“The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus

7 Hold Fast

131 7 HOLD FAST 1. Monday Jimmy Jones had canceled classes for the day, but the Crisis Management Team knew that students who awoke unaware of what had happened wouldn’t necessarily find out before heading to class. Part of the team’s plan was to station selected faculty and administrators in all the residence halls early on Monday morning, so that students would have both reliable information and support. Calls and messages went out to employees with any counseling or social agency background and faculty seen as “student-friendly” who, in Pat Ponto’s words, could also be relied upon “to take care of themselves.” Around 6:30 a.m. these people convened in the Olmsted Room. They included Marigene Arnold, who had been up all night without even the benefit of caffeine (a counseling intern had been sent out for coffee and returned to Trowbridge with quarts of decaf). The group was divided into teams of two, each team assigned to one of the six residence halls, the central lounge in Hicks Center, and the chapel. At the start of the meeting, Pat recalls people asking, “What are we going to do?” and looking at her. She remembers thinking, “We’re gonna try.” CHAPTER 7 132 At 6:30 a.m. on Monday, October 18, Sara Church’s alarm went off in the double she shared with Maureen Kelly at the south end of the second floor of Trowbridge, looking straight at DeWaters. She had an 8:00 class. Sara noticed a Post-it note on her computer. In the dark she snatched it and started to move toward the hallway so she could read it without turning on the light and waking Maureen. But before she could make out the message, the phone rang—a weird occurrence at that hour. “Weirder still,” Sara says, “was the fact that it was my mom asking if I was OK.” It turned out that Sara’s father “had heard on the radio that morning that a female K student had been killed and had immediately called my mom.” As Sara spoke to her mother, Maureen woke. Sara told her mother she didn’t know what had happened and said goodbye. Maureen, a night owl, had been up later than Sara, studying. She’d seen the commotion outside DeWaters and spotted her friends Kelly Jones and Nisse Olsen—who along with Sara and Maureen were on the golf team—crying. She got the word that someone had died in DeWaters , but she decided not to wake Sara and instead left the Post-it. Now she and Sara got online and within minutes discovered Maggie’s name in an early news article. Golf coach Lyn Maurer reached Sara shortly thereafter, in a series of calls to her team. For Sara, who was not personally close to Maggie, the sisterhood of the links was important. “It was a great group, and Maggie was a central part of that gang,” she recalls. She replayed her memories of the final match of the season and the Homecoming preparty at Gillian’s. “And now Maggie was gone? The one laughing in the backseat after an entire round in chilly wind and rain?” At 7:00 a.m. provost Greg Mahler, who had dashed home to shower and change clothes for what he knew would be a long day, was back in his office, launching a calling tree to let the faculty know as quickly as possible what had happened and to advise us that classes were canceled. It was a clear, golden fall day. HOLD FAST 133 Across the quad in the Student Commission offices in Hicks Center, Simone Lutz was initiating another calling tree, this one designed to get the word out to seniors, the primary off-campus population, so that they would show up for the meeting on the quad scheduled by the president for noon. “It was very hard, because a lot of seniors didn’t know [Maggie or Neenef]. But at the end of the day that didn’t matter.” Friends helped her get the word out. The Commission office functioned for the rest of the day as one of many gathering points. “People were in there all day,” Simone says, “just grieving and crying and questioning and talking, and we were making phone calls to get people on campus, and we just had an open door, basically.” At 7...