Laura Anne LaPlante distinguished herself among her University of Chicago Law School classmates as a leader whose sharp intellect was matched by her kindness.

LaPlante, 26, died May 2 from injuries sustained earlier that day after a car traveling the wrong way on Lake Shore Drive collided head-on with the taxicab she shared with another UChicago law school student.        

“This is a heart-rending loss,” wrote Law School Dean Michael H. Schill, in a statement released May 2 to Law School faculty, students and staff. “President Zimmer, Provost Isaacs and I share the deep grief that each of you will feel upon reading this news.”  

Schill pointed to LaPlante’s many gifts and her willingness to serve. “She was well-known at the Law School for her warmth and kindness, always the first to volunteer to help out at an event or to help a friend, always with a smile for everyone,” he wrote.

Originally from Hancock, N.H., LaPlante was slated to graduate from the University of Chicago next month and move to Boston to join the firm WilmerHale, where she had worked as an associate last summer. During her law school tenure, she assumed numerous leadership roles, serving as president of the Federalist Society, treasurer for the Law School Republicans and as a member of the Dean of Students’ Advisory Board. She was an active member of the St. Thomas More Society, the Law Women’s Caucus and the Edmund Burke Society.

LaPlante had garnered respect from faculty and students alike. “Of the almost 2,000 students I've interacted with in my teaching career, Laura was one of my favorites,” said M. Todd Henderson, professor of law and the Aaron Director Teaching Scholar. “We are privileged that every student at UChicago Law is smart and accomplished, but Laura stood out because her tough-mindedness was coupled with a warm and generous spirit that made everyone willing to listen to and follow her. The world lost a great potential in Laura, and her family and friends lost a truly great individual.”         

Adam Mortara, lecturer in law, met LaPlante during her first year as a law student at a brown bag lunch for students interested in the Federalist Society. “Her interest and enthusiasm for the experience she was already having was apparent,” Mortara said. “Over her time in the Law School, we watched Laura go from an eager first-year student to a leader. Not only was she the heart of an amazing cohort of friends in her own year, but she paid forward all the mentoring she had received.”

Over the years, LaPlante met many alumni and judges through her deep involvement in student activities, including the Federalist Society. One measure of the impact that Laura had on them was the grief that reverberated across the world when news of her passing spread, Mortara noted.

“From federal judges at courts of appeals across the country to alumni from classes as far back as the 1980s who knew Laura, all the way to priests saying Mass for her in Lourdes, we saw that to know Laura was to be instantly impressed with her kindness, professionalism and her great potential. I will miss her very much.”

Emily Buss, the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law, will remember LaPlante as personifying the Law School at its best. “She had clear convictions, which she pursued with energy and commitment. Her friendships ran broad and deep,” Buss said. “Laura managed to strike the right balance between the seriousness demanded by law school and a readiness to enjoy three very special years of camaraderie with her classmates. We are all in shock and grieving her loss.”

The loss was felt particularly deeply among those closest to LaPlante. “Laura was such a beautiful, kind and giving person,” said third-year law student Emily Heasley, LaPlante’s friend and roommate. “She always lived her life to the fullest, and she was deeply loved by everyone who had the blessing of knowing her.”

The Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society issued a statement calling LaPlante’s death “a tragedy beyond words, and our entire chapter is heartbroken. As president of the Federalist Society, Laura embodied the best of our law school community: passion, brilliance and unwavering kindness.” Federalist Society members knew LaPlante as a gifted student and athlete, and a woman of compassion and charming wit. “Federal Society members looked up to her, and she made herself available day or night to offer guidance and comfort to anyone who needed it.”

In closing his email, Schill said, “I cannot make sense of the passing of such a wonderful, vital young woman who would surely have done so much in her life to make the world a better place. At the same time, during Laura’s short time on Earth she made an impact. Laura left each of us better human beings than we would have been in her absence. Her friendship, engagement and love enriched us.”

The Law School is planning a memorial service for the campus community, with details to be announced. 

Kathleen Paige Bohanon, fourth-year in the College, was guided by a passion for science, an infectious kindness, and an endless curiosity about the people and the world around her. She died on May 8 in Bakersfield, Calif. She was 21.

Bohanon was born in Evanston, Ill., and spent her early years in Germany and Belgium before her family moved to the San Diego area. She was an active and accomplished violinist, swimmer, Girl Scout and student. Her mother Nellie King remembers many science fair projects over the years, including experiments on whether skim or whole milk spoiled faster, the effects of hibernation on her pet gecko and how rats memorized mazes.

