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On their first night at Syracuse University, Emma Baker and their roommate eagerly made their way to the Shaw Quadrangle, ready to meet new people at a Harry Potter movie night. In the crowd of nervous freshmen, Baker spotted Valerie Goldstein, decked out in Ravenclaw earrings and a matching tie.

“We used to joke that that’s when I knew that I was gonna love her forever,” Baker said.

Valerie, a 2024 Syracuse University graduate, died alongside her parents and younger sister on Christmas Day as a result of a carbon monoxide leak in their New Hampshire vacation home.

Originally from Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, Valerie graduated from SU with a bachelor’s degree in policy studies. She was in her first year working with Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that places recent graduates in underserved schools to teach for two years, when she died. Valerie had been working as a fifth-grade teacher at Baskerville Elementary in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.

“Those kids loved her. She was there for not even a full calendar year, and she was already making such a big impact on these sweet kids and seeing the best in them and making learning fun,” Eleni Cooper, a communications design major at SU, said.

Cooper met Valerie in their first week of college at an icebreaker event for the Renée Crown Honors Program’s orientation.

“My initial impression was ‘Oh my God, she’s so cool, so confident and so amazing,’ and then at some point, a day or two in, she invited me to Dellplain Hall,” Cooper said. “She brought me over to meet her neighbors on the floor and the four of us clicked immediately.”

Cooper and Valerie lived in a house together last year, where Valerie covered the wall in paper flowers to be signed by guests to commemorate their visits, they said. Cooper also credits Valerie for introducing them to some of their closest friends and romantic partner.

“I’ve always said that I’m one degree separated from everybody on Earth because I knew her, because she was just involved in so many different things,” Cooper said. “And she genuinely wasn’t the type of person that was just really social. She genuinely cared very deeply for just an absurdly impressive amount of people.”

Valerie had a passion for “all things nerdy,” Baker said. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Hamilton, The Hobbit and musical theater were some of her favorites. She even shared a matching Lord of the Rings tattoo with her father, Matthew Goldstein.

Matthew Goldstein, an eighth-grade math teacher at the Edith C. Baker School in Brookline, Massachusetts, shared a special bond with Valerie, his oldest daughter. Baker described the two as “especially close,” noting that Valerie often wrote poetry about him on her poetry-dedicated Instagram account. In one post, she fondly recalled the mornings when he would style her hair into pigtails before leaving for school.

Valerie also shared a close bond with her younger sister, Violet, and her mother, Lyla, Baker said. Violet Goldstein was a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she had just finished her first semester studying art when she died. Baker said she was a talented artist with paintings displayed at multiple galleries. She and Valerie also shared matching tattoos based on one of her drawings.

Lyla Goldstein was a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and loved to bake. She was an active member of her community, leading a Girl Scout Troop as well as coaching girls’ basketball and soccer. Lyla often hosted events for her family and friends, a trait that Valerie picked up and carried on throughout her time at SU, Baker said.

Courtesy of Alethea Shirilan-Howlett

Valerie (right) loved musical theater and performing. Throughout her time at SU, she was known for her themed parties, with themes including Twix, Shrek and Lord of the Rings.

“She made everything an occasion, especially birthdays, but she would just have parties at her house all the time,” Alethea Shirilan-Howlett, another friend from SU, said. “She had a Twix party once, a Shrek party, a Hobbit party. She was just someone who loved celebrating other people.”

Shirilan-Howlett, who graduated with Valerie, said Valerie’s parties represented the love she had for her friends. The two met through The Kumquat, a satirical news group at SU. She said Valerie loved to write and was an active voice at the publication.

Valerie’s love for musical theater influenced her to perform herself, which she did while supporting Shirilan-Howlett’s senior thesis, “Pitsl: A Miracle Play,” where she played Shirilan-Howlett’s love interest.

“We had a kissing scene and when we did the kiss we would get closer and closer and then hold our scripts up,” Shirilan-Howlett said. “And it looked like we were kissing behind the scripts but we just both did a little head dance and just laughed at each other.”

Valerie often wrote letters to Shirilan-Howlett and the rest of her friends, complete with matching stationary and stickers, sprayed with her perfume and sealed with wax. Shirilan-Howlett had a letter for Valerie waiting to be mailed when she found out about her and her family’s deaths.

