WATERTOWN, Mass.--Sinedu Tadesse '96 visited her family in Ethiopia last August and told her father that she considered her roommate Trang Phuong Ho '96 her best friend, her father said in a telephone interview last week.

"She mentioned that she has a best friend, and she mentioned one person, a classmate," Tadesse Zelleke, 64, told The Crimson early Thursday morning. "She mentioned she has a best friend and roommate--living together as roommates."

Zelleke, who is a retired provincial school administrator, spoke to The Crimson through an Amharic interpreter from his home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

While still in shock over the murder and suicide his daughter committed last Sunday, Zelleke said he could not explain his daughter's motives. "I cannot even dream about these things. This is unexpected," he said. "She is a very nice person and very humble. Something like this is an unexpected thing."

Zelleke said the tragedy is "still kind of shocking." "I don't know how it happened," he said, breaking into tears toward the close of the 45-minute interview. "It's a complete shock for the whole family."

Tadesse, who was 20 when she died, was the youngest of five children. She is survived by her father, her mother and two brothers and two sisters who range in age from 22 to 27 years-old.

Tadesse was the only of his children to attend the prestigious International Community School (ICS), formerly the American School, in Addis Ababa, Zelleke said. Courses at the ICS are taught in English. Only about a third of the student body is Ethiopian; the rest are children of diplomats and other foreign workers, according to Robert F. Ehrenheim, a history teacher at the school.

In Ethiopia, children inherit their father's given name as their family name. Thus, all of Zelleke's children share his name Tadesse.

Zelleke said he missed his daughter very much during her three years at Harvard and had hoped that she would return more often than her-lone visit last summer.

"She came back last August and passed the holiday with the family," he said. "I would like to see her during the vacation, during the holiday. I missed her a lot."

While some speculation as to the causes of Tadesse's murder of Ho and subsequent suicide has focused on her stressful workload as a premed biology concentrator and on possible "culture shock" as an international student, Zelleke said his daughter's actions remained incomprehensible to him.

Zelleke said he had not heard from his daughter about her school-work being unduly burdensome.

"She told me she has [a] workload," Zelleke said but "she didn't tell me that she cannot make it."

Also, the former high school principal said his daughter did not complain to him about the differences between American and Ethiopian culture. "She did not complain about the culture of America, and she's happy living in America," he said.

Zelleke said his daughter never mentioned being lonely or missing her family in Ethiopia, where she grew up. "She didn't mention about loneliness in America," he said.