A year later, while I was a grad student in California, I learned that the student had shot himself. I felt terrible. So I swore that I’d never again ignore a potential suicide. 

George Chang, a Berkeley prof, recalling his student days at Princeton, wishes he’d said something to someone when a fellow student turned out to have a closet full of guns. That he felt compelled to show people.

The thing is, whether you think this behavior betokens suicide or not (most of us wouldn’t read it that way – maybe we’d want to see it as some form of boasting? intimidation?), you might very well consider it evidence of some mental disturbance… It’s pretty effing weird for an undergraduate to stuff his dorm closet full of almost certainly illegal guns and invite his friends to see them. Like almost asking someone to do something.

This was decades ago, long before scads of campuses became mass murder sites; these days, someone would have screamed about it.

But anyway — with the likely suicide of another Princeton student in the news, there is indeed the question whether anyone noticed anything lethally wrong with Lauren Blackburn. This photo of him, taken I think shortly before his disappearance, shows him with a desperate expression on his face… But it’s almost always asking too much for people to intuit the worst in ordinary daily encounters with people they know. Respect for privacy, the knowledge that almost everyone experiences some depressive episodes and gets over them, a larger American (and campus) culture in which personal freedom matters a lot, maybe a certain fear of a person exhibiting extreme emotions — these and other motives persuade us to stay silent. And of course even if we speak up to the person or to a school authority, there’s no guarantee anything will happen.

And Blackburn was a junior; although seriously out of his element at an east coast Ivy, he got as far as his junior year. If he’d been a freshman, his sudden desperation probably would have set off alarms about his failing to fit in; but he got through three years. He was close to graduation.

They’re searching a local lake for him. There’s no evidence he was drunk; his last reported location was the library.

Watching this local news report about him when he was still home in Indiana deepens the sadness.

*********************

Update: His body has been found in the lake.

How do you get a decade-long suspension?
Michigan State is not inclined to say.
What did you do to get that long a sanction?
A murder or two?  Fraternity rape?  Gun play?

Maybe you hazed your freshmen til you killed them.
Made them drink gin until they passed away.
Maybe you bashed their heads in til concussion.
With hazing there's just so very many ways!

You can identify some of this nation’s scummiest universities by their unwavering tolerance of the most psychotically sadistic fraternities imaginable. Readers of this blog already know the University of Central Florida as one of academia’s bottommost dwellers; but did you know that Sigma Chi at UCF has now been credibly accused of running over its pledges?

Fraternity brothers at Sigma Chi allegedly hit pledges with a car as part of a hazing ritual now under investigation by the University of Central Florida, according to an incident report obtained by the Orlando Sentinel late Wednesday.

A sorority member whose house sits next door to Sigma Chi’s told police she heard yelling, saw a car strike a young man and then heard someone shout “help!” and “my bones, my bones, they’re broken,” the report said.

Hoo boy. They are looking at another two-week suspension.

… but the melody lingers on.

… But … if you read this blog with any care, are you really surprised that a university sorority is being used as a cover for drug dealing?

True, VCU’s dainty prescription drug ladies don’t get anywhere near the mafia-level drugs and guns activity of the frat gangs of San Diego State, busted in the now-legendary Operation Sudden Fall. But as UD has pointed out a lot on this blog, you’d have to be an idiot not to see that frats and sororities are PERFECT operation centers for drug conspiracies. Clean-cut college kids who wash cars to raise money for St Jude’s! Earnest, physically attractive seekers after knowledge! Oh, you kids! All those hyper-secret events and insider signals and slogans – so cute! You wouldn’t want to put the closed cult thing together with the clean-cut moral cover thing and arrive at any conclusions…

Only twenty years old, she was found unresponsive in an off-campus house.

Police have ruled out anything suspicious, which leaves

1. suicide
2. overdose
3. underlying, previously unknown, health issue.

Background on NMSU.

First there was an update on frat life there:

[M]ultiple individuals reported they were drugged at an AEPi house event, and according to the Saturday notice, another individual reported they were drugged at an SAE house event… The University suspended [SAE] in April 2017 after a report that four women were drugged at the house that January. Despite the report, the chapter faced no disciplinary action from NU, and returned to campus on probation in 2018 after completing a one-year suspension. 

That’s from a 2021 article about a large student demonstration in front of SAE, along with calls to shut down NU’s long-lurid Greek system.

Most recently, there are the school’s closely-associated sports teams:

A former Northwestern player said the alleged hazing acts that took place within the football program were “egregious and vile and inhumane behavior.” …

If a player was selected for “running,” … they would be restrained by a group of 8-10 upperclassmen dressed in various “Purge-like” masks, who would then begin “dry-humping” the victim in a dark locker room...

