<p>There is a video clip on Boston.com/bostonglobe (Metro section) about the shooting.</p>
<p>Rumor on campus is that a Harvard girl was in a relationship with one of the three offenders, and let them into the dorm. All signs point to a botched drug transaction, probably either with Cosby trying to overcharge for poor quality goods or the three guys trying to jack him.</p>
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<p>City of Cambridge will be happy to quote that the next time they negotiate Harvard’s “voluntary” annual contribution.</p>
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<p>The last high profile slaying by a Harvard student was in 2003, when a master’s degree candidate overachieved in a knife fight.</p>
<p>I have to note that in the Crimson article linked above, the headline
“If your’re looking for a job in NYC, the Club is the place to be” is not very reassuring.</p>
<p>Siserune,</p>
<p>We are so glad that you highlighted that quote. My daughter, a Harvard student, was aghast at that quote (about relief that the victim was not a Harvard student).</p>
<p>I cannot believe that someone could be shot over marijuana. This is ridiculous. There must be more to the story than that.</p>
<p>I feel so much for Justin Cosby’s mother.</p>
<p>“Relief that the victim was not a Harvard student…” I wonder what the reaction is now that a Harvard student is somehow involved in a drug transaction gone bad in a Harvard residence, a transaction that resulted in a murder, one where the trigger was pulled in Kirkland. Town not so different than gown after all.</p>
<p>Might have been a slip of tongue, but then, that really is something very inconsiderate to say…</p>
<p>There is a common misconception, especially for those of us who went to high school in the 70’s and 80’s, that marijuana is not a street drug. Fact is, the product on the street today is not, by and large, grown by your brother’s best friend on his windowsill. Marijuana today is stronger, and often laced with other drugs, and most times comes directly from criminal sources. It is ALWAYS dangerous to be purchasing it—despite the fact that someone you know may be selling it. </p>
<p>My FIRST assumption, when I read this story, was that it was related to a soured drug deal. Any Harvard student could have been caught in the crossfire. Response time by the college doesn’t mean a pile of beans when the students are underestimating the danger of allowing/looking the other way/participating in drug purchases in their house.</p>
<p>When I first read the details, that I included in post #46, about his “being right back”, I also immediately thought of drugs. But I was thinking of a drug buy and not a drug sale.</p>
<p>ok… so the victim (Cosby) was there to sell drugs to a Harvard student (female), but what about the 3 perpetraitors??? was it a jeolous boyfriend, was he thinking that his girlfriend was getting ripped off in her deals with Cosby, or was Cosby the boyfriend of the Harvard student and the 3 perps were dealers??? So many possibilites. I hope that with students getting ready to leave that someone who knows something doesn’t leave with information and this case never gets solved. That would be scary. I’m really concerned about the 3 perps, who are they? and why were they armed with a gun!?!</p>
<p>Loki5, as the parent of teenagers, I have often lectured them on the potency and contamination of marijuana these days. </p>
<p>However, in Massachusetts, marijuana possession and use was recently decriminalized.</p>
<p>I hope that eventually we will get information from the continuing investigation. I hope that the perpetrators are found. It would be terrible if the story ends here, but that happens a lot in other parts of town.</p>
<p>Good post, Loki5. I suspect it whizzed right by most of your readers. There are none so blind…
As to some other comments (by other posters)–would you consider it inappropriate for a parent to express relief that it wasn’t a member of his family that was killed? And many Harvard students, and perhaps family members, feel that their college is a kind of extended family. Dopers are constantly killing one another everywhere, and no individual can grieve properly for all of this stupidity and waste. You have to reserve your strongest feelings for what hits your neighborhood, whether or not your neighbors are responsible. I hope that Harvard/Cambridge security will take steps to insure that future hit men will hesitate to commit their crimes on campus, since it will be unlikely they could simply run away. That is not the case now, as many of us have just learned.</p>
<p>"As to some other comments (by other posters)–would you consider it inappropriate for a parent to express relief that it wasn’t a member of his family that was killed? And many Harvard students, and perhaps family members, feel that their college is a kind of extended family. "</p>
<p>That’s the way I interpreted the comment, too, as meaning, “Thank God it wasn’t one of my friends who was killed.” I think that virtually everyone who hears of a tragedy at their college, school, workplace or neighborhood thinks, “I hope it wasn’t one of my classmates, coworkers or relatives.”</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean that a person is cold hearted. It just means that they hope they don’t have a personal connection with the victim.</p>
<p>According to Boston Globe, the shooter surrendered today.
