… but it’s rare, and therefore newsworthy, when it happens during the summer.
[A] University of Idaho senior died of respiratory arrest, apparently due to alcohol poisoning after a night of drinking to celebrate his 21st birthday.
Emergency personnel responded to a report of an unconscious man at Sigma Nu fraternity at 2:42 a.m. Tuesday. They located Benjamin Harris of Burley on the third floor and began CPR. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Gritman Medical Center.
Assistant Police Chief David Duke says Harris may have had as many as 15 shots in two-and-a-half hours as he celebrated his birthday Monday night…
UD looked up why it is that you can stop breathing when you drink too much. Alcohol depresses everything, including the central nervous system. Drink enough, and you’ll simply be too weak to breathe. Eventually you’ll go into heart failure.
Two male Edinburgh University students have been found dead in a Scottish hotel, in a laptop suicide pact.
UD doesn’t understand how you set up a laptop to inject drugs for you.
[They] used a laptop to deliver lethal overdoses – and may have broadcast their final moments using a webcam.
Police are probing the possibility that the harrowing footage of their deaths may have been aired over the internet.
Last night, a source said: “It looks like this was meticulously planned.
“The room was tidy and they seemed to have set up a laptop so they didn’t have to inject the drugs directly – they appear to have had a reasonable level of medical knowledge and skill.
“It also looked as if they had set up a camera to film what was happening…”
UD is rushing about from graduation ceremonies to senior English majors parties to other sorts of parties.
The weather is beautiful; her students are beautiful. She will return to blogging when she has finished embracing them and praising them to their parents.
Yet the mother of a Reed College student who died of a drug overdose (background on Reed’s drug problem here) makes a telling complaint:
In [Barbara] Tepper’s … letter [to the Reed campus], she … urged Reed College to provide more counseling to students struggling with stress, to expel and not just suspend students who use or distribute illegal drugs and faulted college counselors for prescribing sleeping pills to her son who had trouble sleeping.
“I was very upset because that’s sending a very clear message if you don’t feel good, chemicals will solve your problem,” Tepper said in an interview Thursday. She said that when she learned her son was given sleeping pills by a campus psychiatrist, she was furious.
“I told Sam, ‘You’re 20 years old. I don’t want you taking sleeping pills. Go out and run around the block. Make yourself physically tired, and you’ll fall asleep.”
The larger point here, about America as a profoundly pill-dependent culture, and about the way easy recourse to pills can predispose people toward overuse and abuse as well as weaken their ability to solve their problems non-chemically, is a terribly important one.
“None of this went reported. We were able to confirm there were no restraining orders, no reports. But just sort of the campus buzz — just the buzz, the campus grapevine — if you’re coaching a team and a player is assaulting a sleeping teammate, wouldn’t you prod around? There were just too many episodes that were almost foreshadowing this.”
A CBS reporter pulls together the latest reports of George Huguely’s violence – toward Yeardley Love and toward others – leading up to her murder.
Having covered, on this blog, quite a lot of on-campus and off-campus violence, I’d like to speculate a little here, about this case.
Let’s start with the coach. It’s contemptible that, knowing Huguely was dangerously violent, the coach said nothing to anyone about it. But it is unsurprising. Why?
1.) Coaches go to incredible trouble, and get paid large sums of money, to recruit and retain aggressive young men. These men are rewarded for their aggression on the field, and rarely punished for that same aggression off the field. Sports heroes like Huguely have been rewarded all their lives for being rude and crude. Their coaches are part of the reward system.
2.) From the coach’s point of view, Huguely is part of a crowd. There are several pretty wild drunks on the team, and it’s going to be hard to single any of them out as not merely wild but pathological.
3.) Coaches tend to have intensely paternal relationships with their boys. They think like fathers, and fathers don’t report their sons, or call the police on them.
4.) The coach is unlikely to come from same the privileged background as his players. If he did, he’d be a lawyer, not a coach. He will perhaps, when considering action against a player, be intimidated by the money and power the player’s parents have.
5.) He will also be intimidated by thoughts of fans and alumni who expect victories and who adore Huguely as a big part of the team’s victory delivery system. A coach’s job is always very shaky — recall that Duke unloaded its lacrosse coach long before the innocence of his players was finally established.
