… the University of Virginia lacrosse player who killed his ex-girlfriend already had a pretty long police record.

… A 2008 Palm Beach County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office report describes an incident in which an angry George Huguely V had to be rescued from the Atlantic Ocean after he jumped from a 40-foot yacht during a heated confrontation with his father.

Huguely, 22, had two previous booze-related arrests, one in Palm Beach County and one that involved a violent attack on a female police officer outside a Washington & Lee University fraternity in Lexington, Va…

Even an urban campus like mine
has leafy paths and flowering trees.
It’s not like Kenyon College, of
course, with its remarkable
Middle Path.

But in all seasons here, as at
Kenyon, there’s a sense of a
separate world, a beautiful world.

Yet the beauty of these college
worlds isn’t really about nature.
Take the two students with back-
packs out of this picture, the
students walking together along
those trees and into a mist, and
it’s any autumnal woods.

These particular worlds are beautiful
because youth is beautiful, and
thought is beautiful, and friendship
is beautiful, and potential is beautiful.

And those things – youth, thought,
friendship, potential – exist with
greater intensity in this setting than,
I think, anywhere else.

Students take the middle path and
then move into the mist at its end.

Professors watch them move off
into their futures; year after year
professors watch students step
off into their futures, and there’s
no knowing. But what professors
keep of their students – some of
their students – is a permanent
image of their perfection as they
walk along the middle path.

They walk at ease, in love, in lust,
curious, amused, charitable, fervent.
The college takes their intensity and
cools it a bit; it asks them to consider
how human beings have shaped their
energy into ideas and structures and
states. The discipline of a curriculum
cools and shapes their intensity.

Somewhat. Essentially they remain
high-spirited and unreachable and
enviably vivacious.

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

To follow the strange and beautiful
world of the university is to feel the
same shock and sorrow others do
when youthful intensity turns into
violence against the self or against
other people, when fervency becomes
the sort of inner turmoil that destroys.

It doesn’t just destroy a life. It
destroys a life at a kind of pinnacle
of inquiry into life. This
sky-high exuberance makes anything
possible. When it is shot down, or
when, inexplicably, it shoots itself
down, the fall is terrible.

Jack Ford, CBS News:

… “You’re not surprised,” Ford observed, “that his attorney is saying, given these facts, ‘It was an accident.’ You can have a situation where somebody dies, because of somebody else’s conduct, and it might not be criminal. Classic illustration, on the job site and two guys are working and one has a piece of lumber in his hand and he turns around and hits the other accidentally, knocks him off the roof, he hits his head and dies. Might be some civil responsibility, it’s not a criminal case.

“But here, quite candidly, it’s going to be a tougher sell, because you have a whole series of intentional conduct: intentionally kicking in the door to her bedroom. Grabbing her. This isn’t a situation where he said, ‘I went to talk to her and I just sort of grabbed her to turn her around and she tripped on something, fell and hit her head.’ What he says, according to police is, he’s shaking her and repeatedly her head is banging against the wall. That gives you intentional conduct. He might not have intended to kill her, but enough intentional conduct that I think accident, pure accident, would be a tough sell here.”

Ford added that, “In most jurisdictions, they say if you intended to harm somebody seriously and they die, even though you didn’t intend to kill them, you could be guilty of murder.” …

“We are confident that Ms. Love’s death was not intended, but an accident with a tragic outcome,” Huguely’s attorney, Fran Lawrence, said Tuesday. “It is our hope that no conclusions will be drawn or judgments made about George or his case.”

A short article about the rough sex defense here.

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

Update:

Search warrants reportedly say two witnesses found Love in her bedroom face down in a pool of blood on her pillow, according to the local NBC affiliate. Police officers reported that Love had a large bruise on the right side of her face, which appeared to have been caused by blunt force trauma.

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

More:

Police say a Virginia lacrosse player suspected of killing a member of the women’s team shook her and hit her head repeatedly against the wall.

An affidavit filed with a search warrant says police found 22-year-old Yeardley Love face down in her bedroom with a pool of blood on her pillow.

Police also say the suspect, 22-year-old George Huguely, told them he had an altercation with Love and had kicked in her door…

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

Update: Via Kate, a reader and a wonderful ex-student of mine, more sickening details at The Hook, a local paper. (Read the comments, too. They provide updates on details of the crime scene.)

Scratch the rough sex defense.

This is a big, fast-moving story. Here’s a link. Updates on their way.

———————-

An interview Love gave last year at UVA.

Question: Who has most influenced your lacrosse career and how?

Love: My high school coach has definitely influenced my lacrosse career. She was an awesome coach that always pushed me to work harder. She not only prepared me to play at the college level, but she taught me important life lessons. She always put a strong focus on good sportsmanship and working together as a team.

Question: What made you decide to come to Virginia to play lacrosse?

Love: I had wanted to play lacrosse at Virginia since I was little, so coming here was like a dream come true.

—————————-

Nora, a reader, sends this link to Inside Lacrosse, which has links to a number of news sources.

