Four weeks ago on May 20, at 6:50 a.m., the landlord of an apartment building in Mission Hill, MA, found a door ajar in his building. Concerned, the man opened the door and found blood across the floor and a woman's body limp and cold.
Rebecca Payne, 22, of New Milford, CT and student at Northeastern University in Boston, was found dead in her apartment. Autopsy reports read that Payne died of gunshot wounds in the legs and chest.
This week, sources told a local television station in Connecticut that Payne was mistakenly shot. The shooter was targeting another female for drugs and money.
Where It All Began
Crimes on college campuses is not unheard of. School shootings, at any level, have dated back to 1966 with the University of Texas massacre where a student killed 14 and injured 31 more from the observation deck of an administrative building.
Since then there have been 46 more school shootings in the United States alone; more than Canada who has seven and the rest of the world which has 14.
Since 2005 the U.S. has seen 14 school shootings. And none of these statistics include individual murders.
Recent Murders
Besides the murder of Payne, other recent murders include a the student body president at University of North Carolina, Eva Carson and Lauren Bunk, a student at Auburn University in Georgia. The suspicious murders were only a day apart.
In 2003, a senior at Colby College in Maine, Dawn Rossignol, was murdered.
In 2006, Laura Dickinson, a student at Eastern Michigan University, was raped and killed.
Statistics and How To Protect Yourself
Since 1992, federal law has required colleges to produce and release crime statistics to the public. The U.S. Department of Education has a Web site for the Office of Postsecondary Education that shows different reports on various crimes on college campuses across the country.
Crimes on campus and crimes to areas off-campus but occupied by students are vulnerable areas for dangerous activity. Whether it is caused by a fellow student or a random person on the street, the area filled with students makes it susceptible for danger.
Colleges such as Amherst College in Massachusetts have Web pages of how students can protect themselves on campus.
Students need to become more aware of what's going on around them. It's easy to get caught up in the every day hustles of life, yet it is more important to protect what's number one in your life: you.
Lauren Vassallo - What makes a talented writer? In my opinion, it's passion, curiosity and creativity. While studying print and multimedia journalism at ...
