Candlelight vigil for Boston victims draws students, community members

Princeton students held a candlelight vigil at the Fountain of Freedom in Scudders Plaza for the victims of this month’s attacks on Boston on Monday evening from 9 to 11 p.m. The vigil served as a space of silence for members of the University and larger Princeton community who wanted to participate.

“Our vision for it is just to have sort of an intentional space for people to come and to mourn if they want to and to really just heal and reflect and send positive thoughts to the survivors and victims and just the whole city of Boston,” Emily Chang ’16, the organizer of the event, said.

The vigil featured a donation box whose funds will go to a charity that helps survivors of the Boston attacks purchase prosthetic limbs along with a banner on which participants could write messages to specific individuals affected by the attacks or to the city of Boston as a whole. Chang said that it hasn’t been decided where the banner will be sent yet, but it will probably be sent to the city government of Boston.

Hannah Miller ’16, who attended the vigil, said that she felt especially connected to the events that occurred in Boston as a member of the running community.

“I’m a runner, so I felt especially connected with the things that happened,” Miller said.

“We just want to support the entire Boston community. I think that’s pretty much the biggest reason why we’re here and to show them that they’re not alone in this,” another attendee, Shirley Zhu ’16, said.

Chang, the organizer, who is from Boston, explained that she came up with the idea on April 19, the day of the Watertown shootings, when she was reflecting on a candlelight vigil that the Worcester community had done a couple days beforehand.

“I was thinking about how that must’ve been really nice, just to have that intentional space — community space — building community in the wake of tragedy, which I think is really the best and only way you can deal with something so terrible that happened,” she said.

Chang added that the support she had received from her family and friends helped her to cope with the shootings and that she wanted the vigil to provide a channel for others to find support.

“I thought there might be other Princetonians here who either haven’t had as positive an experience as me or who also just want to have a very specific time and place for thinking about this,” Chang explained.

Chang explained that she had a very personal connection to the tragedies in Boston. The bombings took place in front of a library where she used to do her homework, which is only a couple of metro stops away from her house. Though her parents were out of town at the time of the bombings, Chang said she was nervous for her sister, who was in Boston at the time.

“I was horrified, shocked. I couldn’t believe it at first,” Chang said of her reaction to the bombings. “It was hectic and scary, and I was out of it for a couple hours — emotionally distraught, mentally scrambled.”

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Chang put together an ad hoc group of undergraduate students to help plan the event, and she reached out to the Butler and Wilson College Offices, which agreed to financially support the event.

However, she said that her aim wasn’t just about attracting a large crowd. “The point is to make sure that people who want to be there are there,” she explained.

“I think each person needs something different in the wake of what happened in Boston. I hope they find what they’re looking for,” Chang said. “Some things bring people together, and I think this is one of those things, and I hope people are just brought together by this and feel that there is a community created out of the tragedy in Boston.”