Just Ends?

The courts of Philadelphia sent a powerful message last week.

Steven Holmes, a 19-year-old man who lives just east of Main Campus, has been sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison, followed by 27 years of probation, for the assault of a Temple student in Anderson Hall last year.

The victim, whose identity has been protected, was in Anderson Nov. 1, 2007, when Holmes grabbed her from behind, beat her, choked her and sexually assaulted her. She was in attendance during Holmes’ sentencing.

Common Pleas Judge Karen Shreeves-Johns issued a somewhat surprising sentence to Holmes, who also had a juvenile criminal record. For the victim, no particular term can match the physical and psychological trauma she experienced, but a potential sentence of 57 years is significant in this case.

Philadelphia – and the area surrounding Temple – has seen an increase in violent crimes recently, even though the murder rate is down. Many influences, including the poor economy, can be attributed as causes for this scenario. But with this sentence, the city now faces a double-edged sword.

To create stricter penalties for crimes less than murder and manslaughter would send a powerful message to would-be or repeat offenders. This can also send a positive signal to the city’s inhabitants, who may feel safer on the streets.

Continuation of such strict sentencing, however, would ask for more work from the city. This would include more police on the streets and upkeep – and perhaps construction – of prisons. The city is facing a large deficit right now, and Mayor Michael Nutter is attempting to balance the budget. A redistribution of funds can help the city where it needs it most.

Shreeves-Johns admitted in court she did not know “where [the justice system] failed,” referring to how Holmes remained on the streets with a lengthy criminal past. But her message through his sentencing is a message that should be seen as precedent.

We live in a city where many would-be offenders already have a criminal past. Due to overcrowding in the prisons or being sentenced by a lenient judge, these offenders are released to the streets, where they are likely to commit more crimes.

In order to maintain safety in the streets during an unsure time, more judges in the Philadelphia system should follow the lead of Shreeves-Johns, and the city should do its best to accommodate the changes.

Crimes of all severity should be considered with a careful eye by judges. Keeping criminals off the street would undoubtedly create a safer city and a Philadelphia with a purer reputation.

Anderson attacker to serve 15 to 30 years

Steven Holmes, the 19-year-old North Philadelphia man who sexually assaulted a Temple student Nov. 1, 2007 in Anderson Hall, will serve 15 to 30 years in prison, followed by 27 years of probation for the assault.

The 22-year-old art major was attacked shortly after locking up a classroom around 7 p.m. Holmes, wearing a mask and allegedly high on the drug PCP, pounced on her. He then dragged her into a bathroom where he violently beat her, choked her unconscious and sexually assaulted her.

Judge Karen Shreeves-Johns sentenced Holmes last Friday. As a part of his punishment and rehabilitation, he will undergo drug and psychological treatment, anger management therapy and will be required to register as a sex offender under Megan’s Law.

“You are a menace,” Shreeves-Johns told an apologetic Holmes in court. “I don’t know where the system failed you, but you need to be watched for the greater portion of your life.”

Holmes had a lengthy record as a minor and escaped from a juvenile detention facility less than one month prior to the assault.

In May, Holmes pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated indecent assault, aggravated assault, robbery involving serious bodily injury, witness intimidation and related charges. Attempted rape and attempted murder charges were dropped earlier this year.

In her impact statement, the victim recalled the trauma she experienced that she still battles with as a result of the attack.

She remembered listening to her father deny she was his daughter in the emergency room following the incident because Holmes battered her so brutally she was unrecognizable.

“He didn’t realize I was his daughter until he heard my voice,” she said, adding that her mother had to leave the ER because it was so painful to see her daughter in that state.

“All I wanted was to go somewhere safe,” she said tearfully in court.

The victim, now 23, also said she still does not leave her home alone often. She said her college experience now holds a stigma she will never forget.

“It breaks my heart to know I will always look at the world [without trust],” she said.

Holmes’ public defender, Tracy Frederick, argued that Holmes is mentally ill, and he used to be on medication for schizophrenia. Frederick also argued because he was high on PCP, he has no recollection of the attack.