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What about Yeardley Love herself? She was obviously being bombarded by threatening emails and by escalating physical violence from Huguely. She must have known about his jealousy-fueled attack on a male friend of hers on the team. Why did she do nothing, beyond locking her bedroom door?
1.) She might have done something. She might have talked about it. She might even have lodged a complaint — something short of a restraining order, let’s say, but maybe something. We don’t know yet.
2.) She might have thought along the same lines as the chair of Amy Bishop’s department: Yes, this is a scary person, but the school year is almost over. If I can just get to the end of the semester, she’ll have to go away, because she didn’t get tenure. Love might have thought We’re a few weeks away from graduation. If I can just wait that out, he’ll go his way and I’ll go mine.
3.) The crowd thing again. She saw him as one of the guys, part of a very close-knit team. Maybe he was crazier than most of the other guys, but they embraced him, loved him, didn’t throw him off the team. He could be seriously shitfaced, but so could they. He could also probably be charmingly apologetic about his obnoxiousness the next morning.
4.) Finally there’s pity and fear.
She wanted to help him. She understood he was a terrible drunkard about to enter an unforgiving world of work, and she wanted to help him. She pitied him, not just because he was an alcoholic, but because he loved and needed her so much. He roused her compassion.
Just as much, though, he roused her fear. He was a powerful man, and a very mean drunk. His love was sick and obsessive, and now that she’d rejected him, it was all wounded ego and vicious rage. Perhaps like his coach she deluded herself that Huguely was under it all still a little boy given to tantrums, rather than a man capable of murder.
… the Tom Buchanan passages.
The latest on Yeardley Love’s killer (UD thanks David for the link):
University of Virginia lacrosse player George Huguely attacked a sleeping teammate last year, leaving his face bruised in an altercation that took place after a night of partying, according to four sources with knowledge of the incident.
… [One] former player, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the grieving families, said Huguely attacked the other player after hearing that his teammate had kissed women’s lacrosse player Yeardley Love, who was dating Huguely at the time…
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From The Great Gatsby:
… Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven — a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy — even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach — but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it — I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
… He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body — he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
… Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.
“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai——”
Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.
From yesterday’s Daily News:
… A friend of Huguely’s who played lacrosse with him in summer leagues told the Daily News that Huguely “partied really hard and when he was drunk or f—– up, he could be violent. He would get out of control.”
Huguely was described by the summer league teammate as “obsessive,” constantly texting and calling Love, to the point that people close to her worried about the relationship.
[N]o protective order had been filed in the local magistrate’s office.
A former Virginia student who was friends with both Love and Huguely described a disturbing incident in which Huguely recently reportedly attacked Love, then had no recollection of it the next day, which precipitated their final breakup. “He was really messed up and punched a window of a car on the way over to her apartment that night,” the friend said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of consideration for Love’s family. The friend said Huguely had been seen breaking bottles at another party before Love’s death and had told people he was going to her apartment to get Love back…
Five female students, including one who’d recently completed a self-defense class, jumped to the aid of a fellow student, grabbing her knife-wielding attacker and holding him until police officers arrived at Husson University, officials said Wednesday.
Jesse Hladik put her new skills to work when she lunged for the hand holding a knife, while fellow students grabbed the man’s other limbs and wrestled him to the ground. Hladik, 21, of Buckfield, said she knew the pressure points to make him drop the knife, thanks to the class.
… Officers responding to the report of a domestic fight at 7:40 a.m. arrived to find 45-year-old Horst Wolk of Bangor subdued on the pavement. A campus officer cuffed him, and city police hauled him away.
John Michaud, professor of legal studies, heard the commotion and saw a pile of people on the pavement, while more women stood by, ready to jump in, if necessary.
… Wolk has been charged with attempted murder, elevated aggravated assault, aggravated assault and violating a protection order, said Bangor Police Sgt. Paul Edwards.
… The incident unfolded in a parking lot next to Husson’s O’Donnell Commons. Wolk, who isn’t a student, rammed the victim’s vehicle after she pulled into a parking space at 7:40 a.m., then jumped out of his vehicle with a knife in his hand, said Julie Green, Husson spokeswoman…
Horst looks pretty beat up in his mug shot.
… 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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