“Kathleen had the rare quality of following what made her happy and exploring her passions,” said former roommate and friend Isabella Penido, a fourth-year in the College.

She attended high school at The Bishop’s School in La Jolla, Calif., and started college in 2009, drawn to the University of Chicago for the opportunity to do research as an undergraduate. She began as a resident of Halperin House, where she made close friends before moving off campus her second year.

She joined the Kappa Alpha Theta Sorority, where her sisters found her unapologetically brainy. Penido recalls watching her friend translate a paper from German into English solely for the pleasure of reading it. “She was interested in everything,” Penido said.

“Kathleen was one of our best, a student with extraordinary talent and potential as a research scientist,” said Stephen Kron, professor of molecular genetics and cell biology, who runs the Beckman Scholars Program. Bohanon was selected to be a part of the prestigious Beckman Scholars Program in 2013, which provides undergraduates a paid opportunity to study in the laboratory of a mentor for two summers.

Through the program, she researched mammalian DNA modifications in the lab of Chuan He, professor of chemistry, and conducted neuroscience research in the lab of Paul Vezina, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience. “Kathleen was a very good student. She did some nice work on developing sequencing methods for mammalian DNA modifications in my lab,” He said, adding that she was a friendly and welcome presence among the people in the lab.

During a period in which she considered a career in medicine, Bohanon trained as a paramedic EMT and worked in Peru with an organization providing women with prenatal health care. “Kathleen was one of the most genuinely caring people I have ever met,” said Courtney Feller, AB’14, friend and fellow volunteer on the medical service trip to Peru.

She soon returned to her passion for research, and settled on pursuing a degree in chemistry, biological chemistry and biological sciences. With her sharp intellect and genuine interest in other people’s success, she often found herself helping other students with difficult concepts.

Kathleen is survived by her parents, Nellie King and Tom Bohanon. In honor of her interest in the science of the brain and mental illness, her family has asked that donations be directed to the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

As a child, Matthew O’Connell wandered the aisles of the grocery store with his eyes glued to a book. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he pored over his reading at the library and walked the streets of Hyde Park with friends, talking and joking about everything from social justice to strange hairstyles.

O’Connell, whose warm personality and expansive intellect made him a valued member of the Department of Art History, died this summer in New York City. He was 26. A memorial service for O’Connell will be held Monday, Oct. 20 at 5 p.m. in Bond Chapel.

At UChicago, O’Connell focused his attention on Islamic art history, a subject that had fascinated him since his years as an undergraduate at Oberlin College.

His adviser, Persis Berlekamp, remembered her surprise at receiving O’Connell’s application to study Islamic art, because no one had taught that subject at Oberlin for most of his time there.

“He was so engrossed by Islamic art that he continued to research and write about it, even after the professor who taught those courses had left,” she said. “He was a truly brilliant young scholar, and his passing is a loss to the field of Islamic art and architecture.”

His experiences teaching English as a Fulbright fellow in Turkey in 2010-11 gave him even more opportunities to pursue his passion for the art, culture and history of the Islamic world. During his time abroad, he visited medieval architectural sites across the country.

The arts always held a special fascination for O’Connell, according to his mother Michele Salemi. As a child, he loved to make abstract drawings. He developed a passion for music, and played the viola for many years. An avid reader from an early age, O’Connell tore through the Chronicles of Narnia at age 6.

At UChicago, he made fast friends with fellow graduate students. His friend Maryam Sabbaghi, a student in the Divinity School, remembered O’Connell as “passionate and eager to learn. Whenever I saw him in the library, he would be poring over his books, coming up with the next best idea,” she wrote in an email. “I feel blessed to have had Matt as a dear friend.”

Claire Jenson, a fellow Art History student, remembered O’Connell for his remarkable personal warmth. “Matt listened intensely, eager to hear our opinions, sympathize with our troubles, and share in our victories—and he would respond readily with some new perspective or compassionate feeling,” she recalled. “He was warm and affable and clever, and wholly present. His company was so precious, because it was so complete.”

To his mother, O’Connell was always simply “a great kid,” Salemi recalled. “He accomplished so much in such a short time.”

O’Connell was the beloved son of Michele Salemi and Matthew J. (Maureen Gaughan) O’Connell, Sr.; loving brother of Abigail, Michael and Kathleen O’Connell, and Jessica and Jacob Summers; cherished grandson of Geri Fiutak and Salvatore Salemi, and Mary Ann and the late Dr. Cornelius O’Connell; and stepson of Thomas Summers.