“He was mortified, embarrassed and guilty [when he learned of the attack],” she said. “He said to me sometime in July, ‘I’d like to write an apology letter.’ He feels horrible about it. He’s not making excuses.”

Frederick requested Shreeves-Johns to strongly consider rehabilitation for the “young man who is just beyond the juvenile system.”

Assistant District Attorney Bill Davis, the prosecutor in the case, requested that Shreeves-Johns sentence Holmes to at least 35 years in prison, citing that as a juvenile, it once took him only 14 days to commit another crime after being released.

“He said he was going to do something to [the witness he intimidated],” Davis argued. “That speaks to the fact that he has no remorse.”

Davis said none of the evidence shows Holmes was high on PCP at the time of the crime.

“At 19 years old, I don’t take [this long of] a sentence lightly,” he said. “I would ask the court to give justice and protect the community.”

Before the sentencing, Shreeves-Johns said Holmes is clearly mentally ill, and he was indeed diagnosed with schizophrenia, but said the alleged PCP use was a voluntary decision.

“I don’t believe the acts were totally intentional,” she said, “but I do find there’s a need for punishment.”

Members of the victim’s family and Holmes’ family declined comment.

Holmes will serve his sentence at State Correctional Institution at Waymart, a facility for mentally disabled inmates requested by the defense, so he can receive proper psychological care.

Morgan Zalot can be reached at morgan.zalot@temple.edu.

Campus is more than just bustle

On a campus caught up in the bustle of city traffic, pollution and just general noise, it is often hard to hold onto any moment of serenity.

Temple students who really take it upon themselves to explore the quite vast campus before them, can easily find a number of quiet locations perfect for studying, relaxing or just spending a few minutes of peace.

These are three of the best places to find that ever-so-important moment of tranquility:

Founder’s Garden
Located right in the middle of campus, a stone’s throw away from both Liacouras Walk and the Bell Tower, is Founder’s Garden. Shaded by overhanging birch trees, the garden provides a surprisingly peaceful place to sit down for awhile. Many students usually walk right through as a shortcut or simply do not venture down the few steps into the garden.

Be sure to say hello to Temple’s founder Russell Conwell if you stop by this botanical haven. Behind Conwell’s giant bust lay his and his wife’s graves in the northwest corner of the garden.

Tuttleman’s Outdoor Courtyard Café
Ensconced between Tuttleman Learning Center and Paley Library is a shaded, airy courtyard, secluded from the noise and busyness of the rest of campus. This ideal spot for eating, studying or socializing also contains some of the most beautiful and unique plant life on campus.

The courtyard can be accessed by walking down the steps in the lobby of Tuttleman to the lower level. Here students will find Fresh Bytes, a café that serves a variety of sandwiches, soups and salads.

Students can take advantage of one of the lesser known meal-plan-accepted locations and get some air at a table right outside.

Anderson’s Rooftop Grass
It is no secret that Temple’s campus is very limited on grass, since cement and asphalt make up the majority of the terrain. Beury Beach has always been a green hotspot, crowded with students basking in the sun on beautiful days. A slightly more relaxed alternative to the “beach” sits atop Anderson Hall on the first floor walkway that extends to Gladfelter Hall. This rooftop getaway sits below the two tall office towers.

The sometimes breezy spot is home to an often overlooked section of campus grass, which grows in a large, square planter box. For students looking for a great place to bring food, study or lay out for a midday nap, the rooftop offers a wide-open feel with a good view of the Bell Tower.

Kevin Brosky can be reached at kevinbrosky@temple.edu.

Campus crimes get media attention

Despite the media attention Temple received for the November assault in Anderson Hall and the February anti-Semitic hate crime, Campus Safety Services Executive Director Carl Bittenbender said the numbers for this year look good.

Part I offenses for 2007 on campus, including murder, manslaughter, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft, auto theft and arson, dropped from 367 in 2006 to 239, according to Campus Safety Services’ annual report.

