MIT Graduate Student Kaitlin Goldstein Found Dead in Ravine While Working Abroad
Members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community are in mourning and shock after the body of one student, Kaitlin Goldstein, 28, was found in India. The student had been missing since June 14 and it allegedly looks that she fell off of a cliff while jogging.
Goldstein was working on her doctorate in architecture at MIT in Cambridge. She arrived in India on June 7 to participate in a workshop on energy and development near the city of Leh. She was a competitive runner and simply out for a jog when she allegedly slipped on loose gravel and fell off of a cliff. Her body was found this week in a ravine.
"She was passionately interested in energy solutions for the developing world, a subject she was exploring in a remote region of northern India at the time of her death," MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in an email to students. "The death of someone so young and promising is a terrible loss; we should all take time to reach out to those around us."
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Goldstein was last seen on June 14, and her family initially feared that she had been kidnapped or worse, given the area that she was in.
"She could have gotten kidnapped for all I know," Goldstein's brother Adam told WPRI News. "It's happened in Delhi. There was a gang rape there a few months ago. My hope is she just wanted to get off the grid for a while and be by herself, but anything could have happened."
The FBI got involved, as did local police, and people that simply knew Goldstein. They organized searches for the student, but it wasn't until Sunday that officials confirmed that they had found her body. Now, her family is in mourning for the girl they said was "really passionate about helping poorer places out."
Goldstein was a native of Providence, Rhode Island. Her parents, Drs. Jack Goldstein and Jean Plover both went to India to help find their daughter. They now have the difficult task of bringing her body back home for burial.
