College "Justice" Fails deMoya

by Benjamin Patch and Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The panel charged with investigating the alleged physical abuse of sophomores Brian deMoya and Bert Sperling by Dartmouth Safety and Security forces and members of the Hanover police force has delivered its report to Dean of the College Lee Pelton. The report contains no recommendations of sanction against the involved Safety and Security officers. It also contains no larger sanction against the attitude or policies of the Department of Safety and Security.

Dan Nelson, Senior Associate Dean of the College, wrote an open letter in synopsis of the panel’s findings. The selection that describes the committee’s findings is one sentence long: “I am also led to conclude that the situation might well have been considerably less difficult and less confrontational had the two Dartmouth Security officers and the two students principally involved conducted themselves differently.”

Although all accounts to come public indicate that deMoya was roughed up in the presence of Security officers, Nelson nowhere advises sanction or assigns more blame to the Safety and Security officers. In Nelson’s analysis, all parties are equally at fault. deMoya is consequently making preliminary preparations for a lawsuit. He remains, he says, fundamentally unsatisfied by the College’s response.

“Obviously the College is not concerned with the way students here are treated by Safety and Security,” deMoya said in response to the report. “They’ve just made an attempt to brush my case under the table. It’s pretty disappointing.”

Proctor Robert McEwen, the man charged with supervising Safety and Security, repeatedly postponed interviews with this newspaper and finally refused to return phone calls. Safety and Security has made no formal statement.

On the evening of January 31, deMoya was in his dorm room in French Hall. His roommate had thrown a party earlier in the evening, but the room had cleared out and deMoya, who had not had anything to drink that evening because of a lingering illness, was getting ready for bed.

Several Safety and Security officers entered the room barking orders at deMoya. Sperling was in a back room at the time. The officers said they were called to resolve a noise complaint from a neighboring room. They saw empty alcohol containers lying around and demanded to search the room. deMoya gave them that permission and went to bed.

The officers were less than pleased. They began cursing violently at deMoya and Sperling, who by this point, had come into the front room. deMoya and Sperling responded in kind, and the officers began to threaten them with arrest. When the roomates continued to argue and question the presence of the officers, the officers called Hanover Police for backup and physically detained deMoya and Sperling within the room. deMoya and Sperling had at this point neither committed nor been charged with any crime other than Possession of Alcohol.

Sperling asked to go to the bathroom, and when the Safety and Security officers reluctantly allowed him, he left the room and tried to run away but was caught and physical restrained by Safety and Security. deMoya bolted. He headed down the stairs only to be tackled, headlocked, and slammed into a concrete wall by an arriving Hanover Police officer, called in for tactical support.

In his affidavit, deMoya wrote that the officer was “forcing my head into the floor with his other forearm, while kneeing me in the back of my legs and shouting that he was going to kick my ass, that I was a f*ck*ng prick.”

He was then dragged down the stairs and out to a waiting squad car as Dartmouth Safety and Security followed behind. Then, “the police officer said to hold on as he would adjust my cuffs to ensure they were not too tight... to my dismay and disbelief, he tightened the cuffs.” Afterward, deMoya had bloody wrists and scabs and had to receive treatment at Dick’s House.

deMoya also claims that Safety and Security mocked and taunted him throughout the affair.

When the police finally got deMoya to the police station and tried to place him in ‘protective custody’ for intoxication, deMoya finally talked them into giving him a breathalyzer — that’s when he blew a .000.

Neither the Department of Safety and Security nor the College has issued any public defense of its officers nor have either contradicted deMoya’s version of events. Safety and Security officers Wilds, Wooley, and Carr and Hanover Police officer Baynes have been most prominently implicated in the attack.

The next day deMoya sent out an e-mail detailing the events of the night to several friends which was quickly forwarded to most of the students on campus, which was quickly up in arms about the attack.

On February 4, under student pressure, Dean Lee Pelton announced that he would appoint a panel to invesigate the incident. Angry students were pleased by the administration’s prompt response. The appointed panel included Professor Deborah Nichols, Assistant Provost (and History Professor) Sheila Culbert, student Noah Phillips ’00, and was chaired by the acting director of the Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Office Ozzie Harris. Pelton gave the panel a limited charge — to determine the events of the evening.

“Originally I wasn’t going to talk to the panel,” said deMoya, “because I felt the statement I made was sufficient and we really just felt like we would be disadvantaged in the panel. After Bert and I read the Safety and Security statements, however, and realized how disparate they were from ours, we decided to testify.”

Following its mandate, the committee heard testimony from all of the parties involved. According to deMoya,“The committee’s lines of questioning seemed to tend towards trying to get me to weaken my claims or get me to support even the most minute claims of Safety and Security. It seemed to me that they kept prodding me to change my original statement.”

The members of the panel this paper contacted refused to comment on the panel’s findings. They are under institutional sanction, and are prohibited from discussing the case.

The possibility still exists that Proctor McEwen will discipline the involved Safety and Security officers, although the reluctance of Dean Nelson to place even minimal blame on the officers make it seem unlikely that McEwen will take decisive action.