Smith held leadership positions on the student council, Hodge said, and volunteered much of her time outside of class. She tutored younger students preparing for the SAT, served as a big sister in a mentoring program, and coordinated canned food drives.

Her service to her Harlem community did not stop after graduation. After her freshman year at Harvard, Hodge said, she collaborated with three high school classmates to establish a scholarship fund to help defray the costs of travel and textbooks for female seniors at Frederick Douglass headed to college.

Smith had made her way from Harlem to Harvard—and had found a way to bring the benefits of her new home back with her.

Smith’s Harvard classmate recalled that she often commented on the distinction between fellow black students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Smith would speak disdainfully of those from ritzier parts of New York City and would complain that Harvard students were insensitive to the struggles of blacks and ignorant of the realities of life in poverty.

“It’s difficult to take someone that is into the street life and come to a college campus,” Hodge said.

He said that although Smith received a “phenomenal” education at Frederick Douglass and had even greater academic opportunities at Harvard, “for some reason or somehow, the young lady made poor decisions.”

II.

Ill at ease with several aspects of campus culture, Smith found in Copney, 22, someone with whom she shared a hometown. Copney, an aspiring songwriter, was also from Harlem. Beginning in 2008 the two forged an intense, at times rocky relationship that would contribute to their mutual downfall.

“We’re either like at a really good point or a really bad point,” Smith said in court in March 2011, when she affirmed that she and Copney were still dating. “We had disagreements about, yes, a lot of things.”

The classmate recalled noticing, “It seemed like going back and forth, complaining about him and other times in love with him.”

Friends of Smith note that she may have had cause to complain. Chanequa N. Campbell—one of Smith’s best friends and the other student who was not allowed to graduate from Harvard in the shooting’s aftermath—agreed with the prosecution’s description of Copney as “jealous” and “controlling” of Smith.

“They had a pretty tumultuous but passionate relationship. They were committed to each other,” Campbell said.

That commitment ran deep. Smith said that the two were “basically planning a future together.” By her senior year, they lived together in her Lowell single, said Cambridge Police Detective John W. Crowley in court.

But the relationship was still fraught with conflict.

According to Smith’s testimony in a hearing, Copney at one point ordered her to get rid of evidence, such as framed photographs and stuffed animals, of a relationship that ended about two years before she began dating Copney. She told Copney that she had thrown away the items. But in fact, she had stowed them under her blockmate’s bed—a spot she would later reuse as a hiding place when Copney asked her to conceal the murder weapon.