Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Cornell Student Found Dead In Gorge Two Days Before Graduation

A senior at Cornell University in upstate New York was found dead in a nearby gorge on Friday, two days before his graduation ceremony.

Avram “Avi” Pinals of Newton, Massachusetts, had planned to attend medical school at the University of Michigan, the Cornell Sun reported Sunday. He majored in biological sciences with a concentration in neurobiology and behavior, and minored in music.

Police told the Sun that the cause of death is not yet determined but foul play is not suspected. He is the third Cornell student to die in the Fall Creek Gorge in a little over a year.

Pinals played trumpet in the university’s jazz band and wind symphony, was a philanthropy chair in the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, and often volunteered at a local community kitchen, the Sun reported. He had also worked as a field laboratory technician at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, a research trainee at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a research assistant at the University of Michigan Medical Center.

“Avi’s profound impact on others was undeniable,” the director of advising for Cornell’s Office of Undergraduate Biology, Beth Howland, wrote on Saturday night. “To say it is tragic for such a promising young life to be cut so short is an understatement.”

Pinals’s faculty advisor described him as “a young man with great intellect, a generosity of spirit, and a genuine interest in other humans their welfare,” according to an email from the dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, Gretchen Ritter.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.