Part II offenses on campus, including simple assault, forgery, fraud, vandalism, disorderly conduct and other offenses, however, rose in 2007 to 145, up from 73 in 2006.

Alcohol, drug and weapons arrests and referrals on and around campus also saw a drop of 77 offenses from last year to this year.

Even with some negative media attention in the cases of the assault and the hate crime, both of which are set to go to trial, Bittenbender said Temple received a lot of positive press this year.

“I think there’s always attention at universities for positive things and negative things. Has this been, in my 12 years, the most I remember media attention? I don’t believe so,” he said. “We had [the media] in here for a number of positive things.”

Positive press for Temple includes running stories about the radio room that Campus Safety redid this semester and also an upcoming U.S. News and World Report story about Rape Aggression Defense training on college campuses that features Temple.

Bittenbender said that the U.S. News and World Report reporter commented that students at Temple seem to have a very good relationship with the police.

“I have students who have studied at other institutions who say, ‘I didn’t find that at my other school.’ My question always was, ‘Why not?’ We’re not separate, we’re part of the university community,” Bittenbender said.

He said he is proud of the relationship the Temple police have with the students.

“We’re not perfect, trust me, nobody’s perfect,” Bittenbender said. “But overall, the comments of the ease of the students with the Campus Police, talking to them, interaction with them, has always been positive.”

Morgan A. Zalot can be reached at morgan.zalot@temple.edu.

PASCEP is community

Working boring nights in Anderson Hall has shown me there are still community outreach programs that are actually successful. Like clockwork, the lobby of the building transforms into a bustling marketplace of kinship each night.

After 6 p.m., Dottie Jewels begins selling jewelry and other unique figurines, down the hall from Noah Nature, who will give you a bag of popcorn that will change your life. From the tantalizing fragrances and shea butters to the photos and CDs, no one need leave empty handed.

But the camaraderie in the lobby is just the tip of the Pan-African Studies Community Education Program iceberg. Monday through Thursday nights, 1,100 students are enrolled in 85 classes.

“Almost anything you can think of, we offer something that’s linked to it,” Director Yumy Odom said.

Boxing, yoga, health and diet, wing chun kung fu, mathematics, GED programs and religion are all here.

“There is a great age range coming from all over the city. There are even folks coming [to Philly] from New York to D.C. just for one class,” Odom says.

And although trying to rummage through the waves of kids after a long day is tiring, I admit that PASCEP’s youth program is arguably one of the best today.
Some wonder how Odom does it.

“It’s not even a secret. I got a call from someone trying to do some rites-of-passage programs with youth, and wanted to know why our youth programs are so different. Not that others are not good, but you can tell our youth from anyone else’s youth in the city,” he said. “I like to tell people that we create students and scholars, while other programs create clients and cattle.”

When the founder, Annie D. Hyman, created PASCEP as a grassroots organization in 1975, she founded this unique philosophy of relations, which is still a cornerstone of the program and gives it the zest to stand out.

Without even mentioning the outreach work PASCEP is doing in the community, the program as a whole is an amazing feat, considering there are only two paid employees and about 10 volunteers who are doing the work of a full-time staff. But a lack of people isn’t the problem. It’s the location.

“With the faculty, volunteers and the staff, there are a hundred of us, so really we don’t have enough space,” Odom says humbly. “But it works out because they sit in here [at their eighth-floor office], or they sit out in the hallway, or in the lobby.”

This doesn’t seem right.

PASCEP is Temple’s premiere community outreach program, which it ought to take a lot of pride in and give abundant resources to. But still there is talk of downsizing.
After downsizing once in 1995, the administration wants to move the program yet again into two offices off campus. So, it’s no wonder that there have been a lot of concerns about the future of the program.

“They might mean well,” Odom said. “But the issue is what it looks like to the community.”

Jena Williams can be reached at jena.williams@temple.edu. 

Emergency alert network tested

On Valentine’s Day, students at Northern Illinois University witnessed yet another college shooting. According to the New York Times, a lockdown and notification system was put into effect immediately, similar to the TU-Alert system that university officials recently tested.

