Ipso facto Manhattan Island (including Morningside Heights) is a fairly pleasant place by comparison; bad things happen to good people; random acts of violence happen in big cities.
Yes, and the violent crime perpetrated in large cities has increased the last two years. It is down from its peak 30 years ago, that doesn’t help the victims. There is no indication our rates will approach more sane countries, like Singapore or Japan. These acts of violence are an order of magnitude lower in both, they don’t just happen.
Morningside Heights is not “pleasant” IMO. The 2019 Barnard student and this phd student should be living their youth and be with their families. These sorts of things don’t happen in pleasant places.
I do agree Baltimore is worse than Manhattan as a whole, but that’s really bottom of the barrel along with south side Chicago, Compton, and Oakland.
Morningside heights really is quite lovely, these parks are nice places, there are wonderful places to eat and sit, the walks along the river are fabulous and the concerts and shows that you can see at Manhattan School of Music and Riverside church are wonderful. I agree these are terrible events and these young people will be terribly missed. But NYC is a wonderful place and a fabulous place to live, work and go to school.
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Is that observation based on you presently living or working on the Upper West Side?
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I do not want to dox myself with too much information given what I have provided elsewhere. I have spent plenty of time in the five boroughs over the last 40-50 years. I have not been to morningside heights since 2015. I have memories of it in the 90s, the 2000s, and more recent. I do have two former law partners who live on the upper west side/midtown west and have professional commitments in morningside heights. I do receive feedback from them.
Well I think THAT ship has long sailed.
Violent, random deaths happen in pleasant places literally all the time, every week… This is America.
Yes, upon his prison release someone from Washington Heights crossed Manhattan diagonally southbound and made it as far Central Park, killing along the way before being stopped.
The stabbings did occur where he happened to encounter people that night, NOT because of that neighborhood.
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I mentioned some foreign locales these stories do not occur, or occur in such low frequency as to not be considered when walking around aimlessly at night. The examples provided were Tokyo and Singapore. To broaden the scope, we can include Perth and Seville.
Domestically, these occurrences do not happen in well to do suburbs and rural areas at anything close to similar rates. There may be some murder in Darien or Chevy Chase or Bel Air, odds are it is not random, not for the cash on the deceased person’s body, and it will be the story of the decade for the town.
Might I remind members of the forum rules: “College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/guidelines
As the recent posts have been dominated by a handful of users, I have put the thread on slow mode until morning. My hope is this will allow other users to join the conversation and prompt the more exuberant users to be strategic in postings.
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I am always interested in the different perspective male posters have on these incidents; I suspect that it is a fairly accurate indication of whether they have ever felt physically threatened walking down the street, as most women have, in my experience. Suffice it to say, prospective college kids and their parents should carefully consider the impact on their quality of life of both the likelihood and the perception of random crimes against college kids close to campus.
Just to add to this discussion a Florida Institute of Technology student was killed in the dorms today by campus police after he attacked another student. So these things do happen in non urban areas.
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Ok. We get it. So just don’t pay for your kid to go to college and NYC and leave it alone.
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This is a great point.
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A lot of parents here are concerned after the UChicago and Columbia murders. They want to talk it out. I don’t know why you wish to shut conversation down when you can simply ignore this discourse or, better yet, constructively contribute to it.
We are trying to keep our children reasonably safe. There are both major and minor decisions that can avoid these heinous outcomes. Based on the private messages I have received regarding both the legal profession and urban safety, a lot of parents here do not have much experience living in larger cities for more than a couple days and I speak to the precautions to take. Hopefully I helped someone avoid a life altering incident.
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I think the biggest adjustment kids from the suburbs have to make when attending an urban university (Columbia, Penn, Yale, Chicago, etc.) is not having the use of a car as an armored vehicle to get from one place to another. Uber and Lyft attempt to fill that void. But, a lot of people get used to the idea of traveling in a herd; mass transit or even just keeping to where there is ample lighting and foot traffic.
That may not be enough, of course. There was lighting and foot traffic before 11pm at 123rd and Amsterdam. The victim was accompanied by another healthy young male. Since that clearly was insufficient to prevent his death, one might expect those who are more vulnerable to fear the danger more.
As a man that was hit in the face with a tire iron by a complete stranger as a high school student, and then had a gun pulled on him in college, I assume my opinions might differ from those that have lived a more sheltered life.
If your children think walking the streets, head down, looking at their phones with their AirPods in is normal, they might need a situational awareness boot camp before heading to an urban campus.
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That’s useful advice regardless of where a student attends school. Of course, it still may not be sufficient.
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No one’s trying to play insurance underwriter. There are lots of lovely and scenic places where I refuse to go walking around day or night, including the bluffs around Torrey Pines which every local knows are inhabited by rattlesnakes; just about anywhere there are signs posted, “Beware of Bears” and, don’t even get me started on the subject of water moccasins in the Southeast. It’s a matter of what you are used to.
I am fond of purchasing bear spray. More to the point, walking with others at night near campus is a pretty typical college student activity, and the victim was a well-travelled and sophisticated man of 30, not a naive rural teen.
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I think you and I are in agreement that there is not a lot the young man could have done to have prevented what happened.