Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Mary Read: Aspiring elementary school teacher served food, smiles
Mary Karen Read
- Age: 19
- Status: Freshman
- Major: Interdisciplinary studies
- Hometown: Annandale, Va.
- High school: Annandale High School
- Parents: Peter Read, Sun-Yon Kim
- Blacksburg residence: Campbell East
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At Annandale High School, Mary Read brought cupcakes to her friends in the school band and helped bake a strawberry cake each time someone in her French class celebrated a birthday.
At the Virginia Tech dining hall where she worked this semester, Read served pizza, pasta and smiles.
“She was just one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever known,” said Malisa Savanh, a friend since middle school. “There’s no bad anybody could ever say about her.”
Read, who was killed Monday at Norris Hall, was born in South Korea into an Air Force family and lived in Texas and California before settling in Annandale, Va., said her aunt Karen Kuppinger, of Rochester, N.Y.
An aspiring elementary school teacher, she was “a young person who had a lot of promise and was just starting to figure out what direction she was going to go,” uncle Edward Kuppinger said.
At Virginia Tech, she joined Campus Crusade for Christ and a Bible study group.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” fellow Tech freshman Blair Bullock wrote in an e-mail. “Mary is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. She was such a caring and happy person, always laughing and smiling. She never spoke a bad word about anyone; she was a sister and friend to everyone.”
Read, the oldest of five children, loved the beach and delighted in wearing flip-flops as often as possible — “even when it was cold out,” said Savanh, a freshman at the College of William and Mary.
She played lacrosse and the clarinet, loved football and spun flags in her high school color guard.
Since February, she had worked at the West End Market, a campus dining facility where she was a model employee, operations manager Jamie Parnell said.
“She was very friendly and sweet,” Parnell said. “There was nothing more we could have asked her to do.”
Bullock recalled Read’s reaction last week after their Bible-study group watched a video about heaven.
“Mary was talking about how great it’s going to be when we get there, and how excited she was,” she wrote. “We are comforted in knowing that we will see her again one day.”
— Jim Reedy and Associated Press
