A Short Life Lived to the Fullest
Senior From Vienna Worked Hard, Played Hard

By William Wan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 28, 2007

The hair dyeing started when she got to college. Blue, green, purple and red. It was a silly thing, a fleeting indulgence for a young woman serious about her future. But not too indulgent -- Maxine Turner would dye only the very tips of her locks. That way she could quickly get rid of them the second she landed a job interview.

That was Maxine, her friends say, whimsical and practical, fun and studious.

Her friends and family have spent the past two weeks laughing and crying, rocking loud and weeping soft. And yesterday, on a chilly day under a cloudy sky, they gathered for her funeral at Church of the Holy Comforter in Vienna. It was the last in a long week of memorial services in the Washington area, home to six of the Virginia Tech dead.

There were two sides to senior Maxine Shelly Turner, 22, her family and friends said, and the studious side emerged early in life.

After getting on the bus for the first day of kindergarten, Maxine opened her pencil case and wondered: "Are these the right kind of pencils?"

"She never messed around with school," said her friend Tina Diranian, who sat beside her that day on the bus.

One of Turner's favorite "Sesame Street" characters was Count von Count, and she often finished her homework -- especially math -- days before it was due. At James Madison High School, she signed up for the hardest math and science classes, even when it meant she was one of the only girls in class.

"She ended up putting us guys to shame," Darren O'Brien, 22, said.

But when work was done, and sometimes before, all that seriousness would evaporate and a wild, fun streak would emerge.

Turner once volunteered to be duct-taped to a window to win a game. She could quote entire Monty Python movies. She got a big kick out of working at a lingerie store while in high school, cracking up over clueless husbands trying awkwardly to buy something for their wives. And whenever, wherever she heard music, she would rock to it -- dancing, shuffling, even doing homework to the beat.

Turner, a Vienna resident, was accepted to Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins but chose Virginia Tech after falling in love with the campus. The bright green grass of the Drillfield and the stone-facade buildings made it all look like some fairy-tale castle, she told her roommate.

Living with Maxine could be messy at times, but also inspiring. "I was a little more reserved before I met Max," said Michelle Vrikkis, 22, who roomed with her all four years. Maxine took Michelle to her first rock concert, taught her to swing dance and expanded her tastes in music.

"Yeah, she basically taught me how to rock," Michelle said.

After their sophomore year, Maxine, Michelle and 10 other students formed a sorority for engineers. Engineering, they said, was hard enough on its own, but in a field mostly filled with men, it was doubly difficult for women.

A petite woman -- 5-foot-1 and 110 pounds -- she also joined a taekwondo club and was preparing to test for her brown belt. "She said she wanted some way to defend herself, should anything happen," said her father, Paul Turner, 53.

She fulfilled most of her class requirements by her junior year, so she took some fun classes her senior year: Chinese medicine, horror films and beginning German. It was in German class that she was shot and killed April 16.

When her friends learned of her fate, an online memorial sprang up on Facebook.com. Within hours, hundreds of friends had joined the site to grieve. And by the next day, they began looking for some way to celebrate her life.

They thought about her fun side, the part of her that loved rocking to the beat. So instead of having a moment of silence in her name, her friends decided they would have a moment of loudness.

Last week, they packed into a bar in Fairfax, put a hard rock band from her high school onstage and yelled out the lyrics to her favorite songs. There was grief in the music -- a loud, angry, bass-thumping sadness -- but there was also affirmation.

"This is how she would have wanted it," Diranian shouted over the noise of the crowd, causing the bar to erupt into cheers as everyone raised a drink in agreement. "I know she's looking down on us and saying, 'Yes, this is the way to rock out my life.' "

Turner's brother Anthony, 13, was surrounded by Maxine's friends. Her death has been especially hard on her brother, Paul Turner said. "Anthony looked up to her, wanted to emulate her," he said. "Maxine played violin, so he wanted to play violin. She was good at math, so he wanted to have strong math skills."

During the past two weeks, her mother, Susan Turner, 52, has spent hours reading the hundred-plus posts on Maxine's memorial on Facebook, poring over the memories of her daughter's friends.

There should have been more time, they all seem to say. With just weeks to go until graduation, Maxine had spent her spring break apartment-hunting with her mother in Elkton, Md. She had been offered several jobs, but the one she had picked, the one she called " amazing," was an engineering position in Elkton with W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex.

She had chosen the job for practical reasons, her parents said, but also for its proximity to the beach.

There had been other plans as well: to get a black belt in taekwondo, to adopt a dog -- a miniature husky. She had talked about getting a PhD one day and becoming a researcher.

"She was one of those people you knew would change the world one day, make it better," Diranian said. "Now the world will never know."

Six students from the Washington area were killed in the Virginia Tech shootings, and each has been profiled this week. These stories, and profiles of all 32 victims, can be found at washingtonpost.com/shootings.