They seemed, on the surface, like they could have been perfectly compatible roommates.

Both Sinedu Tadesse '96 and Trang Phoung Ho '96 were two of Dunster House's quietest residents, foreign-born students and biology concentrators.

And both wanted to become doctors. Tadasse dreamed of returning to Ethiopia to provide medical assistance, and Ho hoped to become a pediatrician helping the Vietnamese American community.

Friends and neighbors yesterday described both women as calm and studious, stressing how shocked they were that Tadesse could brutally murder the woman she reportedly considered her closest friend at Harvard.

On Sunday morning Tadesse stabbed Ho 45 times with a hunting knife, wounding Ho's visiting friend who tried to intervene, and then hung herself from the shower curtain pole in the bathroom she and Ho shared.

"It would come as less of a surprise to me if [Tadesse] just committed suicide, because since she was always so quiet I could see how she could be depressed," said Nan Zheng '96, who met Tadesse during first-year orientation week and occasionally ate lunch and dinner with her throughout the last three years.

"But to hurt somebody else is what I cannot imagine her doing. I guess she just couldn't take it anymore."

Zheng, who is a Crimson editor, described Tadesse as a loner, "the kind of person who would internalize her feelings."

If Tadesse were depressed, Zheng said, "I don't think she would take the initiative to actually go get help."

Tadesse, who was 20 years old when she died, attended the International Community School (ICS), formerly the American School, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia before coming to Harvard.

There, Tadesse was already known as an exceptional student.

Of the roughly 450 students in the school, which runs from pre-kindergarten to the 12th grade, roughly a third are Ethiopian, Robert F. Ehrenheim, a history teacher at the school said in a telephone interview.

Tadesse was one of six scholarship students admitted annually of a pool of 60 to 70 Ethiopian nationals to attend ICS, according to Maura McMillin, her senior-level English teacher in the school's International Baccalaureate program.

Tadesse was a student leader, serving as president of the student government and on the staff of the yearbook.

She was very much a product of traditional Ethiopian culture, said McMillin in a telephone interview with The Crimson today from Addis Ababa. "Traditionally, women are more quiet, respectful, submissive, the workers in the family," McMillin said. Tadesse "was a prototype, certainly, but outspoken in what she believed in."