Valerie was a member of multiple clubs and organizations at SU, playing intramural volleyball and soccer, writing for The Kumquat and serving as chief operating officer of Skills Win!, an organization that helps local middle and high school students learn often-overlooked skills, such as typing and researching.

“She constantly inspired me to be a better person. She was really superhuman. I feel like she kind of moved two times faster than everybody else,” Shirilan-Howlett said.

Bill Coplin, a professor of policy studies at SU, said that as a freshman, Valerie spent time in his PST416: Community Problem Solving class even though she wasn’t officially enrolled in the course.

“She sat in the class for no grade or anything, and then the next semester she took it, and then the next semester she ran it. And she ran it for three semesters… she just was unstoppable,” Coplin said.

With a 4.0 GPA throughout her time at SU, Valerie also worked as a research assistant for Coplin while he wrote his book, “The Path to Equity: Inclusion in the Kingdom of Liberal Arts.” Coplin said with her aid, it was the fastest book-writing process he ever had.

After speaking with the Baskerville Elementary principal, Coplin learned that Valerie was the only teacher in the school to meet her class’s academic benchmarks, a level of improvement the school hopes to see across its classrooms.

“One of the (Baskerville) teachers said she was always with the students. She always cared about the students, and she would even go out on the playground and play volleyball with them,” Coplin said. “You know, these are fifth graders. How many teachers go out and play with fifth graders?”

Coplin said the first time he met Valerie, she stood out as the first of only three students to take him up on a lunch event offered to his entire Introduction to Policy Studies class.

Valerie wanted to create change in education policy with her degree, Coplin said, but knew the first step was to become a teacher herself.

In pursuit of this dream, Valerie enrolled in Teach for America, where she met Paris Coughlin, a first-grade teacher at Martin Millennium Academy in Tarboro, North Carolina. As participants of the same program living in the same state, the two agreed to live together.

“I met Valerie initially over Zoom. She comes across, at least over Zoom, as someone who is intensely shy, and that is a complete lie,” Coughlin said. “I knew she was kind of nerdy and geeky from the jump, but the depth and breadth of both her nerdy geekiness as well as her personality is astounding.”

Coughlin said even though they didn’t think they would connect with her at first, Valerie offered Coughlin a room in her apartment because she knew they were having trouble finding housing. After moving in, Coughlin said the two instantly became friends.

Living with Valerie, Coughlin said, was like living in their childhood home. Valerie would often cook meals, buy Coughlin their favorite snacks and “pamper” them daily.

“It’s just romantic. She was just so romantic. I think it’s difficult in some ways to describe and understand a friendship as romantic,” Coughlin said. “But I think that she was someone who you could really actualize intimate, platonic love with, because she was just the best. ”

Coughlin and Valerie spent most of their free time together. One of their favorite activities was watching Dancing with The Stars, a reality television dance competition. The two rewatched every rerun available online and tuned in every Tuesday during its latest season, rooting for American rugby player Ilona Maher and The Bachelor star Joey Graziadei.

They also remembered dressing up to see the musical “Wicked” in theaters together; Coughlin as Glinda and Valerie as Elphaba, who Coughlin said she really resonated with.

Valerie’s love and care for the environment also stood out to Coughlin. They recalled their friend searching high and low for a recycling bin after realizing their home didn’t provide recycling services. Reluctantly, Coughlin drove Valerie two blocks down to the nearest bin every week, just so Valerie could throw her recycling away into the proper receptacle.

“I feel like so many of those small good things made up her life, these small efforts that, like, are seemingly meaningless but actually amount to so much in the grand scheme of things,” Coughlin said.

Coughlin compared living with Valerie to tubing down a river, saying that as long as you trusted the path, you would always be safe and taken care of.

After the Goldstein family’s memorial, Coughlin, Baker and other friends of Valerie all met up. Though some of the group were complete strangers to each other, they all felt connected through Valerie.

“My goal now, and all I really can hope for, I guess, is to one day be someone else’s Valerie,” Coughlin said. “Be home to somebody else, and kind of take what I’ve gained and what I’ve learned from Valerie, and offer it to someone else.”

Published on January 23, 2025 at 12:40 am

Contact Delia: dsrangel@syr.edu