“He was a really nice guy,” said sophomore Nils Reid, who was friends with Voluck. “It’s really devastating because nobody expects things like that to happen.”
According to a Daily Free Press article, Shattuck was also interested in art and music. She had gone out to dinner with her parents in Kenmore Square earlier in the evening of the incident.
According to Rivera, the engineer of the commuter rail that struck the students told T police that he saw the students when they were only 50 feet in front of him and was not able to honk the horn or hit the brakes in time—the train would have required approximately a half a mile to be able to stop.
BU Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore expressed his sympathies in a statement released on Wednesday.
“Our prayers and our hearts go out to their families and to those who knew them,” he said. “The Boston University community has suffered a great loss.”
—Staff writer Reed B. Rayman can be reached at rrayman@fas.harvard.edu.