Sarah Papenheim was supposed to be coming home for Christmas. The 21-year-old drummer, a precocious up-and-comer on the radar of some of the Twin Cities’ most respected musicians, had a show…
Sarah Papenheim was supposed to be coming home for Christmas.
The 21-year-old drummer, a precocious up-and-comer on the radar of some of the Twin Cities’ most respected musicians, had a show to put on. Next week, she was scheduled to be onstage at Schooner Tavern in Minneapolis, playing the blues with a friend and fellow musician. She was supposed to be flying in from the Netherlands, where she was attending Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
But on Wednesday, a phone call from Dutch authorities replaced anticipation with grief: In Papenheim’s own apartment Wednesday, police said, her roommate stabbed her to death.
“I’ve cried so much my ducts are dry,” her mother, Donee Odegard, told Fox 9 in Minneapolis.
Police arrested Papenheim’s roommate, a 23-year-old man and cello player, Wednesday afternoon on suspicion of murder and expect he will be charged in her death soon, a Rotterdam Police Department spokesman told The Washington Post. The suspect, whom police have declined to identify, fled the apartment building in Rotterdam on a train and was captured at a station 65 miles away, carrying a suitcase and a cello, police said.
Police aren’t sure about his motive in the killing at this time, the spokesman said. Her mother told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that her daughter started living with him about a year ago after bonding over music, but that he had recently become unstable. Odegard said her daughter planned to leave the apartment to stay with her boyfriend, but returned to grab clothes for school, which is when Odegard believes the stabbing happened.
