Five Key Perspectives on the Student Arrests in November

In this article we present — to the best of our ability — five of the most important perspectives regarding the recent on campus arrests. At times the perspectives are completely at odds and contradictory, but for the sake of fairness, all were left in.

All information used in this article was obtained legally through Sunshine State Public Records Laws, which grants access to the emails, police reports, and interviews of New College’s public officials.

PRESIDENT O’SHEA’S PERSPECTIVE

President Donal O’Shea spent the entire month of November stressed out of his mind, or at least it seems that way from reading his emails (he was dealing with at least four contentious issues at once). In an email titled Potential letter to students… I think I’m losing it, President O’Shea sent this draft of a letter, intended to eventually address the student body’s shock over the arrests of four students in November of 2015, to his support staff:

New College abides by the laws of Florida and the US.

In particular. we never have and never will tolerate dealing illegal drugs on campus. Whether or not one believes that a given substance is harmful, large amounts of proscribed substances and the cash associated with dealing them put the community at risk.

I’D LIKE TO SAY (BUT PROBABLY SHOULDN’T)

Which would you prefer — a couple of campus police with guns drawn, or thugs with semi-automatics

intent on stealing the goods and money?

Please do not write to me with the idiotic trope that banning dealing (or public consumption of alcohol by minors) will drive NC students to the streets for untested products (or their rooms for highly alcoholic confections). New College of Florida exists to provide students an education at the highest levels of excellence. We are not a drugstore.

President O’Shea later amended the draft — perhaps in an attempt to use less inflammatory and racially coded language when addressing students. He opted to keep the top half unchanged, instead editing the bottom:

I am aware of the argument that banning dealing (or public consumption of alcohol by minors) will drive New College students to the streets for untested products. This argument is completely flawed. New College students are too smart for this, and the sole reason the institution exists is to provide them with an education at the highest levels of excellence.

Though the email’s final draft was friendlier, President O’Shea’s email was met with a huge backlash from students, resulting in a 70+ comment thread on the forum. On November 30th, President O’Shea sent an additional email containing four pages of his thoughts regarding the Carlos Ramirez situation, recent racial tensions (brought out by the situation at Mizzou and an unaffiliated slur-spewing white woman at a Q&A session), a Sarasota rabbi’s letter concerning antisemitism at NCF, and lastly, the arrests.

When speaking about the arrests, President O’Shea tried to clarify and defend his position, lifting some of the sentiments from his earlier email (particularly how “large amounts of substances put the community at risk”), even subtly making his point about “thugs with semi-automatics”, by citing that “a few years ago, some New College students were robbed at gunpoint in a room out of which drugs were being dealt”. The situation President O’Shea is referencing happened once and it was over 10 years ago.

Through the course of reading President O’Shea’s emails, it seems as if he honestly believes he is working toward a safer campus, even if that means sometimes supporting the arrest of student’s.

President O’Shea declined our repeated requests for an interview.

We spoke with the arrested students to get their side of the story.

C’S PERSPECTIVE

For purpose of complete discretion it should be noted that the author of the article is personal friends with the interviewees.

I had an hour and a half conversation with C, M, and A. We discussed essentially everything that happened spanning from the night before the arrest, to its lingering effects today.

C spent the night before the arrest enveloped in his role as a student activist. He spent the prior week “organizing a march in solidarity with Mizzou”, where racially charged protests had been breaking out. When discussing his involvement in these protests and his activism in general, C speaks passionately, frequently engaging in rhetoric surrounding the pervasive issues of racism and cyclical poverty in America.

He proudly declares himself as “someone who is trying to think about shifting the paradigm, and altering our codified and structured inequalities,” and stresses how “it’s important to set up the context as me being someone who is fighting the system, if you will.” This particular dichotomy of identity has been difficult for C to reconcile with: as somebody whose entire personality is so defined in opposition to these “corrupt and racist systems”, it’s been difficult to become one of the victims that he was trying to protect.

While C speaks about the arrest with pointed aggression, M speaks with notable fragility. He begins the discussion by talking about how his license was suspended a couple days before the arrest, and how his trip to the DMV to clear things up foreshadowed future events, “the lady at the DMV told me she couldn’t help me because there was a warrant out for my arrest, and I was just like, why? So I called the Sarasota Police Department, and they told me not to worry about it, so I just stopped thinking about it.”

M nervously continued “and then the night before the arrest I was having trouble falling asleep, so I didn’t get to bed until 6 am, so when the cops came I had just fallen asleep. I was not coherent when I was waking up. So in hindsight, it would have been really easy that I could have stumbled, and gotten shot or something.”

