ROME—Pope Francis met on Wednesday with the parents of a U.S. college student whose body was found in Rome’s Tiber river this week, as police tried to establish if the teenager was murdered less than 24 hours after arriving in Italy for summer classes.
A brief Holy See statement said Francis expressed to Beau Solomon’s parents “feelings of deepest sympathy and compassion, and his closeness in prayer to the Lord for the young man who died so tragically.” The pope held the unscheduled, private encounter shortly before holding an audience with French pilgrims in a Vatican auditorium.
Solomon’s roommate has told school officials he last saw him early Friday at a pub popular with U.S. students in the Trastevere neighborhood of cafes, bars and restaurants near the Tiber.
The 19-year-old Solomon, who had just completed his first year of study at University of Wisconsin-Madison, had arrived in the Italian capital on Thursday for study at John Cabot University, a four-year, English-language institution not far from the pub.
The ANSA news agency said preliminary autopsy results indicated that Solomon had suffered injuries consistent with a fall. Police on Tuesday detained a homeless Italian man they described as being “seriously suspected of murder aggravated by futile motives.”
