U.S. Citizen Killed On MH17 Lived Mainly In Netherlands

By Scott Neuman

Published July 18, 2014 at 3:52 PM CDT

Candles commemorating the dead spell out MH17, the flight number of the plane that crashed Thursday, at a church in Kuala Lumpur on Friday.

Quinn Schansman, the dual U.S.-Dutch citizen killed on Malaysia Airlines MH17, was reportedly planning to join his family in Kuala Lumpur for vacation when the plane he was on was shot down over eastern Ukraine.

USA Today says: "Photos on social-media accounts show a fun-loving college student who enjoyed hanging out with friends, had a girlfriend and liked to relax with a beer or a smoke, especially after exams. Some news reports say he was 19 when he died."

According to his Facebook page, Schansman considered Amsterdam his home.

USA Today, citing public records and social media, says his father lives in Menlo Park, in the San Francisco Bay area, where he currently works for Siemens. His mother lives in Amsterdam, the paper says.

NBC News says Schansman was born in New York City but lived in the Netherlands for most of his life.

Karlijn Keijzer, 25, of Amsterdam, was also among the dead on Malaysia Airlines MH17. She was a doctoral student in chemistry at Indiana University.

Separately, Indiana University said Friday that 25-year-old Karlijn Keijzer, a Dutch national pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry at Indiana University, was also among the dead on MH17. Keijzer had been a member of the university's rowing team.

"On behalf of the entire Indiana University community, I want to express my deepest sympathies to Karlijn's family and friends over her tragic death," Indiana University President Michael A. McRobbie said in a statement on the university's website. "Karlijn was an outstanding student and a talented athlete, and her passing is a loss to the campus and the university. Our hearts also go out to the families of all the victims of this senseless act."

The university said Keijzer "was part of a research team that uses large-scale computer simulations to study small-molecule reactions involving certain metals. She was co-author of a research article published this year in the Journal of the American Chemistry Association."