When fellow College students describe Nadia Ezaldein, they recall a caring young woman who showered kindness on others.

“She had a thoughtfulness that was unmatched,” said Rachel Silver, AB’13, a close friend and classmate. “She was innately perceptive of the people around her and made you feel safe and at home in her presence.”

Ezaldein, 22, died Nov. 29 of injuries suffered in a shooting incident at a downtown Chicago department store where she worked. The fourth-year was majoring in English language and literature.

“This is heart-rending news, and we extend our deepest sympathies to her family and friends,” Karen Warren Coleman, Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services, wrote in a statement issued Nov. 30 to UChicago students. “Nadia and her whole family will be in the thoughts of many of us during this time.”

In a statement provided to the University, Ezaldein’s family thanked the UChicago community for honoring her memory, saying it was a reminder of “why she loved her experience as a student at University of Chicago so much, along with the considerable impact her friends and faculty mentors had on her time there.”

“Words cannot describe the type of person Nadia was in our memory,” the family’s statement said. “She was selfless in nearly every sense of that word.”

Her family said one of Ezaldein’s big decisions when she enrolled in the College in 2009 was choosing between studying science or the humanities. She decided that she eventually wanted to pursue social justice and law.           

Ezaldein’s first-year roommate Meher Kairon, AB’13, who came to Chicago from India, remembers how Ezaldein welcomed her. “She made our little room in [Max Palevsky Residence Hall] feel like a home away from home,” Kairon said. “She was always ready with a smile, a story and some sass. She refused to let me feel homesick.”

Kairon said Ezaldein once stayed up with her late into the night to bake an elaborate cake for someone, “just because she wanted to make them feel special.” Ezaldein’s family said that was not a rare gesture, noting that when they spoke with her late at night, she often was busy proofreading essays and papers for her friends or family members.

“We would plead with her to stop so she could get some sleep for herself,” the family wrote.

Ezaldein also is remembered for her commitment to tutoring neighborhood children, and a sense of ebullience that friends said would fill the room. She was always ready for an impromptu snowball fight or an adventure around campus.

“Nadia had a way to make people feel special and feel loved,” said Emily Yuan, AB’13. “When you make someone feel special and loved, they learn to love themselves a lot more.”

Ezaldein’s family wrote that she had an ability to “view people as the best versions of themselves.”

“We hope that her example is one that is shared and remembered,” the family wrote, “and that those who have listened to her story are spurred to achieve closer connections with family and closest friends than ever before.”

The Ezaldein family held a private funeral service.

During a teaching career that spanned 34 years at the University of Chicago, Amy Kass designed courses that addressed both the enduring questions of human existence and the urgent questions facing today’s young people by helping them see the relevance of classic texts to their everyday lives.

Among these was the “Ethics of Everyday Life: Courtship” course, which she co-created with her husband, Leon Kass, SB’58, MD’62. In the course she encouraged students to explore “inarticulate longings” and discover the purposes and virtues of courtship, love, sex and marriage through texts by such writers as Homer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Allan Bloom and even Miss Manners.

Amy Apfel Kass, AB'62, senior lecturer emerita in humanities, died on Aug. 19 at her home in Washington, D.C., after a 10-year battle with ovarian cancer and a short battle with leukemia. She was 74.

“Amy Kass was a wonderfully generous and engaged teacher of the humanities, who profoundly influenced and enriched the lives of several generations of students in the College,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History. “Her contributions to the theory and practice of liberal education were manifold and outstanding. She left an extraordinary legacy of excellence and dedication to the highest educational ideals of the College.”

In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens, AB'95, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, noted that Kass was one of the best teachers he ever had. “Mrs. Kass believed that at least one aim of a higher education is to provide students with a sextant of sorts, by which they might better discover what it is they should know about life, what they might hope for it and how they might go about getting it,” he wrote.

Born Amy Judith Apfel in 1940, Kass grew up in New York City and chose, against her parents' wishes, to attend the University of Chicago because the recruitment catalogue focused on ideas and contained no pictures. "But really what was distinctive about Chicago—it was a place where you didn’t have to apologize for being serious," she often said. She met her future husband on her first day on campus. Leon Kass, a student at what is now the Pritzker School of Medicine, happened to be on the Orientation Board, responsible for orienting new students. The two were married two years later, in 1961.

