Krista Depew’s death came as a shock to the Cornell community in May. Tonight, Cornellians will gather to honor her memory at a service in Sage Chapel at 5pm.
Depew died at the end of her Cornell freshman year from meningitis. On campus, among other things, she was an Applied Economics and Management major, an involved member of Alpha Phi sorority, and a Cornell Fitness monitor. Those who knew her describe her as being beautiful both inside and out.
Alpha Phi’s president sent out the following information to the Cornell greek community:
As most of you know by now, one of the rising Alpha Phi sophomores, Krista Depew, unexpectedly died on May 26th, the day before graduation. She contracted meningitis shortly upon her return home from Cornell after spring term, and unfortunately the symptoms did not present in a way that alerted Krista, her doctor or her family that there was anything wrong apart from a nasty case of the flu. Obviously, this was not the case.
Due to University policy and the impending graduation celebrations, Cornell would not release a statement via email alerting the school community to her passing, and thanks to the life-joy that is social media, almost everyone (including my members) found out via Facebook. Because of this a lot of individuals were left to mourn her death on their own, away from school, and we decided it would be best to post pone any sort of service for Krista to this fall, when all of our chapter members and her friends outside of Alpha Phi could be back together to try and navigate through this tricky time.
That being said, we will be hosting Krista’s memorial service at 5PM on Monday September 10th, 2012 at Sage Chapel. I know that it would mean a lot to my chapter members to see a lot of the other Panhellenic women there, and to see that they have a big system of support outside of just themselves.”
