BERKELEY (AP) — A University of California, Berkeley student who was killed in last week’s Bastille Day truck attack in France was remembered Monday as an energetic and engaged member of the campus community.
Nicolas Leslie, 20, was an aspiring entrepreneur and environmentalist who participated in fraternity life and a student-run consulting group that provides marketing, research and social responsibility advice to businesses, student body President William Morrow said.
“He is definitely well-connected on campus and known as a socially affable person,” said Morrow, who met Leslie a couple of times and helped organize a vigil in his honor later Monday.
The FBI informed school officials on Sunday that Leslie was one of the 84 people killed when a Tunisian man rammed a truck through crowds on a promenade in the French city of Nice.
Leslie, a San Diego area resident, had been missing since the terror attack. Friends, relatives and university officials had been searching hospitals in Nice and plastering the city with flyers bearing his photo before word of his death came.
Berkeley T-shirts and other mementos were placed on the promenade in Leslie’s memory.
Another Berkeley student, 18-year-old sophomore Tarishi Jain, was among the 20 hostages killed by militants in Dhaka, Bangladesh, earlier this month.
Leslie was a junior majoring in environmental sciences who planned to also study at Berkeley’s business school in the fall, campus officials said. He was a member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, Morrow said.
Leslie was one of 85 California college students attending a month-long entrepreneurship class and competition in Nice hosted by the European Innovation Academy and organized by Berkeley’s Study Abroad program, UC Berkeley officials said.
Two other program participants still were unaccounted for as of Monday: 22-year-old Canada-based Ukrainian national Misha Bazelevskyy and 21-year-old Estonian Rickard Kruusberg, Annie Seneard, a communication officer at the Nice branch of the academy, told The Associated Press.