[A] Daily Northwestern article also mentioned other allegations of hazing rituals, including a practice where freshmen had to duplicate a snap from the center to the quarterback while both players were naked. It also cited a second player who noted the existence of the ritual.

Here’s a thing UD has learned about UD as UD has gotten up there in years.

Time was she loved poignant films featuring tender damaged people brutalized by the world (A Patch of Blue, Forrest Gump); now she has trouble handling the vulnerability/cruelty thing (zillions of films feature this theme), and instead leans toward disaster films where thousands of extras go SPLAT under asteroids.

She seems done, that is, with main characters we deeply glomb onto and watch disintegrate; now she wants a smoking hulk of an earth inhabited by five families who manage to get to the shelter or to Planet New (Greenland, Knowing).

She’s zooming out, in other words, of the whole condition humaine thing…

**************************

And when she reads articles like the one I’ve quoted from in my headline… When she feels the desperate pathos behind names like People Matter Festival…

When she realizes that both the cease fire and the mass education in basic compassion campaign are taking place in Miami-Dade Florida in preparation for Spring Break, she feels that familiar, heavy, useless, unbearable empathy creeping in upon her… An entire American city pleads for a temporary putting down of guns, knowing the gesture is hopeless and that multiple young people will be shot to death during what used to be a fun innocent week… A city government – again, hopelessly – reminds its populace that you really shouldn’t shoot people to death because PEOPLE MATTER…

UD can’t handle how pathetic this is. UD can’t wait til Greenland 2 comes out and she doesn’t have to think about this shit.

****************

Here we go.

Love the way the reporter describes a barely-underway spring break (March 17 is Day One of the cease fire) as “relatively calm and peaceful.” LOLOL

******************

UPDATE: Wotta shocker.

You know, there are many things you can do to “close” your city to violent, unmanageable, crowds. You’ll need cooperation from owners of bars and hotels; you’ll need a temporary shift in traffic patterns, coupled with a huge uptick in traffic enforcement. You’ll need a lot of help from police around the state; they’ll have to come in and help you.

You will need to place portable jail cells along beaches and boulevards, so you can immediately arrest high, drunk, armed, dangerous people as they shoot into crowds. Not a very pretty picture; not a very festive picture. But modular cells make sense when lethality overwhelms your city. Remember that when you attract scads of young people, you attract rival drug-selling gangs. These are responsible for some of the killing and much of the menacing/fighting/unrest. If you attract a smaller crowd, you’ll attract fewer gun-bearing drug dealers.

Do not forget social media: Get the message out strongly and early in the game that – as Miami’s mayor keeps saying – your city doesn’t want spring break. It simply endures it.

… and therefore a popular early theory about the U Idaho students knifed to death in their beds seems plausible: It was a random ugly encounter, during a night of barhopping, with someone who turned out to be a vicious asshole, who followed them home and killed them.

PhD student, criminology, Washington State University.

FROM: SpartanFans! Graphics, Lansing

TO: MSU Publications, Trey Nowak, Head, Pub Office

SUBJ: 2023-24 University Brochure

Hey Trey hope you’re having a great day. With this email, SF!G is excited to present our revision/addition to MSU’s student recruitment brochure.

With the university’s recent push to get students to gamble, we brainstormed how we can exploit this new initiative, which promises to be very attractive to impulse-challenged teenagers across the country. Since MSU is one of America’s few fully-operational student-driven gambling businesses, we need to seize control of this market while we continue to enjoy a dominant position.

This is why we recommend the following image for the cover of the new brochure, with the accompanying copy:

MICHIGAN STATE: IT’S SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST LATE NIGHTS.

To anticipate your comment: No, he’s not holding a cigarette. We can easily add this, probably in front of the whiskey glass (once you decide which distillery you’d like to feature, among those with whom MSU partners, let us know and we’ll add a bottle with the relevant label). We also plan to edit in a large fraternity ring on his hand – probably the notorious Delta Kappa Epsilon haha! (Is it still under suspension?)

I don’t think we want to mess with the nice simple clarity of this image more than that (aside from, obviously, taking the gray out of the guy’s hair and thickening/tousling it a bit), but let us know if any other images (the muzzle of a gun between his fingers, in the context of gambling, would be an intriguing reminder of Stephen Paddock; but would it look too… suicidal?) seem attractive to you.

As always, we look forward to working closely as we optimize MSU’s advantages in the student-recruitment market.