“I don’t know very much about their system,” said Temple communications director Ray Betzner, whose son was a student at Virginia Tech last year during the shootings on that campus in April 2007.

“There are similar systems that are being used at colleges and universities around the country. For instance, the University of Pennsylvania has the same system we do,” Betzner said.

With this recent rash of campus shootings and security breaches on Temple’s campus, administrators and Campus Safety Services are instituting extra security measures.

After the Nov. 1 assault in Anderson Hall last year, ID checks in lecture halls campus-wide, especially in Anderson and adjacent Gladfelter Hall, became tighter than ever. At the beginning of this semester, students also noticed locked bathrooms on upstairs floors of the towers.

“As far as the bathrooms, there were some that were secure prior to [the assault] and then others that we looked at and decided to secure them,” said Charles Leone, deputy director of Campus Safety Services. “We’ve just made a change that we’re going to have them open during the day because there’s a lot of free flow, there’s a lot of folks in the building. In the evening, we’re going to have keys accessible.”

Senior theater major Erin Ryan said she doesn’t think strict ID checks or locked bathrooms make too much of a difference.

“The only thing that I like that they changed is the new alert system that they’ve added in, which I think was more a result of Virginia Tech than the [sexual assault],” she said. “But they just tested it, and they’ll send you a text message to your cell phone. On a campus this big, it’s more effective.”

Betzner said the alert system works by first sending a text message notification, then calling the same cell phone with an automated notification message and then sending an e-mail.

He said that only 25 percent of the total population of Temple has signed up for text messages and phone calls.
“We want students to know they’re not going to get a text message or a telephone call unless they sign up for it through OWLnet,” Betzner said. “The e-mail will go out to everyone who has a ‘temple.edu’ e-mail address.”

In addition to the TU-Alert, Leone and Campus Safety Services executive director Carl Bittenbender said they are always looking for ways to make security on campus safer and more convenient.

“We look at everything, believe it or not, on a daily basis. We look at just about the whole picture of security, policing, everything from maps to just talking to folks and getting information from our Web site,” Leone said. “We’re always asking people to send us information. Anything we get, we take a look.”

Both Leone and Bittenbender said they’re also optimistic about Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey’s new crime fighting plan for Philadelphia.

“It’s good to get a fresh look,” Leone said. “We’re looking at anywhere possible to come up with the best practices.”
Bittenbender said he would not have let his daughter live on campus for the four years she attended Temple if he wasn’t confident about the security. Leone’s son will also be coming to Temple in the fall.

“It really is exceptional the amount [of security] that Temple provides,” Bittenbender said. “I feel good about this place.”

Morgan A. Zalot can be reached at morgan.zalot@temple.edu.

Safety First

Reality struck again Thursday evening.

And it struck hard.

With all of the fancy bells and whistles Temple has added to campus in recent year, it’s almost too easy for students to forget that this is still North Philadelphia.

But Thursday night’s assault was a devastating reminder of what can happen if you fall into a complacent mind state.

A 22-year-old female student was sexually assaulted in the hallway of Anderson Hall at about 7 p.m. by a clean-shaven, dark-haired white male, city police spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore said.

Fortunately, Temple instituted a new emergency notification service last week that is designed to inform all students and faculty members of any dangerous situations that may occur on campus.

Well, it’s about time.

Look, there have been plenty of high-profile incidents at several schools across the nation in the past couple of years. It’s simply astonishing that Temple hasn’t instituted a system like this prior to this month. The recent shootings at Virginia Tech and Delaware State must have sped up the administration’s process of selecting a system that would help inform students of catastrophic situations.

The emergency notification e-mail that was sent out to Temple students and faculty members Thursday night was an OK attempt at improving this situation. But, realistically, how many students actually opened the e-mail? The general consensus is that most students ignore most Temple e-mails, whether they are from the administration, departments or organizations, simply because they receive so much e-mail from the university that they don’t differentiate which ones are actually important.