—————————-

From the New York Times:

… “This is just an incredible story that has taken a life of its own because it’s so tragic,” [Charlottesville Police Chief Tim] Longo said. “Everyone who has children can relate to the families of what these young people are going through. These young people were literally on the threshold of their futures. That dramatically has changed.”

The top-ranked Virginia’s men’s lacrosse team is expected to be the top seed heading into this month’s N.C.A.A. tournament. The women’s team is in the top five and considered to be a strong contender to advance to the national semifinals.

The Virginia lacrosse community has endured its share of recent tragedy: the former Virginia men’s captain Will Barrow died of an apparent suicide in 2008 and the longtime assistant media relations director Michael Colley, who was the lacrosse team’s main contact, died of a heart attack in July.

Now the community is in shock again.

“Charlottesville is just a wonderful place,” Longo said. “Kids from all over the country come here, the best and brightest, and these are two of them, two successful athletes.

“It’s just an unbelievable situation. These are not the kinds of things we see in this community.” …

——————————————–

Via Crimson05er, another reader, these local Charlottesville links.

——————————————–

From the police news conference.

——————————————–

One initial comment from UD. The story is very new — one wants not to say much. But here’s one piece of speculation in response to the remarkable speed with which Huguely was arrested.

Love was a strong and pretty fearless woman, from what I can gather. My guess is that she fought hard, and as a result Huguely may have sustained injuries consistent with someone trying to ward him off. I also think it likely that he confessed.

———————————————-

A recent case that seems similar:

… Kevin R. Schaeffer, also a Gettysburg College student, choked [Emily Rachel] Silverstein, 19, a sophomore from Roosevelt, N.J., early Thursday morning and then stabbed her in the neck with a steak knife. He sat with her for 15 minutes before putting her in a bathtub, according to a police affidavit.

Mr. Schaeffer, 21, of Oley, Berks County, confessed to the crime, according to the affidavit. He told police he had been drinking that evening but was not intoxicated. He said he had recently stopped taking Zoloft, an anti-depressant, the affidavit said.

Police arrested Mr. Schaeffer that morning and charged him with homicide, aggravated assault, possessing instruments of crime and tampering with evidence.

… Preliminary autopsy results showed that Ms. Silverstein died from a combination of strangling and stabbing between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.

It was not clear why Ms. Silverstein was at his house. The two had recently ended a sporadic romantic relationship.

“They’d been on and off, and they had broken up again recently. He never hit her that we know of. But she broke up with him because, I don’t know, he had some issues,” Ms. Silverstein’s father, Robert Silverstein, said yesterday…

A much more detailed account. (Note: The earlier link wasn’t working. I found a better one.)

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

It’s a weirdly local story for me. Huguely comes from an old Bethesda family; he went to school at Landon, the place where I rehearsed Handel’s Messiah last year.

… has been ruled a suicide.

Background here.

You probably already know that, in response to an Iranian cleric’s assertion that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes, Jennifer McCreight, a Purdue University student, organized tens of thousands of women yesterday to bare or semi-bare their breasts at the same exact moment to see what would happen.

The Boobquake Facebook page announces the results.

Nada.

Still…

Obviously this study had its flaws. We didn’t have a large sample size, and we didn’t have a control planet where women were only wearing burkas. We didn’t have a good way to quantify how much we increased immodesty (what’s the unit of immodesty anyway? Intensity of red on blushing nuns?). Maybe women did dress immodestly, but we didn’t lead men astray enough. [The cleric says there’s a causal connection between inflamed men and plate tectonics.] Maybe God really was pissed, but he couldn’t increase earthquakes for us because that would provide proof for his existence (or maybe it’s his existence that’s the problem).

His apartment mates found Owen Thomas unresponsive yesterday afternoon. No cause of death has been announced, though police say it wasn’t homicide.

His coach made a statement: “We want to make sure his roommates are OK. We’re going to pay particular attention to them because they stumbled upon him. It’s a delicate situation but right now our whole team is an emotional mess.”

The most likely reasons are an undetected health problem (weak heart, for instance), alcohol poisoning, or suicide.

Students at Princeton begin to think about Goldman Sachs in a new way.

My headline is a student’s comment on an article in the Princeton paper. This is how the article concludes:

The charges claim Goldman Sachs led clients to believe that a financial product was high quality while simultaneously betting that the product was low quality. Like a cliche used-car salesman, it sold its clients a lemon. When the housing market collapsed, Goldman got rich and its clients went belly-up.

… [Not] all activities that expand liquidity are good. This point might be easily missed because the people who invented and supported these trades became quite wealthy. And most people who (mis)understand economics believe that it teaches that people get rich because they do valuable work. What the recession shows is that people can earn a lot just by convincing others that their work is valuable, even if it isn’t.

[The gap] between what people think and what is actually true … allowed traders and analysts to do harm to our economy while believing that they were actually doing good.

… So, to my classmates who dream the Wall Street dream, or to those who are willing to defer their own dreams while working on Wall Street, I say only this: Mind the gap.