[Arrest</a> made in Harvard University slaying - Local News Updates - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/05/arrest_made_in_5.html]Arrest”>http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/05/arrest_made_in_5.html)</p>
<p>I know it seems inconsiderate to say, and to say it to a reporter is inconsiderate, but I doubt there are many Harvard students today who don’t share the same feeling. I’ve been on both sides of it, having someone shot on/near campus that wasn’t a student and some people who were; it’s just more detached when you know you haven’t passed that person walking to class every day that year. I wouldn’t get on him too hard for the quote.</p>
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<p>The Cambridge public high school, where the dead man and possibly his girlfriend studied, is a sort of hole in the gown. As was posted above, there were 11 CRLS students at Harvard from that year. The figure without an admissions preference for locals would be zero or one per year, maybe two sometimes. Eleven may be a bumper crop or not, I don’t know; but there are a lot more CRLS connections at Harvard than would ordinarily be the case, and given CRLS’ demographics this does up the odds of some unsavory relationships. For instance, the number of CRLS students who have or acquire arrest records is far larger than at high schools with a halfway comparable record of Harvard admission.</p>
<p>I’m not suggesting that Harvard admissions policy is to blame for the shooting, but the shooting does bring the CRLS connection to light in the most undesired way possible.</p>
<p>This is nonsense.</p>
<p>We do not know who the person who wanted to purchase the drug was and where this person had gone to school. CRLS is indeed an urban school and a very diverse one. But that fact does not make it a den of crime or produce a higher incidence of druggy students. Some acquaintances of mine looked at private high schools for their daughter. At one they toured, the whole place reeked of marijuana.</p>
<p>There is no data that suggests that CRLS graduates admitted into Harvard are performing less well than students admitted from other schools. I happen to know several of them, and they have all performed admirably. Besides being admitted to Harvard, CRLS graduates have been admitted to Stanford, Yale, Columbia, etc… where they are neither legacies nor connected to these universities in any way. The fact is that CRLS is bi-modal, with students whose parents are university professors (Tufts, MIT, Harvard, BU among those I know), lawyers, engineers, architects, and so on, and students who come from recently immigrated, limited English background as well as low-income local families. Chances are the CRLS graduates who are admitted into top colleges come from the first group. To suggest that their background is problematic is risible.</p>
<p>The dead man was visiting his girlfriend, according to reports. Do you suppose she or whoever introduced him went to CRLS, or do you find it likelier that Harvard girls like to date their drug dealers?</p>
<p>Harvard does not publish statistics on the performance of preferred admission categories. Common sense, and the results of studies in the case of athletes, minorities, etc suggest that the same performance deficit holds for CRLS admits, though I admit the latter have some advantage in a local support system. </p>
<p>CRLS draws about half its students from the Cambridge housing projects. The equivalent demographic at schools with comparable admission results would be tiny indeed, and having very little social overlap with the academic echelon of students going to Ivy Leagues (as they take no classes together). Because CRLS teaches students of all levels in the same classes, there is a lot more mixture, and a lot more students to mix with. I need not dwell on the fact that, in Cambridge as everywhere else, crime is strongly linked to socioeconomics, race, parental education, and all the usual factors. CRLS is up to its ankles in unfavorable demographics and low performance, and I believe was on probation with the state accreditation agency in the not too distant past for the academic underperformance of the minority students.</p>
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<p>There was no such suggestion. The actual suggestion was that, relative to other schools, CRLS’ alumni at Harvard are uniquely positioned to have an elevated chance of a connection to problematic locals (or creating a connection between such and the college population). Somebody from Freebase Central High School in some other city is not going to have a stable of local associates. With CRLS, given the number of its Harvard attendees and the number and flavor of the local connections they may have, it is far likelier to have a matriculant who knows someone in the area with a rap sheet, or dates them, or lets them into a Harvard dormitory. Several of those alternatives appear to be true in this case from the existing reports. </p>
<p>Note that “far likelier” than a small probability is still a relatively small probability. Added up over the years and over the large number of students, the chances do accumulate that from time to time there will be some actual problem.</p>
<p>Siserune:</p>
<p>What you say about CRLS is untrue.
For two years, 9th and 10th graders were taught in “homogenous classes.” This system did not exist before those two years, and was abandoned after that when the principal who instigated these reforms left. But even then, 11th and 12th graders (and advanced 9th and 10th graders) were able to take APs. As in many schools, the AP classes are demographically different from the school population as a whole. As the Harvard prof whose son is currently a junior told me, the AP classes her son are in are full of Caucasians and Asians and Asian-Americans. There are few Hispanics or African-Americans–though some CRLS African-American students I know have been absolutely stellar.
The year that 11 CRLS students were admitted into Harvard, three were children of Harvard faculty. At least two other CRLS students from that year were admitted to MIT, two to Yale, two to Stanford. None as far as I know was a recruited athlete. From the year before, several are currently in top grad schools. And that is from my small circle of acquaintances.</p>
<p>The chance of Harvard students dating local kids going to a state college is vanishingly small. The proportion of Harvard students doing drugs is probably just the same as any other college. And as any other college, they will seek out people who can cater to their needs. Again, CRLS aggregate academic performance may not be terrific; but this says absolutely nothing about the incidence of drugs at that school. The private school I referred to earlier is located in a very wealthy suburb. Years ago, I got to know a former teacher at a very expensive private school where a student had forced others to purchase drugs for him by torturing them. The teacher found about it when he noticed burn marks on some of them. That private school was located in a town very far removed from Boston/Cambridge. </p>
<p>More news:</p>
<p>[Police</a> arrest NYC man in killing at Harvard dorm - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/22/nyc_man_is_arrested_in_killing_at_harvard/]Police”>http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/22/nyc_man_is_arrested_in_killing_at_harvard/)</p>