C jumps in, “the post-arrest fear of being shot was very real. It’s not like the administration didn’t know who I was. And the fact that the police thought they needed to have guns pointed at New College students was… a problem, it’s terrifying looking back on it because there is this whole idea in the way that the police do their job, it’s like ‘I need to make sure that I’m safe before anyone else is safe’. I think M and I have this well deserved fear that at any point we could have said the wrong thing and could have ended up as statistics.”

“Yeah,” M continues, “in the moment I wasn’t thinking clearly, I was just terrified of dying in multiple senses, like getting shot, or going to jail, because in the moment they seemed both as bad. I was just in a complete daze, because I had fucking guns in my face.”

M sits straighter in his chair “Oh yeah, and in the police report they say that they were pointing them toward the ground but that’s just not true. I could see the hole of the gun.” A immediately agrees with M, “Yeah, they came in the room holding their guns, and you could maybe make the argument that they didn’t know our beds were on the floor, but even then they saw that we were sleeping, and they moved forward, with the guns still pointed at us.” Without hesitation M adds,“Very distinctly at us.”

I look at C, “So you remember seeing the barrel of the gun too?”

“Yes absolutely.”

“Ok so what happened next?” I ask.

C answers, “I was placed in handcuffs and I was told that I needed to cooperate. I think that when it first happened I kind of felt like I was in a dream a little bit. My home is a temple it’s like my sanctuary, when you put your head on your pillow, in your house, in your home, that is the one place where nothing can come to hurt you, so when I went to sleep that night I felt like this was my home, so when I had that sense of safety violated the whole situation did not feel real. It sort of resulted in shock and disbelief. They read through my journal in front of me, try to imagine that, it was not only a violation of my space, but a violation of my mind.”

C continues, “So they tell me they have a warrant and that we need to cooperate. They go into my room, search through all my stuff and then they take me back out into the common area. It was at this point they read us our Miranda Rights.”

It’s important to note that Officer Fisher, Officer Rivett, and Officer Spees all claim in the police report that the Miranda Rights were read prior to the search being conducted. However, Officer Marc Mayoral (the officer who actually read the miranda rights) claims that they were read after the search took place. Officer Mayoral’s timeline is unanimously supported by C, M , and AS.

After establishing these discrepancies I continue, “C, I have a really personal question for you, concerning something that M told me the day of the arrest. Are you ok with really personal questions?” C confidently agrees. “ML told me that when they were escorting you out of the room in handcuffs, that you said something along the lines of ‘If I get more than five years I’m just going to kill myself.’, what was going through your mind when you said that?”

C takes a large gulp of air, and answers in a much more subdued tone — the first time in the interview that he strays from his confidence — “yeah, that was a dark time. So yeah, on the record, suicide is absolutely something I contemplated. To have police going through your stuff, opening and reading your journal, felt like being on a stage completely naked, feeling completely violated, and I was thinking about how my life chances could be shaped from this, and I was just thinking that they don’t look good, to say the least. At the time it was hard for me to think about how I could go forward from here,” C’s voice breaks a little, “and before I knew that at this point in my life, that I was going places, I had my dream to go to Yale, and to go into politics and then now I was thinking maybe I could be a busboy at a nice restaurant. It really made me question the meaning and the purpose of continuing.”

M adds “Yeah that day sucked, all I could think was that this wasnt real, and I thought maybe I was just tripping dick. It was too horrible, like they let A put pants on and I was wearing black tighty whiteys, and they were handcuffing me and I kept saying ‘please let me put pants on please let me put pants on” I was begging, and they refused, and said ‘no you have enough on’ and I said ‘please let me put my pants on’ so I thought I was going to jail with only my underwear on. That would have been a really bad way to start jail.” A gets visually anxious as M retells this part, her hands begin shaking. Upon noticing this M tells me to “write in the thing that her hands are shaking.”

“Oh, and I also want to add that I’ve been robbed at knife point before, and having the cops bust in with their guns and everything was, way scarier. That day just sucked so bad, and I didn’t even go to jail. The period of time from when I woke up to when I went to the cop shop was the longest experience I’ve ever had, and like all I could think was ‘there goes my life, it’s done from here on out, and there goes my parents’ view of me as a good kid and shit, it sucked.’

We move onto discussing what happened after the arrest C starts, “once I was in the actual jail cell there was a lack of ability to tell time, there were no clocks, the toilet the sink the beds were all together. There’s this dehumanization of your individual reality, there’s a ripping of your personhood. There’s a reason that the uniforms and the lack of activity and mobility, it’s as if they are taking away your shot at any future normality. The peeling of the walls, the grime on the ground, the lack of sanitation is palpable. Leaving jail and seeing my friends was the first moment that things were real, it was just really wrenching really hard, and for the first time that day I broke down and just lost my composure. But the support of the community was great.” M adds on, “Yeah, and I was just homeless for the next few weeks, sleeping on couches and in hotels. Even though they only found A and I with a few grams of weed. It was awful.”.