…”got a running start and cleared a barrier on the observation deck, on the 86th floor” of the Empire State Building in order to commit suicide, was a Yale undergrad.

Berkeley College junior Cameron Dabaghi ’11, an East Asian studies major from Austin, Texas, took his life in New York City on Tuesday, Yale College Dean Mary Miller said in an e-mail to the College community Wednesday morning.

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

UD thanks David for the link.

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

Update: Some details —

A Yale University junior left a suicide note in his dorm room before heading to New York, where he apparently plunged to his death by jumping from the Empire State Building, police said Wednesday.

Cameron Dabaghi, 21, from Austin, Texas, jumped from the 86th floor observation deck Tuesday during evening rush hour. His note said he was sorry and he would be jumping from either the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River in upper Manhattan, or the Empire State building, police said.

There were seven other people on the observation deck at the same time, and one person tried to talk to the jumper as he climbed over the barrier, but was unsuccessful…

Not sure if this can be right – the part about “climbed.” He seems to have jumped over the barrier.

… but a sensible enough article in the Huffington Post.

… The cause of suicide is not Ivy League pressure or the social and academic expectations that distinguish one school from another. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people between 15 and 24 years of age: the college years simply fall within this period.

The brain changes that occur in adolescence–specifically the pruning of gray matter that makes our brains more efficient and capable of complex, intellectual operations–are often responsible for adolescent angst as well as the onset of serious psychiatric disorders. The first peak of depression typically occurs around age 13-14; schizophrenia first appears around 18-19; and adult-onset bipolar disorder, or manic depression, tends to begin suddenly around 19-20.

… Don’t think … that the Arizona sunshine, or the prestige of Harvard, or the Florida beaches will cure your child’s psychiatric disorder…

The student was a freshman.

Kendall Berry, 22, a member of the FIU football team, was stabbed to death last night on the campus.

[T]wo men were seen arguing outside a recreation center about 9 p.m., and witnesses said one stabbed the other.

… writes in the New York Times about “the horror of multiple suicides.”

In a time of unrelenting connectivity, through Facebook, Twitter and our smartphones, paradoxically it is too easy to stop connecting directly with those most able to help our young people.

I’m not sure what this means. In the Huffington Post, the mother of an NYU student who recently killed himself writes in response to David Skorton’s NYT letter:

I am also encouraged to see that I am not the only who believes that connectivity disconnects people. I think that we need to [go] back in order to go forward.

I think both writers need to clarify what they mean. It seems intuitively right to me that part of what’s weird about being in your twenties today is that you’re always online in a variety of pseudo-social ways… That you’re maybe addicted to these bizarre tethers that aren’t really tethers… But I’d like to know more about why people think there’s a link between this and self-destruction.

Like Simon Liebling, Tyler Rosenbaum is a precocious social critic. Both Liebling and Rosenbaum are undergrads at Brown, and both, in the pages of the university newspaper, go after aspects of the school they find unpalatable. They do so with confidence, clarity, and charm.

Someone on the Brown admissions committee knows good writing when she sees it.

Rosenbaum has an easier task than Liebling, since Liebling took on the complex matter of the relationship between Brown’s president and Goldman Sachs; but Rosenbaum does beautifully with his more modest target: the university’s student fees.

… Last month… The Herald reported that the Organizational Review Committee, which President Simmons appointed to look for ways to cut $14 million from the University’s budget, would be recommending the creation of a $65 fee which would go to the Department of Athletics. … Perhaps sensing that $65 was excessive, the Corporation cut the final version to $64.

But why would a committee charged with cutting the budget recommend the creation of a new fee? Evidently, of the 12 subcommittees that investigated various areas of the University to trim down in light of the recession, the athletics subcommittee was “the only one that did not meet its savings goal.”

This strikes me as quite unfair. Apparently, every area of the University has to make its fair share of sacrifice — except the athletics department. This is despite the fact that a poll conducted by The Herald at the end of last semester found that half of students had not gone to a single sports game that semester, and in total nearly four-fifths had attended two or fewer such games.

Brown is not a “sports school” [Scathing Online Schoolmarm would remove the quotation marks.] like Duke, or even Cornell for that matter. Most students here don’t care about athletics — universities are for higher education, after all, not athletic endeavors…

But, as this new fee aptly demonstrates, athletics at Brown are a financial drain on the University’s budget. The question, then, is why in these tough times the Corporation decided essentially to exempt the athletics department from the shared sacrifice in which every other facet of this University was expected to take part…

I laud the Corporation and the administration for making this subsidy to athletics readily visible as a separate fee and not hiding it in the general tuition increase. This should spur a campus-wide debate about the place of athletics at our institution.

Should a financially non-self-sustaining program that is completely extraneous to the purpose of a university, and about which the vast majority of Brown students are apathetic at best, be sheltered from the tough decisions the rest of us have to make? …

Completely extraneous. Universities are not for athletic endeavors. UD admires this writer’s outrageously contrarian ways.