During a video interview in January 2014 with Bill Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, Amy Kass spoke fondly of her experience at UChicago. “We spent the first three weeks discussing the Declaration of Independence,” she recalled. “And I was blown away. The conversations that it generated … really converted me to a way of thinking, a way of reading and a way of speaking,” she added.  

After graduating from UChicago, Kass took a teaching job at a high school in Lincoln-Sudbury, Mass. She took time off in the summer of 1965, following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, to put her strong beliefs in civil rights into action. She and her husband traveled to Mississippi, where they spent a month mobilizing African Americans in rural Holmes County to register to vote, encouraging them to organize and defend their civil rights.

“Amy’s devotion to excellence in teaching was part of a larger moral vision that guided her throughout her life and shaped her character,” said Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, and the Herbert W. Vaughan fellow at the Witherspoon Institute. “At the core of that vision was a sense of the profound and equal dignity of the human person.”

Re-inventing the rituals of courtship

Kass joined the UChicago faculty in 1976 as a lecturer in the Humanities Collegiate Division. Her husband Leon also joined the faculty for what would be a long and distinguished tenure; he currently is the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus of Social Thought and the College. Amy and Leon Kass co-founded the “Human Being and Citizen” Common Core course devoted to the questions, “what is an excellent human being and what is an excellent citizen?” Amy Kass also was a stalwart teacher and advisor in the Fundamentals: Issues and Texts undergraduate major.

“Amy was an inspirational teacher for students and staff, believing so vehemently as she did in the value of a humanistic education,” said David Bevington, the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. “She was no less dear and wonderful as a human being and colleague.”

Nathan Tarcov, professor of social thought and political science, agreed. “Amy was a rare and beloved teacher who inspired her students not only to respect the great books she taught but to respect themselves and each other,” said Tarcov.

At UChicago, Kass and her husband learned from their observations and through conversations that many young people went along from one unsatisfactory relationship to the next, often becoming “jaded and embittered.”

“There was a lot of talk about the failure of marriage, the divorce culture, the problems of single parenthood,” said Leon Kass during an interview with the Weekly Standard’s Kristol. “But there was absolutely no discussion whatsoever about how you get married and how you go about finding and winning the right one with whom you could make a life. And there were no cultural norms, there were no teachings.”

The Kasses decided to address the problem, both in writing and teaching. In 2000, the efforts led to the creation of a course, “Ethics of Everyday Life: Courtship,” which was based on an anthology the couple edited, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying. The book promotes what they called a higher kind of sex education designed to prepare hearts and minds for romance leading to lasting marriage.

Through the book, the Kasses sought to inspire young people to rediscover the blessings of marriage by reading classic and modern works on the subject, and re-inventing new forms of courting based on improved respect between men and women.

“Amy tried to help her students realize that what they longed for—intellectually, spiritually, even romantically—but too often felt they were denied by modern life, was only denied to them as long as they failed to really understand their longings,” wrote journalist Yuval Levin, who earned his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at UChicago. “They could come to better understand them through the study of great works of literature.”  

In 1980, after only four years of teaching in the College, Amy Kass won a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In 2010, Kass received the Norman Maclean Faculty Award, and the University subsequently created the Leon and Amy Kass Odyssey Scholarship Fund.

“Amy Kass was keenly interested in young people’s development as thoughtful human beings,” said Ralph Lerner, the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus in Social Thought and the College, who co-taught several courses with Kass. “Her welcoming manner and easy smile never got the better of her intellectual rigor. Her success as a teacher may be measured by her many College students who strove to adopt for themselves the standard she held up before them: that when it comes to thinking, half-done is not well done.”

Kass retired in June 2010, and she discussed Herman Melville's Moby-Dickin her last class. When summarizing her UChicago career, she wrote that her lifelong mission was to teach people to “read great books slowly and critically, to refine their ideas, to enlarge their sympathies, and to aspire to a richer life beyond self-centered quests for gain, fame or power.”

Kass served on the National Council on the Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a consultant to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Corporation for National and Community Service, and as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

She authored numerous articles and edited anthologies on American autobiography, and on the idea and practice of philanthropy. In addition to Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar, she and her husband also produced the anthology, What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. They also produced e-curricula on The Meaning of Americaand The American Calendar.

Amy Kass is survived by her husband of 54 years, Leon Kass; her daughters, Sarah Kass and Miriam R. Kass; son-in-law, Robert Hochman; her granddaughters, Polly, Hannah, Naomi and Abigail; and her siblings, Dr. Roberta J. Apfel, Dr. Franklin J. Apfel and David J. Apfel.