<p>What on earth is going on at our universities these days? As a parent of a UCLA grad student, stories like these just make my heart start pounding....</p>
<p>Student</a> stabbed in chemistry lab, suspect in custody / UCLA Newsroom</p>
<p>^ I don’t think anything is new, it’s just what the media picks up to make it look like a trend. One story feeds another. </p>
<p>With 4000 campuses and 16,000,000 college students in the US, there is bound to be a news story of a violent nature every day on some campus if they want to find it.</p>
<p>^I would hate to think such student-on-student violence in an academic building in the middle of a workday is so common place. This is not a mugging at a dark corner of a campus by a stranger.</p>
<p>In January, a young UCLA chemist died of extensive burns caused by a lab accident. Now, this… So sad.</p>
<p>Justamom, if your graduate student works in a lab, please pass this to him/her: follow lab safety rules religiously! Unfortunately, safety often easily ignored by professors, as this tragic incident shows:</p>
<p><a href=“http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8731sci1.html[/url]”>http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8731sci1.html</a></p>
<p>BB, she does work in a lab, and as chemical engineering student, she goes to the chemistry department for supplies fairly often. Her professor has this article displayed in their lab as a stark reminder to diligently follow safety procedures.</p>
<p>I know what you mean Just-a-mom. But a few incidents can readily occur close together when the underlying numbers are so large. Most of the time we can neither comprehend the sheer numbers of people on campus, nor realize that most incidents do not appear in the news.</p>
<p>So for example, on US college campuses in 2000, every day on average, 3 people killed themselves, 11 were charged with aggravated assaults, and 5 people were raped. And about every 17 days someone was murdered. </p>
<p>Sad but true. But fortunately, campuses are MUCH safer than off campus.</p>
<p>Most of the college students who are victims of crime are victims of crime committed by another college student. The “dark alley mugging” is the exception, not the rule. The rule is that there are millions of college students in daily contact with one another, they are mostly young adults (and therefore more prone to criminal behavior than any other group), and some of them do bad things to others, with or without being mentally ill. (With a population of millions, at any particular time a bunch of them will have some serious mental illness.)</p>
<p>Here is the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s booking info:</p>
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</p>
<p>The stabbing allegedly took place in an advanced organic chemistry laboratory where most of the students were senior undergrads. There were several witnesses.</p>
<p>‘Several’ might be an understatement - according to the statement, there might be as many as 30+ witnesses involved in some way or another. :eek:</p>
<p>What I find interesting is that he apparently stabbed this girl several times and then just calmly walked away and “turned himself in” to a “staff member”. So did he just walk into the chemistry department front office and say “hey thought I’d let you know that I just stabbed someone in a classroom over there and figured I’d wait here for the police”?</p>
<p>The other thing that struck me is that there were supposedly 30+ witnesses and the guy was actually able to walk away from the scene. That’s extremely disappointing to me. A 5’11", 200 lbs. guy with a knife (or maybe a piece of glass or something - I dont’ think the weapon has been released yet) is simply no match for 30 people. Surely there were at least a few people there with the conscience to try to take this guy into custody - put yourself in the place of the girl who was stabbed in front of a large crowd. How would you feel if that large crowd let the one attacker just walk away?</p>