Graduate’s final blog hours before blast

She was a food fan, eager for culinary discoveries.

In her last microblog update the morning before the Boston Marathon blasts, the Chinese graduate student identified as the attack’s third victim posted a photo of ciabatta-like bread chunks and fruit.

“My wonderful breakfast,” Boston University statistics student Lu Lingzi wrote.

In her early 20s, she often shared photos of her home-prepared meals on her Twitter-like Chinese Sina Weibo account.

They were almost always served in a shallow, blue-patterned bowl. In September, she showed off her first two-dish meal — stir-fried broccoli and scrambled eggs with tomatoes, often cooked by Chinese students learning how to live on their own abroad.

Chinese officials have said one of their nationals was killed in the attack, but authorities in China and the US have not released a name, in accordance with the wishes of the victim’s parents. However, state media and long-time acquaintances have identified the victim as Lu Lingzi from the north-eastern city of Shenyang.

An editor of her hometown newspaper, the Shenyang Evening News, said Lu’s father had confirmed her death when reporters visited the family.

The reports have drawn an outpouring of comments and condolences from friends and strangers, both on Lu’s Sina Weibo account — with nearly 20,000 comments as of last night — and on their own. Her former neighbour in Shenyang, Zhang Xinbo, lamented how the news brought home the tragedy of what he had considered a faraway event.

“I saw her grow up, and a few scenes from the past are flashing through my mind. Now, she’s becoming a girl, a bit Westernised, but a loud bang has changed everything,” he wrote on his own Sina Weibo account. “I think of her loved ones, and I don’t know how they are coping with this painful news, while still searching for any thread of hope.”

Lu’s former high school teacher, Yang Yongkun, told the Shenyang Evening News that Lu had left a deep impression on him.

“This child is particularly smart and simple,” the newspaper quoted Yang as saying.