Comment on Lives of Texas campus victim, suspect violently intersect

FORT WORTH, Texas — The lives of 18-year-old University of Texas student Haruka Weiser and the teenage suspect in her killing differed dramatically. Weiser grew up in a tight-knit community in Oregon, where she attended an arts magnet school and danced with the Portland Ballet. By contrast, Meechaiel Khalil Criner, the 17-year-old runaway arrested in her death, was intellectually disabled, abandoned by his mother as an infant and in Texas foster care, his uncle, Leo Criner, told The Associated Press on Saturday. Authorities say Weiser and Criner’s lives intersected violently on UT’s Austin campus, leaving Weiser dead in a creek on school grounds Tuesday and Criner jailed two days later in Travis County on a $1 million bond. She grew up near Beaverton, Oregon, in a four-acre co-housing community established in 1998 around the values of community, service and sustainability, where residents share tools like lawn mowers but also responsibilities like gardening, said Weiser’s neighbor, Helen Spector. “She always had sunshine in her smile wherever she went,” Spector told the AP by phone Saturday while preparing soup for Weiser’s grieving parents and younger sister and brother. Spector said Weiser loved ballet and hip-hop dancing and wanted to study medicine, emulating her father, a doctor in Oregon. Weiser’s parents could not be reached for comment Saturday but said in a statement a day earlier that they “remain steadfast in our desire to honor Haruka’s memory through kindness and love.