By the time student newspaper editors learned that a student had died in a fire just off the Boston University campus over the weekend, they knew the drill. Over the next few days, they confirmed the student's name with officials, confirmed what had happened with campus police and started talking to the victim's friends to compile an obituary.

The death of Binland Lee, a senior studying marine biology, came less than two weeks after a bomb at the Boston Marathon killed 23-year-old Lu Lingzi, a graduate student studying statistics at the school. In all, an "unprecedented" 11 BU undergraduate and graduate students have died in the past 13 months, said BU spokesman Colin Riley.

"We get them in these little clusters," said Emily Overholt, editor-in-chief of the Daily Free Press, BU's student newspaper. "It's hard, because it's really catching up to people. It's one thing after another."

Overholt, 21, said she never expected to write so many obituaries working for the paper, which covers BU's 33,000 graduate and undergraduate students, most of whom are younger than 25. She called it a "nonstop barrage of bad news for BU."