often put her spur-of-the-moment ideas into action. In one especially memorable example, she convinced friends to run through the streets of Boston to the John Hancock Tower at midnight.

Animation wasn’t just a personality trait—it was a calling.

“I think it was sophomore year that she took the VES class in animation, and it was very shortly afterwards that she came back to her dorm room, and she just went around saying ‘I want to be an animator,’” Morris remembered. “And that’s what she became.”

After graduation, Hill and Gailiunas, then just friends, both moved to New Orleans, and they soon began dating.

Hill went on to study animation at California Institute of the Arts, and Gailiunas returned to his native Nova Scotia to study medicine at Dalhousie University.

They married in 1996, and in 2001, they returned to the city where their romance had begun.

There have been at least eight murders in New Orleans in the first week of 2007, including Hill’s. This sudden increase in homicides has Mayor C. Ray Nagin and police Superintendent Warren J. Riley considering a curfew to help curb the violence.

“It’s something we’re just sort of talking about, to see if that will make a difference,” Riley told the Associated Press.

Hill worked in her adopted hometown as an independent animator and filmmaker, starting the New Orleans Film Collective and hosting free film seminars to help other artists in the community.

Gailiunas helped start a family clinic that served the city’s indigent, charging on a sliding scale based on the patient’s income.

The couple also worked together to benefit their community, running the New Orleans chapter of Food Not Bombs, which delivered food to the homeless throughout New Orleans.

“She was a very wonderful, caring, outgoing person,” said next-door neighbor Richard A. Morris. “Both of them were always happy and cheerful and jovial and glad to meet people all the time.”

They injected cheer into a city that has recently known mainly despair.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed the couple’s home and “90 percent of their stuff,” Hill told the Los Angeles Daily News in an interview this past September.

While the city Hill loved struggles to recover from a week of tragedy, the people who knew and loved her have gathered at places across the country to celebrate her memory.

Hill’s former roommate Morris, who spoke to The Crimson from one such gathering in New York City, said mourners—some of whom hadn’t seen Hill in 15 years—all shared fond memories. “She was just that strong a spirit and a force,” Morris said.

—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.