Vanderbilt University graduate student and former U.S. Army officer Taylor Force was stabbed to death Tuesday in a series of Tel Aviv stabbings carried out over 20 minutes.
The attacker, a 22-year-old Palestinian man, was shot and killed by police after fleeing to another area and stabbing more people. 12 others were injured in what the US State Department is condemning as “outrageous terrorist attacks.”
Vice President Joe Biden was nearby at the time of the stabbings, which took place in the Jaffa district, by the Mediterranean Sea.
An Israeli-American woman Emily Young tended to another stabbing victim, applying pressure to his wounds with her jacket and accompanying him to the hospital. “He was badly stabbed on his eyebrow, and I put my jacket on his face and applied pressure,” she told The New York Times.
“He was dead-set focused. The dude had big dreams,” Force’s friend Barrett Caldwell told The New York Times.
Force was a first-year graduate student in Vanderbilt’s school of management, and was in Israel studying global entrepreneurship with 28 other students.
“This horrific act of violence has robbed our Vanderbilt family of a young hopeful life and all of the bright promise that he held for bettering our greater world,” Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos said in a statement, according to CNN.