Furthermore, how exactly is this system going to work? Granted, a sexual assault is an important incident for the Temple community to know about, but where exactly do you draw the line? Will the system inform the university of every single crime that occurs on campus? And what exactly justifies itself as an emergency?

Obviously, there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered. But Temple deserves credit for at least taking a step in the right direction.

It’s fantastic that Temple is continuing to establish a safer environment for its students and faculty. But this new system is far from sufficient in its current state.

We hope the administration will continue to tweak the system and pursue more options that will keep members of the university well-informed about what happens on campus.

It’s about time that everyone has a better idea, anyway.

Emergency notification sounds off

The new emergency contact system has now been installed throughout the entire university.

The system is called the MiR3 and it is a two-way notification system that will alert students and faculty in the situation of any campus-wide threat.

This alert will be disseminated through the university by e-mails, voice mails and text messages.

Although Temple’s Main Campus is one of the safest urban colleges in the country, associate vice president of communications Mark Eyerly said he is aware of the constant changing concerns of safety.

“We’re always continually evaluating our processes to see if there are things we can do to make it a more safe place,” Eyerly said.

This is the reason Temple, along with other universities such as the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University, has purchased the MiR3 for an undisclosed price.

At New York City’s St. John’s University campus in Queens, the same campus-alert system has proven to be effective.

Authorities were alerted on Sept. 26, 2007 when a masked man carrying a rifle entered St. John’s campus.

The school’s vice president then disseminated a campus-wide alert through text messages advising people to remain where they are or to get indoors.

The masked gunman was subdued by local authorities and then students and faculty were given the all-clear.

This system helped alert students and faculty to the situation keeping them free from harm.

Timothy O’Rourke, Temple’s vice president for computer services, said he is extremely adamant about having students register their contact information with the MiR3 system.

“This is an extremely important tool, and it does no good if you’re not signed up for it,” O’Rourke said.

Of the approximate 42,755 people attending Temple this semester worldwide, only 5,800 have registered with the system as of noon on Oct. 31.

Though this is most important for campus safety, it is also planned to be used to show school cancellations due to inclement weather and other unexpected reasons.

But with only such a small percent of students registering since the campus-wide email from Temple President Ann Weaver Hart, the positive effects of the MiR3 are extremely limited.

“It takes you 30 seconds,” O’Rourke said regarding the time it takes to register yourself for Temple’s new emergency notification system.

O’Rourke said he believes that until a much larger percentage of students and faculty register for Temple’s new MiR3 campus alert system, the university’s population will be at greater risk of an imminent threat without notification.

The first emergency notification was disseminated throughout Temple’s campus by an e-mail from Clarence Armbrister, Temple’s executive vice president, after a student was assaulted in Anderson Hall between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Thursday evening.

The alert was issued at 12:25 a.m. on Friday, and over the span of the next 55 minutes, it was distributed to approximately all 42,000 e-mail accounts of Temple’s population.

The staffs at the Executive Office and the Communications Office were willing to make any statements regarding the assault that took place on Thursday evening, but O’Rourke and Armbrister are saying the systematic goal of MiR3 was a success.

“We’re happy it works as it was described,” Armbrister said. “We do plan to test it.”

The test will be using the text-messaging service, phone calls and e-mail to let students know the service is active, and it will say that it is only a test in the message to not cause a panic.

“We encourage staff, faculty and students to register on the system,” Armbrister said.

In the event of an immediate threat, the MiR3 system is the fastest way for all of Temple’s population to be alerted, Armbrister said.

“I didn’t associate that with any danger to me,” freshman elementary education major Tamara Golden said about the e-mail alert. “Nothing changed.”

After receiving the e-mail alert, Golden said she did not feel any safer being on campus.

“I didn’t really get consciously freaked out,” she said

Although Golden read the MiR3 system’s e-mail, the situation did not change for her.

“It will let students know what’s happening,” said Golden, but said she does not think this will increase safety and security on Temple’s campus.

If you see something suspicious, do not wait for a message from the MiR3, officials say. Call Campus Police at 215-204-1234.

Daniel Weisbein can be reached at dweis@temple.edu.