On a rain-slicked October evening in 2025, the Juilliard School’s rehearsal studios still glowed with the memory of Emily Finn’s last arabesque. The 21-year-old senior had been in Studio 306 until 11:47 p.m., perfecting a 32-fouetté sequence that her teachers whispered could finally win the school its first gold medal at the prestigious Prix de Lausanne in Switzerland the following January. Classmates described her that night as radiant, almost weightless, laughing as she dabbed rosin on her pointe shoes and promised, “This is the year we shock the world.”

Less than forty-eight hours later, Emily was gone, murdered in her off-campus apartment by the ex-boyfriend she had tried for eighteen months to escape.

Her name is now etched on a small brass plaque outside the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, but for the thousands who watched her rise, the loss feels violently unfinished, like a symphony that ends mid-phrase.

Emily Rose Finn was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a steelworker father and a piano-teacher mother who recognized their daughter’s gift the moment four-year-old Emily stood on tiptoe to reach the kitchen counter and refused to come down. By seven she was training with the Scranton Civic Ballet; by twelve she had left public school for the American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis pre-professional program. Teachers still speak in hushed tones about the day a 14-year-old Emily walked into the ABT studios, all elbows and determination, and within one class earned a full scholarship from Misty Copeland herself. “She didn’t dance,” Copeland later said. “She negotiated with gravity and always won.”

At Juilliard, she became the quiet phenomenon everyone orbited. Her extensions were endless, her musicality surgical. When the school announced its 2025–2026 season, the marquee read simply: “Giselle – Emily Finn.” Critics who saw the dress rehearsal wrote phrases like “once-in-a-generation” and “the next Alessandra Ferri.” The Prix de Lausanne jury had already reserved front-row seats for the American contender who, at 5-foot-9 with legs that seemed borrowed from a Modigliani painting, moved like liquid starlight.

Yet behind the perfection was a private war.

His name was Caleb Warrick, 25, a former sound-engineering student she had dated for nine tumultuous months during her sophomore year. Classmates remember the early red flags: the way he waited outside studios for hours, the texts that flooded her phone during class, the screaming matches in the Juilliard lobby that once required security intervention. Emily ended it in March 2024 after Warrick allegedly pinned her against a dormitory wall during an argument. She filed for an order of protection in April. The judge granted it. She changed her locks, her phone number, her walking routes. She told friends, “I just want to dance without looking over my shoulder.”

For a while it seemed to work. Emily threw herself into preparation for Lausanne with monastic focus. She trained six days a week, took extra Pilates classes at 6 a.m., iced her feet in buckets while memorizing French vocabulary for the compulsory contemporary variation. Her variation coach, former Bolshoi principal Natalia Osipova, called her “a sponge that absorbed correction and turned it into diamonds.” In September, Emily was named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch.” The article’s headline read: “Emily Finn: The Girl Who Will Make America Believe in Ballet Again.”

On October 14, she FaceTimed her parents from the studio, twirling in a practice tutu. “Mom, I finally nailed the diagonal in ‘Kingdom of the Shades,’” she laughed, breathless. “Thirty-two clean turns. I counted.” Her mother, Karen Finn, still replays that video every night.

The next evening, Warrick violated the restraining order for the third time. Neighbors heard pounding on Emily’s apartment door at 10:52 p.m. Security footage later recovered by NYPD shows him forcing the lock with a screwdriver he had carried in his backpack. Inside, Emily was stretching on the living-room floor, earbuds in, listening to the adagio from Sleeping Beauty. She never had time to scream.

He stabbed her twenty-seven times.

Police found her body at 11:31 p.m. after a fellow dancer, worried that Emily had missed their nightly check-in call, alerted the doorman. Warrick was arrested three blocks away, covered in her blood, still clutching the kitchen knife. In his pocket was a crumpled print-out of Emily’s Lausanne registration confirmation, the words “You’ll never dance without me” scrawled across it in red ink.

The ballet world stopped spinning.

Juilliard canceled classes for a week. The marquee outside Lincoln Center went dark except for a single spotlight on a pair of blood-stained pointe shoes someone had left at the stage door. Within hours, #DanceForEmily trended worldwide. Paris Opéra Ballet dancers wore black armbands during performances of La Bayadère. The Royal Ballet dedicated its entire Swan Lake run to her memory. At the Scranton studio where she took her first steps, little girls in pink tights left roses and handwritten notes: “We’ll turn our fouettés for you.”

But the rawest grief unfolded inside Juilliard’s fourth-floor corridors. Dancers who once competed fiercely for studio mirrors now clung to one another in silence. One classmate, sophomore Lila Chen, described finding Emily’s practice tutu still hanging on the dressing-room rack, the ribbons tied in the perfect bow Emily was famous for. “It smelled like her rosin and vanilla,” Lila whispered. “I couldn’t breathe.”

Emily’s parents arrived from Pennsylvania the morning after the murder. Karen Finn walked into her daughter’s apartment clutching a childhood teddy bear and collapsed when she saw the chalk outline on the hardwood floor where Emily used to mark her turns with tape. Her father, Michael, a man who had once carried 300-pound steel beams for a living, stood motionless for twenty minutes staring at the blood-soaked rug, repeating, “She was going to be Giselle. She was going to be Giselle.”

The funeral was held on what would have been Emily’s 22nd birthday. Over eight hundred people filled St. Malachy’s Church in the Theater District, the “Actors’ Chapel,” because Emily had always joked she wanted to be buried where the stage lights could still find her. The New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck read a eulogy that left no dry eyes. “Emily didn’t just dance,” Peck said, voice breaking. “She reminded us why we started dancing in the first place: because for three minutes on stage, you can be weightless, fearless, immortal.”

They carried her out to the second act adagio from Giselle, the music she died listening to.

In the weeks since, the questions have multiplied like cracks in a shattered mirror.

Why was Caleb Warrick free after three restraining-order violations? Why did the NYPD’s monitoring system flag him only after the murder? Why did the dormitory he once stalked Emily in never install the promised additional security cameras? Advocates for domestic-violence survivors point to Emily’s case as the tragic endpoint of a system that too often treats young women’s fears as inconveniences rather than prophecies.

Juilliard has announced the Emily Finn Scholarship, fully funded for the next twenty-five years, earmarked for female dancers fleeing abusive relationships. The first recipient will be chosen on what would have been Emily’s opening night as Giselle. The Prix de Lausanne has created a new prize in her name: the Emily Finn Spirit Award, given to the dancer who most embodies courage and artistry under pressure.

On the night Emily was supposed to debut her variation in Juilliard’s winter showcase, the stage remained empty for four full minutes of silence, an eternity in theater. Then, one by one, every dancer in the school walked onstage in their pointe shoes, placed a single white camellia, Emily’s favorite flower, at the center mark, and executed a single, perfect reverence toward the wings where she would have entered.

The applause that followed was deafening, the sound of a world refusing to let her final pirouette be forgotten.

Somewhere, if the stories are true, Emily Finn is still turning, thirty-two fouettés and then some, weightless, fearless, immortal.