Father-daughter pilgrimage ends tragically in Mumbai
Alan Scherr and daughter Naomi, 13, were nearing the end of a visit to India with their Virginia spiritual group when militants attacked, killing both.
Reporting from Arlington, Va. — Alan Scherr devoted his life to meditation and the search for peaceful balance. His 13-year-old daughter, Naomi, was as bright and mischievous as her father was focused.
Together they met an improbable violent death Wednesday, shot in a terrorist rampage as they shared a late dinner in the plush dining room of the Oberoi hotel in Mumbai, India.
Scherr, 58, and his daughter were nearing the end of a two-week pilgrimage to India with a group of 25 others from the Synchronicity Foundation, a spiritual community in Central Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.
A thin and bespectacled former art professor at the University of Maryland, Scherr moved with his wife, Kia, to the community in the 1990s. They studied the teachings of Charles Cannon, who founded the group in 1983 and practices a form of meditation using audio recordings. Approximately 30 families in the group, including the Scherrs, have homes near the 450-acre Synchronicity sanctuary on the outskirts of the small town of Faber, near Charlottesville.
Naomi, a home-schooled 8th-grader, earned impressive marks and scored in the top tier on national academic tests, even while occasionally dying her hair blue, exuding an individuality that delighted her family and friends.
"She was passionate, if not a little mischievous, and will be fondly remembered by many of us for colorful hair styles and radiant energy," read a tribute posted on the group's website.
Mona Kaufman, a Synchronicity volunteer, said Naomi "always wanted to go to India. She was an incredibly gifted young lady with such a bright future."
Cannon, known to the group as Master Charles, traveled often, and his students yearned to go along, said Bobbie Garvey, a vice president of the group. "He finally said this year, OK," Garvey said.
Scherr was the founder's paid spokesman and a prolific writer and astrologer. He and his daughter were selected to go while Kia Scherr and her two sons visited family in Florida.
With Alan Scherr as their guide, the group saw ashrams and holy sites and was preparing to return home Monday. Naomi was to make her experience the subject of an essay for a scholarship application to Emma Willard School, a private school for girls in Troy, N.Y., she planned to attend.
Father and daughter were dining Wednesday night at the table of Andreina Varagona of Nashville, a 45-year-old meditation teacher and friend, when the shooting started.
