Service, scholarship fund to honor two Naperville sisters killed in Ohio driving home
A memorial service is being held Saturday for two sisters from Naperville who were killed in a car crash while driving home to visit their parents.
The service for Angel Yang, 29, and Cassidy Yang, 26, will be conducted online, via Zoom. It may also be telecast on YouTube, according to a post on a GoFundMe page raising money for the Angel and Cassidy Yang Foundation.
The sisters, their family's only children, were killed Dec. 5 on the Ohio Turnpike, according to Ohio State Police. A preliminary crash report indicates Cassidy lost control of the car and hit a car parked on the shoulder. There was freezing rain or drizzle at the time, according to the report.
Cassidy Yang was a graduate student at Princeton University in New Jersey, studying quantitative and computational biology at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, according to the university. She anticipated earning her doctorate in May. She graduated from Caltech in 2016 with a double major in physics and business economics and management, according to a web page about the two sisters with biographies written by their parents, Zhongjin Yang and Jie Yao.
Recently, she volunteered as a tutor for remote schooling for Black, Latino and other minority students in kindergarten through 12h grade in Princeton, New Jersey.
"Cassidy was a fantastic student," said adviser Joshua Shaevitz, a physics professor and director of the QCB graduate program, in the university news release. "She was tenacious at attacking problems and didn't back down when things in the lab got difficult.
"She was also an amazing friend and mentor to many in our group. In every research group there is usually one person who seems to selflessly look out for everyone else, and for us that was Cassidy. She was also active in mentoring and outreach projects both on campus and nationally. The world has lost a star at too young an age."
Angel had a bachelor's degree in physics and management science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master's degree in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of California at Berkeley. She was working as a business consultant in New York, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Both graduated from Naperville North High School.
"It's been years since I was in the same Chinese school class with Angel, but her mischievous sense of humor left quite an impression and made boring classes seem more fun," wrote one GoFundMe donor, Tianning Xu.
Angel was born in Oslo, Norway, while Cassidy was born in Halifax, Canada, before the family moved to Naperville in 1994, according to the parents' biographies.
"Her life was brilliantly radiant even if cut short," the parents wrote about Angel. And, Cassidy's "life was short but brilliant," they wrote.
Friends established the GoFundMe page with a goal of raising $100,000 to give to the Yangs' parents. The fund stood at more than $263,000 Friday evening.
The parents have indicated they intend to use it to establish a scholarship for women studying science, technology, engineering or mathematics, according to the organizer.
"With the outpouring of support and love from everyone near and far, Angel and Cassidy's parents are in the slow process of recovery from their loss of loved ones," the GoFundMe organizer wrote on the page Wednesday.
"In memory of Angel and Cassidy, and to carry on their dreams and legacies, we will keep working to grow the foundation to support more girls and young women in their future endeavors in science," the organizer wrote.