The best-kept secret: crime on campus

Black Issues in Higher Education, May 6, 2004 by Crystal L. Keels

In Indiana, a Ball State University student's lifeless, bullet-riddled body is discovered at dawn, wedged between the seats of his car. A 19-year-old Iowa student is stabbed to death in plain sight in a campus-dining hall at the Maharishi University. A Fort Hays college freshman is savagely beaten just off campus in Kansas, and dies days later. Three young female students are raped during a burglary one block from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

And, just recently, a 22-year-old man became the second Hampton University student gunned down during the 2003-2004 academic year.

Crime is increasingly characterizing the contemporary college experience. In a post-Columbine, post-Sept. 11 world, the "It can't happen here" response to such violence has been replaced with "Oh Lord, not again."

Therefore, while most parents expect to provide tuition, advice and encouragement for their college-bound children, many parents must now become adept at helping them cope with the aftermath of robbery, rape and in the most severe cases, murder.

This is the situation John and Karen Grace of California now face. On March 1, 2003, their son, Matthew, then an 18-year-old freshman at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and 12 other students found themselves on the street in the early morning hours at the mercy of an apparently drug-crazed, gun-wielding assailant. By all accounts, including those in the Washington Post and the Hilltop, Howard's student-run newspaper, Matthew and the other students were allegedly instructed by campus security to vacate the dormitory lobby where they were making arrangements for late-night cab transportation. Fortunately, the students survived the encounter with the armed assailant, but five bullets penetrated Matthew Grace's legs, and Geary Johnson, also a Howard freshman, was wounded as well.

Both students recovered, physically that is, and were even responsible for the assailant's subsequent capture. Matthew Grace returned to Howard after the incident; Geary Johnson did not.

As a parent, John Grace, president of Investors Advantage Corp. in Westlake Village, Calif., says he must support his son's decision to return to Howard. He also says he finds no fault with the way D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department handled this particular incident after which his son lay bleeding in the street fearing he was paralyzed. And the elder Grace makes it clear that he understands bad things can happen any time, any place.

What Grace objects to is what he describes as Howard University's inadequate response to the attack, particularly since members of the university's security staff were directly responsible for the students' presence on the street in the first place. To make matters worse, Grace says he and his wife learned of their son's fate from a friend in Texas--they say they received no notification that night from anyone at the university.

Speaking to the Washington Post in 2003, one month following the attack, J.J. Pryor, the assistant vice president for university communications at Howard University, acknowledged the events of that evening. But Pryor says because of a well-attended dance on campus there were extenuating circumstances in the students' encounter with campus security. "It wasn't that they were picked out and made to leave," Pryor told the Post. "They just asked them to leave the lobby.... They were just asked to keep it down. It was just a very unfortunate incident."

In response to what the Graces perceive as Howard's inadequate response and failure following the incident to put effective strategies and procedures in place to ensure students' safety, the family has made it their mission to at least minimize the possibility of this happening again. As part of that endeavor, the Grace and Johnson families recently filed suit against Howard University for negligence and punitive damages.

'ONE OF THE BEST-KEPT SECRETS ...'

Howard and Connie Clery were compelled in a similar fashion following the 1986 death of their daughter on the Lehigh University campus in Pennsylvania. Early one Sunday morning in April, Jeanne Clery, 19, was tortured, raped and murdered in her dormitory room. Her assailant, another Lehigh student, had easy access to her room through a series of dormitory doors, all of which were supposed to be locked but were instead left propped open.

The Clerys claim the university refused any responsibility in their daughter's death, despite the fact that there were almost 200 reports of open dormitory doors registered with the university prior to Jeanne's murder.

In response to their loss and the lack of institutional support they received, the Clerys filed suit against Lehigh University, citing "negligent failure of security and failure to warn of foreseeable dangers on campus." Their subsequent settlement included the university's agreement to take specific steps to make the campus safer.

After their daughter's death, the Clerys founded Security on Campus Inc., a nonprofit organization designed to work on a national scale toward crime prevention on campus, and to assist other victims of campus crime.