… when you’ve got Wongene Daniel Kim?

… prompted a New York University freshman to jump off the roof of his high-rise dorm.

Sad details about him, and his family back in Trinidad, are here.

[A]fter the [Governor Bob] McDonnell family had spent a vacation at Williams’ lake house, the McDonnells’ sons had driven Williams’ Range Rover home. Maureen McDonnell subsequently asked Williams if the boys could take the vehicle back to the University of Virginia. Williams said no. Not long after that, Maureen McDonnell called Williams with another idea: could he give her money to buy another of her children a used Ford Explorer. Again, Williams said no.

The killing of a teaching assistant by another teaching assistant (with whom he worked) sounds like an act of extreme rage. The killer brought not just a handgun but a knife, and he used both on the victim.

Once he got his rage out of his system, the killer seems to have relaxed quietly just outside the building.

Police say when an officer arrived, he spotted Cousins sitting on the ground outside the building with his hands behind his head.

Head resting in hands would have been What the hell did I just do? I just killed someone and ruined my life.

Hands behind head suggest Ahhhh. That’s done.

A student has been found dead in his dorm room on the Mount Vernon campus of George Washington University.

Police “have not classified [it] as a homicide.”

They will possibly be looking into whether the student’s death was alcohol-related. Or whether it was suicide.

Or whether the student had underlying health problems (a weak heart, for instance).

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Sean Keefer, a native of Oregon, and a student in GW’s honors program who was pursuing a degree in Math and Computer Science, died.

… this one at at Purdue, where a teaching assistant sought out and shot a fellow teaching assistant to death, are unknown. Both worked for an engineering school professor. The killer apparently walked calmly to the classroom where he knew the victim would be, shot him multiple times, and then walked around a bit, waiting to be arrested.

Let us speculate.

The dead man was dating a woman the killer wanted to date.

The dead man was impressing the professor more than the killer was, and this enraged the killer.

The victim had ridiculed or put down the shooter in some way.

The victim and the shooter had had an earlier altercation, and this was payback.

The killer is a psychopath. (Very unlikely. They either kill themselves after they finish killing, or, like Amy Bishop, they drop the gun in a trash bin and proceed to go out to dinner with their husband. Bishop considered herself far too clever ever to be caught.)

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UPDATE: Hints begin to emerge:

[B]oth a Purdue professor who worked with him and a Purdue student say he could be rude and disliked being told he was wrong…

Purdue Professor Thomas Talavage describes Cousins as intense and aggressive about his projects. He says Cousins “didn’t like to be told he was wrong.”

UD is reminded of another university workplace murder: Annie Le’s killing at Yale. Some of the people who knew her murderer, who worked with Le, “described him as a ‘control freak’ who was competitive in sports, compulsive about his work habits and controlling in his romantic relationships.”

Madison Holleran, a beautiful, smart, athletically gifted nineteen year old U Penn freshman, killed herself last Friday. She jumped from the top of a parking garage in downtown Philadelphia.

Already the story has appeared in Time magazine, and lots of other media outlets.

Holleran’s is the sort of suicide that gets attention.

It gets singled out because it’s a big shock. Unless there was a suicide note (right now it looks as if there wasn’t), this one was a real stunner. An extremely young woman with absolutely everything going for her (that’s how it looked, anyway) and with nothing we know of signalling depression does this thing.

In almost every case like Holleran’s I’ve covered on this blog, there was prior evidence (sometimes a little; sometimes a lot) of mental unbalance. Sometimes there was a note; sometimes a recent cryptic note on a Facebook page now made sense.

Frequently these deaths were – like Holleran’s – first-year students, which suggests that something in the transition to a new school, a new life, triggered the trouble.

In any case, the particular peril you’re in when you’re young and depressed is impulsivity – the pull toward the sudden jump. Go here for an extract from a New York Times article about youth, depression, impulsivity, and suicide. And here for a more lengthy discussion of the subject.

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UPDATE: As her father tells it, it does indeed seem to have been stress over a new school, new pressures. She had been seriously depressed. And she did leave a note.

For a moment there, it looked as if a disgruntled ex-member was going to fuck with Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s kill ratio. But no worries.

… of humiliating and battering to death nineteen year olds.

You understand the primitive sadism at the heart of many fraternities when this sort of story breaks, when the media doesn’t yet have all the information, but knows that a college student has been ritualistically killed.

[A Baruch College freshman died in the hospital after having been] at a Tunkhannock Township [Pennsylvania] residence… [About] 30 members of the New York City Pi Delta Psi fraternity had traveled there for the weekend. [The freshman,] one of four pledges to the fraternity, was allegedly injured early Sunday morning in a ritual in the yard of the residence, which is about 30 miles north of Allentown.

Ritual, ritual, ritual — what might that be?

Look no farther than Florida A&M. Last year, their marching band beat a band member to death in a hazing ritual. If UD had to guess (we’ll see if she’s right when the police report comes out), she’d say the fine folks at Pi Delta Psi simply beat the kid to death.

Miss Ole Miss gets it said.

Some wag placed a recent official Ole Miss ad just below her YouTube. LOL.

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(“Sweetheart, William Faulkner drank enough whiskey to float Oxford.” — From the article’s comment thread.)

The now-legendary three Saudi med students who sued the University of Ottawa for $156 million dollars because it dismissed them from its neurosurgery program (poor performance, though the Saudis claim discrimination) have now had their latest appeal rejected by Ontario’s highest court. I assume there are still other places they can go to keep appealing; and I assume with each appeal they will raise their ransom demand by a few hundred million. It’s one to watch.

The world’s most diplomatic police spokesperson turns his attention to the woman at the University of Wisconsin who got wasted and then waited until very late at night to cross a busy street while texting.

… Adderall-dependent lumps watch this.

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Update: Okay, so he plagiarized it.

“There’s been a lot of turnover [of staff] in the Dean of the College and other offices . . . and fraternities have been left somewhat to their own devices,” [one Dartmouth observer] said. “It’s become a bit of a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation.”