A Hoffman Estates woman attending college in rural southwestern Virginia was found slain Wednesday in a wooded area behind a shopping center about a mile from campus, police said.
Police would not say how Yasmeen Qutub, 18, was killed or whether they had any suspects, said Capt. Eugene McCoy of the Bristol Police Department. An autopsy was scheduled for Thursday in Roanoke, Va.
A passerby discovered Qutub’s body at 10:30 a.m., ending a nearly weeklong search that started shortly after the freshman at Virginia Intermont College went for a night walk on campus Feb. 8 and never returned.
Qutub, an equine studies major at the 834-student college who was known as Yassy, had gone out about 9 p.m. after quarreling with a female friend in her dormitory, said Ahila Qutub, her identical twin sister and roommate.
After several minutes, Ahila Qutub got worried, gathered some friends and started searching for her sister. When they couldn’t find her, they notified authorities.
Ahila Qutub flew home from Bristol on Wednesday with her mother, Nancy, who had gone to Virginia over the weekend to be with Ahila and to monitor the search.
“She has taken her sister’s death very hard,” said her father, Shehryar. “She needs a lot of care and consideration.”
On campus, students were grappling with the Baptist school’s first known slaying. Classes were canceled Wednesday and Thursday, and security has been increased.
“We are in shock,” college spokeswoman Laura Mondul said. “It’s always been a very small, close-knit campus. It’s always been very safe.”
Their shock and grief were echoed in Elgin at Canterbury Farm, where the twins kept their horse, With White Gloves.
“It was their combined dream to keep a barn and train horses,” said Norine Wilcox, 31, of Streamwood, who had known the sisters for 10 years. “I’ve never seen twins as close. They operated as one. They never did anything without one another.”
At Schaumburg High School, from which the twins graduated last spring, guidance counselor Tom Mueller described Yasmeen Qutub as a hard-working, likable student who excelled in the classroom, earning a 3.9 grade point average.
Physics teacher Ron Williams said she was “quiet and reserved, but if you talked to her outside of the classroom, she was very friendly.”
Yasmeen Qutub and her sister chose Virginia Intermont because their trainer was a graduate of its well-known equine studies program, said Amina Qutub, their older sister.
The college is near downtown Bristol, on the Virginia-Tennessee state line in the Appalachian Mountains. The sister city of Bristol, Tenn.–the two cities have a combined population of about 42,000–is perhaps best known for its NASCAR track.
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The college has a separate 132-acre riding center several miles outside town that was one of the targets of the search, which involved helicopters, police dogs and assistance from the FBI.
The twins’ older siblings, Amina and brother Mustafa, arrived from California and Minnesota over the weekend. They started contacting media, law enforcement and missing-person agencies in the hope their sister might be found alive.
After word spread that a body had been found Wednesday, Mustafa Qutub addressed reporters outside the family’s home in Hoffman Estates, thanking well-wishers for their support.
He talked about Yasmeen Qutub’s love of horses.
“It was a passion for her all her life,” Mustafa Qutub, 25, said. “That’s what drove her.”