Two Virginians – Alan Scherr, 58, and his daughter, Naomi, 13 - were among those killed during the continuing two-day terror spree that shook Mumbai, India. The father-daughter duo was traveling in India with a 25-member delegation from the Synchronicity Foundation when they were killed by terrorists.

Together they met an improbable violent death on Wednesday, killed in a terrorist rampage inside the plush dinning room of the Trident-Oberoi Hotel.

According to a statement from the foundation - which promotes meditation and spirituality - Alan, a thin and bespectacled former art professor at the University of Maryland, devoted his life to meditation and the search for peaceful balance. His daughter, Naomi, a home-schooled 8th-grader, was a bright and mischievous teenager.

Alan and his wife, Kia, moved to the spiritual community in the 1990s. They studied the teachings of Charles Cannon, who founded the group in 1983. 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.

Alan was the founder’s paid spokesman and a prolific writer and astrologer. He and his daughter were selected to go to India, while Kia Scherr and her two sons visited a family in Florida. Alan was the guide of the group that saw ashrams and holy sites. Naomi was to make her experience the subject of an essay for a scholarship application to Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y.

Kia Scherr learned the tragic news in Florida. Describing her state of mind, Bobbie Garvey, a vice president of the foundation said: “She goes in and out of periods -speaking and non-speaking.” Garvey’s words trailed as she added: “She is a mother and a wife and . . .”