U.S. Girl, 17, Dies in Fall From Soviet Hotel Room

A 17-year-old honors student on a student-exchange tour of the Soviet Union died in Leningrad in an apparent fall from her fifth-floor hotel room, school officials said today.

Mary (Melony) Hardaway was pronounced dead at the scene Tuesday, after a Soviet citizen found the girl’s body on the street beneath her window in the Kiev Hotel.

Spokesmen with the People-to-People program said 29 students from Colorado and Wyoming were near the end of a two-week tour Tuesday morning when Hardaway told the group’s two adult sponsors that she was tired and wanted to skip a scheduled museum tour. That was about an hour before her body was found.

“It’s still up in the air about what happened,” said Cherry Creek High School speech teacher Gary Addington, an organizer of the People-to-People programs. “There was no forced entry into the room, and the door was bolted from the inside.”

Addington called the fall “either a mistake or something else.”

“It all kind of depends on what that window looks like,” he said. “If she was pushing on it or what it was. My first information was it was a low veranda thing and (the fall) could have easily been a mistake.”

An autopsy is being done in the Soviet Union, and it is not known when the body will be returned to Colorado.

Soviet officials are translating Hardaway’s diary and examining her camera film as part of the investigation, Addington said.

Hardaway’s parents and an aunt, who is a pathologist, were to arrive in Leningrad today. Her father, Robert M. Hardaway, is an associate professor of law at the University of Denver; her mother, Mary, is a Continental Airlines employee.