Pipo Nguyen-duy, a photography professor and the chair of the studio art department at Oberlin College in Ohio, and his wife, Tran Thi Phong, were fatally shot in their home on Wednesday 28 October. Nguyen-duy was 64. Phong was 56.

Their child, Asia Nguyen-duy, 31, has been charged with their deaths and faces six counts of murder, one count of tampering with evidence and four counts of felonious assault, according to Oberlin Municipal Court records. The charges were reported as the college community absorbed news that has stunned one of America's best-known liberal arts institutions, and as friends and colleagues began to share tributes to a teacher many described as beloved.

Nguyen-duy was a respected photographer whose work was widely exhibited. His series Mercury, made between 1995 and 1998 and revisited in 2025, was among his best-known bodies of work, and his photographs circulated in galleries and publications well beyond the college. As chair of Oberlin's studio art department, he shaped the teaching of photography at the college and mentored generations of students, many of whom have spoken of his generosity as a teacher and his exacting eye.

Oberlin, a small college town in northern Ohio, is known for its conservatory and its art museum, and the deaths have reverberated far beyond the campus. Tributes have focused on Nguyen-duy as a teacher and colleague whose influence extended well beyond his own photographs, and on the suddenness of a loss that has left the college reeling as it comes to terms with the violence of what happened in a faculty family's home.