One of the country’s safest locations suffers a mysterious bloody mass killing of four college students in their shared off campus house. Quite a few days later, with the community so afraid that many students are fleeing the school, the local police have still released extremely little information. What we do now know (assuming the information they’ve allowed out is correct) is hard to make sense of.

We are told that in the wee hours of the morning, with two other students asleep (?) in the house through the entire insanely violent attack, four students were knifed to death with an enormous “Rambo-style” knife. Only hours later the next day did someone call 911. Huh?

On the face of it, this is nuts. How can we possibly make sense of it? How can the surviving students not have awakened; how can they have waited hours (assuming they made the 911 call) to report the massacre? Did the killer tell them he’d come back and kill them too if they told anyone anything?

Okay, let’s assume sheer paralyzing terror plus drunk out of their minds? I mean, I’m digging deep here to find a mental condition that would allow them to be passed out through the thing, or motionless for a long time (who knows when the attacker(s) left?) in an attempt to save themselves. Could their paralytic terror have lasted into the next afternoon? No use of their cell phones? Why did neither of them, assuming a window anywhere near, hurl themself out of a window and run?

The killings were “targeted,” we’re told; which stands to reason. This sort of homicide is, as they say, personal. Robbery makes zero sense. At the same time, the word “grudge” seems absurdly inadequate.

Let’s say the killer wanted to kill only one of the four, but the others tried to defend him/her. Okay.

But then the question is how did one person with a knife (was there more than one?) overpower and destroy three other able bodied people? You would expect one or two to escape, screaming their lungs out and alerting the neighborhood. If the killer controlled the students by tying them up, why aren’t we being told they were tied up? UD understands that police withhold information for perfectly good reasons during the course of an investigation, but this seems strange nonetheless.

One way to go is to imagine that one or both of the surviving students did all this. They controlled the situation by quietly, methodically moving from room to room, taking on one student (or maybe two) at a time. But we know from the coroner’s report (she’s being very uncommunicative, but I think this is confirmed information) that bruises indicate one of the students fought like hell.

Since this sounds rather unpremeditated (rather, because the killer might have planned it for a very short time – let’s say hours), and viciously impassioned, I’m going to assume an abundance of forensic material. The killer, for instance, must also have bled somewhat, and must have (have had; he’s had plenty of time to shower) blood all over himself, bloody clothes, etc. Blood spatter must also be on walls and other surfaces. If there were sexual assaults, that might be another source of leads.

******************************

Here’s one possibility.

All of the murdered students spent the night on the town – parties, bars, other social spots. During the course of this activity, one or two of the four got into a drunken nasty encounter with some random but dangerous/crazy other drunk person. Did some guy hit on a girlfriend and did that provoke one of the Idaho students? Something like that.

Let’s say the guy’s a member of one of Idaho’s many biker gangs. No sissy university student’s gonna humiliate him in front of his friends, he thinks, fingering the Rambo 9410 in his pocket… He follows them home and waits outside until they’re asleep.

… So I’ll trust you to go to YouTube and watch Sophia Rosing do her thing; I’d rather link you to this narrative by one of the long-suffering U Kentucky students attacked by this drunk violent racist.

About the video: It’s too bad for the worst among us that everyone’s got a camera these days and knows how to use it. This particular docudrama makes for irresistably engrossing viewing, so it’ll rack up a lot of views.

“Kiss your entire future away, babe,” says the camerawoman as Rosing spews it and spews it, and then hits everyone, including the policeman who shows up. Certainly her future at UK (Kentucky always makes the top ten most racist states lists, and for personal safety as well as reputational reasons, the school is going to have to let this … dynamic … white supremacist go); but she has looks, gumption, and the sort of straightforward approach to the race problem that guarantees her a political future in any number of Idaho congressional districts.

I’m gonna predict that maw and paw will bring out the jesus brigade to wrap her in their love and forgiveness. Cry like Jimmy Swaggart, Soph! If this happened a little further north, the folks would find some psychiatrist to attest to her years of emotional struggle; but it’s the southland, so I’m thinking it’ll be the jesus brigade.

When the frats kill – or destroy – a particularly young one, I post this variant I wrote of Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into State U.
And I drank in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Miles from home, loosed from my parents’ love,
I woke to black vodka and the nightmare brothers.
When I died I was 0.486 booze.

**************************************

Don’t read how they destroyed him if you lack a strong stomach.

As with extreme gun enthusiasts, frat killers consider the death or almost-death of teenagers to be a perfectly okay price to pay for their pleasure.

Their obnoxious interruption of a debate on campus warranted immediate condemnation. But these are timid times. At least she came out with it.