Family and friends recall graduate student Hadi Kasab
When Hadi Kasab was a boy in Lebanon, he went through a phase of carrying a small briefcase to school.“He already knew that he wanted to be an engineer,” Kasab’s younger sister, Jana, recalls — and the young Hadi thought that carrying a briefcase was something all engineers did.Her brother never lost his sense of wonderment at the world, Jana Kasab says: “He was really always a 5-year-old on the inside.”Hadi Kasab, 23, was found dead in his room in MIT’s Sidney Pacific dormitory on the evening of March 6. He had been a second-year graduate student in MIT’s program in Computation for Design and Optimization, on track to graduate with his master’s degree in June.“He was very quiet most of the time,” Jana Kasab says. “We used to say that he lived in his own world.” At a kindergarten graduation ceremony, her distracted but driven brother marched straight across...