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American Killed in Egypt Taught English to Children American Killed in Egypt Taught English to Children
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An American college student killed Friday during antigovernment violence in Egypt was in the country on an internship to teach English to young children while also improving his Arabic skills, family members said. The American student who was killed in Egypt on Friday during street protests in Alexandria was an idealist, an Arabist and a linguist, drawn to the Middle East, friends said, despite — or perhaps even because of — its political unrest.
The American, Andrew D. Pochter, 21, a student at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, was killed in Alexandria during clashes between supporters and opponents of President Mohamed Morsi, the college said. Security officials in Egypt said he was fatally stabbed near the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been set on fire. The American, Andrew Pochter, 21, a student at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, was exuberant when he departed for Egypt on May 28 for a visit spanning three months, said a friend, Zoe Lyon, whom he called from the airport. The prospect of being in a country riven by political and religious conflict seemed to hold no fears for him, Ms. Lyon said. Like many other young people drawn to the world’s problems, she said, “he knew there was a possibility of trouble, but never thought that he could get caught up in it.”
Mr. Pochter, who was to enter his junior year at Kenyon in the fall, worked as an intern at Amideast, a nonprofit organization. “I am not shocked he was at a protest,” she said. It was not clear, she said, citing conversations with Mr. Pochter’s family, whether he was taking pictures or video of the scene in Alexandria.
Mr. Pochter’s family released a statement saying that he had planned to return to the Middle East for a semester abroad. Egyptian security officials said Saturday that Mr. Pochter was stabbed in the chest, near his heart, late Friday during clashes between supporters and opponents of the country’s president, Mohamed Morsi. He was taken to a nearby military hospital where he was pronounced dead shortly afterward.
“Our beloved 21-year-old son and brother Andrew Driscoll Pochter went to Alexandria for the summer, to teach English to 7- and 8-year-old Egyptian children and to improve his Arabic,” the statement said. “He was looking forward to returning to Kenyon College for his junior year and to spending his spring semester in Jordan.” On Saturday, Egyptian prosecutors ordered the arrest of suspects in the killing, but gave no information on the number of suspects or their identities. The prosecutor also ordered Mr. Pochter’s body to be handed over to American officials.
“He went to Egypt because he cared profoundly about the Middle East, and he planned to live and work there in the pursuit of peace and understanding,” the family said. But, even as the diplomatic machinery turned, current and former American students in Alexandria said Saturday that the reverberations of Mr. Pochter’s death had only just begun.
Mr. Pochter, who lived in Chevy Chase, Md., had also spent time in Morocco, and in an article he wrote for Al Arabiya News in 2011 he explored the potential of the Arab Spring protests that forced out President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt that year, viewing them through the lens of his time living with a Moroccan family. Alexandria, a port city which has previously seen protests turn violent, felt more tense than Cairo recently, said Tim Montrief, a University of Michigan student who spent time in both cities while studying in Egypt. That tension, he said “transferred over to how people treated Americans. It was really palpable.” One difference, he said, was that in Alexandria “they don’t really want their pictures taken. You really didn’t want to be seen taking someone’s picture.”
“By their participation in community protests, members of my host family and friends are trying to reinvent themselves as members of their society and changing how the rest of the world perceives them,” he wrote. “By voicing their opinions, they can help shape the true face of this Moroccan generation, not by what the media say.” Ian Bury, a student who took part in a language program called Flagship, who also recently returned to the United States, said he was surprised in Alexandria by “how much closer I was to the reality of the situation. My friends lived across the street from the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters that were burned down. Protests frequently passed behind my apartment,” he said, and he witnessed an anarchist group burning tires.
At Kenyon, Mr. Pochter was active in Hillel, the campus’s center for Jewish life, according to The Kenyon Collegian, the student newspaper. He went to high school at the Blue Ridge School, an all-boys boarding school outside Charlottesville, Va., where he won the foreign language award his senior year and played lacrosse. “I believe the real issue right now in Egypt isn’t the political disagreements but rather the complete lack of basic security measures,” he said.
Mr. Pochter was one of three people killed in Friday’s clashes, in which antigovernment protesters ransacked Muslim Brotherhood offices in Cairo and Alexandria as they demanded that Mr. Morsi step down and that early elections be held. “Thousands of families who have sent children abroad, or are planning to, have read, and will read about this,” said one friend of Mr. Pochter’s, who asked not to be identified because he did not want to be seen as speaking for the Pochter family.
Egyptian security officials said that Mr. Pochter was stabbed in the chest near his heart late Friday during clashes between Morsi supporters and opponents in Alexandria. He was taken to a nearby military hospital where he was pronounced dead shortly after. “My own family already called and told me not to go back to Egypt,” the friend said. But if Mr. Pochter’s death leads to “a collective recoil,” and a drawback of language and study abroad programs in Egypt, “it would be a shame. I don’t think he would have wanted that.”
On Saturday, Egyptian prosecutors ordered the arrest of several suspects in the killing, but gave no information on the number of suspects or their identities. The prosecutor also ordered that Mr. Pochter’s body be handed over to American officials. Mr. Pochter’s family said he had gone to Egypt to teach English to young children, while also working to improve his Arabic skills.
An embassy official confirmed Mr. Pochter was the victim, but would not say how he was killed. “He went to Egypt because he cared profoundly about the Middle East and he planned to live and work there in the pursuit of peace and understanding,” the family said in their statement. “Andrew was a wonderful young man looking for new experiences in the world and finding ways to share his talents while he learned.”
In response to the turmoil, the American State Department late Friday issued a travel advisory urging American citizens “to defer nonessential travel to Egypt at this time due to the continuing possibility of political and social unrest.” Mr. Pochter’s parents live in Chevy Chase, Md., just outside Washington. His father spoke briefly with a reporter at their home on Saturday, but only to say that the family preferred to speak with the news media on another day. Mr. Pochter’s mother, Elizabeth Driscoll Pochter, is the administrator for policy and program at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
It also authorized the departure of some nonemergency workers and family members. Andrew Pochter, said his friend Ms. Lyon, took an avid interest in the social and political turmoil in the Middle East after spending time with a host family in Morocco at the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011. As well as being a prominent member of Kenyon’s Jewish society, she said, he was close with its Arabic community and professors.
United States Embassy officials did not release any details about the circumstances of Mr. Pochter’s death, but the family, in its statement, said, “As we understand it, he was witnessing the protest as a bystander and was stabbed by a protester.” Marc Bragin, Kenyon’s Jewish chaplain and the director of Hillel House, a program for Jewish life on campus, said Mr. Pochter had “a passion for learning about other people and other cultures. He was truly interested in listening to what other people had to say, which for a 21-year-old is not that common.”
“Andrew was a wonderful young man looking for new experiences in the world and finding ways to share his talents while he learned,” the family said. In an article Mr. Pochter wrote for the Saudi Arabian news network Al Arabiya in 2011, Mr. Pochter described his experiences in the unpredictable early days of a political movement that came to transform the region, sometimes painfully.

Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Cairo.

He wrote, then, of his support for street protests. His host family, and others, he wrote, would “be on the streets to make sure that their claims and concerns are heard by all parties.”

Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Cairo, Gerry Mullany from Hong Kong, and Ashley Southall from Chevy Chase, Md. Susan Beachy contributed research from New York.