I then asked them about their relationship with D (person who signed the affidavit). C answers “I thought it was mostly fine. Our relationship suffered from the typical things that people who live together and don’t know each other suffer from, like loudness of music, and leaving dishes out.”

I ask them what they think about D’s claim that he was forced into signing an affidavit, C says “Yeah, I have no idea. If he’s lying about it, then that means he’s just a really vindictive person, and he never seemed to be a vindictive person… unless he really, really was.”

D’S PERSPECTIVE

While D declined to do an interview at this point in time, he gave his side of the story in an email forwarded to former Dean Tracy Murry and President O’Shea. In hopes that D’s story is represented fairly, we are publishing his email in full with minor exclusions.

Early in the morning of November 16 (Monday): I emailed Vanessa Van Dyke about my problems with housing, how I am being ignored by my RA, and my roommates only become aggressive when I approach them to be more quiet.

I am emailed back on Tuesday and then Mark Stier emailed me telling me to stop by his office. I go to his office and spend most of the day speaking with him and Tracy Murry. They tell me that they have to involve police to fix my problem (all I wanted was a quiet room and to move out). I tell them that I will make a complaint but I don’t want to cause any problem. They say that I will remain anonymous.

The police showed up and had me tell my story. They said that I can remain anonymous but then there is nothing that they can do. The told me to write down the problems that I am having with my roommate and write my name, and they will do everything to ensure that there will be no problems. I told them that I am afraid of possible backlash from this because C is vindictive. and they told me that there will be no problems and I can finish the semester in a new room as long as I filled out the form and signed it. I then started to fill out a form to change housing, which they told me would become active after they solve the problem.

They then told me that I had to email them to keep them up to date on all drug transactions and I felt that I would lose integrity my chance at a noise-free room if I didn’t cooperate.

On Thursday (November 19th) at 8AM, without an email to let me know, I was woken up by cops running into my room with guns yelling at me to put my hands up. Once they asked my name, one cop laughed and said, “This is just a show for you,” while still handcuffing me and putting me in the kitchen with the others.

Afterward I talked to Tracy Murry about my safety on campus. He told me that he will go ahead and email my professors about the possibility of telecommuniting, which was a complete change of plans from before when he said I would just change rooms. He then also emailed me stating he wasn’t aware that I was supposed to stay on campus next semester and offered to call my home institution to let them be aware and take me back starting in the spring. He also told me that my name would be released on Monday and I should leave by then.

Everything changed so suddenly. I was lied to about getting a new room and they escalated a simple room change into an arrest while using me as the name on the papers and drove me out of town. This is a beautiful school with an amazing faculty but is poisoned by a horrible student affairs faculty.

ADMINISTRATION’S PERSPECTIVE

Mark Stier, the Associate Dean of Student Life, and Tracy Murry, the outgoing Dean of Student Affairs, both have fundamentally different stories from the account provided by D. Over email, Stier claims that “There are obviously huge pieces of his story missing. Tracy and I met with him outlining all his options including a room change. He specifically stated that he knew there would be negative repercussions, but at this time didn’t care. He wanted C and M gone from campus for all the problems they caused him throughout the term.” In another email Associate Dean Stier claims that, “The longest we ever talked to [D] was 15 minutes. It is funny how he even claimed that he knew that there would be repercussions but that he didn’t care. He was all about ‘paying them back’ for making his life unbearable as a suitemate.”

In an email, Dean Murry gave his own timeline of the situation.

Now, I will speak to my own interactions with D. I spoke with him on three occasions: a few minutes on the afternoon of the 17th, mid-day on the 20th (with his family present), and late afternoon (in President O’Shea’s office). On the 17th I only spoke with him for five or ten minutes. I was on my way to a meeting when Dr. Stier caught me to ask if I could answer a quick question for a student. I walked inside his office and he introduced me to D. Dr. Stier explained to me that D has concerned about drug dealing in his room. Dr. Stier told D that I thought the police would have to have a statement with a complainant name in order to act on any information. I told him that I did not think the police could act on such a statement based upon an anonymous source. I told him that I might be wrong. I would check with the police. I also mentioned that he could move to another space or off-campus, regardless of him providing a statement or not. I told him that if he decided to provide a statement, we could relocate him to a safe room or to a hotel. I then stepped out of the office and called Chief Kessie. Chief Kessie confirmed that the police would need something more than an anonymous statement to act on it.

Tracy clarifies that he “thinks it is urgent to find out if a staff person did deceive [D]. If so, that person should be held accountable for his or her actions. If someone made D into a pawn, then that person needs to be dealt with in a most severe way. To jeopardize some one’s safety and academic endeavors is unforgivable.”

The Inhibitor spoke with Tracy Murry about his involvement in C’s case, and he maintained that he had only one interaction with D before the arrests were made.