Vigil held in remembrance of Barnard student Tessa Majors

ByEyewitness News WABC logo
Monday, December 16, 2019
Vigil held in remembrance of Barnard student Tessa Majors
Naveen Dhaliwal has more from Morningside Heights.

MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, Manhattan (WABC) -- A vigil was held Sunday to remember Barnard College student Tessa Majors, who was fatally stabbed in a Manhattan park this week.

Northern Manhattan elected officials and community leaders held a candlelight vigil in Morningside Park.

Growing memorials are in place on the edge of campus, feet from where Majors collapsed after being stabbed multiple times.

Police released a 14-year-old Saturday after he was being questioned in connection with the murder.

Divers were searching the pond in Morningside Park on Saturday.

Police have arrested a 13-year-old who was found with a knife while it's not clear if that was the murder weapon. Police say they are not talking to anyone else at this time.

The teen says he was present and only handled the knife, but he has implicated two others from his nearby middle school.

Majors was walking home around 5 p.m. Wednesday when she was attacked in the park and able to stumble up the stairs before she collapsed in front of a security booth.

Majors, from Charlottesville, Virginia, played in a rock band in New York and had told an editor from a newspaper internship in high school that she planned to take journalism classes in college.

Majors was killed just as the semester at all-women's Barnard College was winding down, with final exams set to begin Friday followed by a month break.

She sang and played bass guitar in the rock band Patient 0. After her first New York show in October, Majors wrote on Instagram: "Safe to say the first NYC show went well ;)"

Her Instagram account also offered glimpses into Majors' personality and her move from Virginia to the big city, from farewells to the "ville" to posts about college life.

Majors graduated high school in May from the private St. Anne's-Belfield School in Charlottesville, where Head of School David Lourie said she was "a shining light in our community, a good friend, respected classmate, trusted teammate, and creative and passionate musician."

Her father, Inman Majors, is the author of six novels and an English professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.


(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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