The second stabbing isn’t so unexpected to upper classmen.
Being a resident here for four years, I have always felt safe, but that has absolutely nothing to do with Public Safety or the Radnor police or anyone who claims to be keeping us safe here on campus.
I feel safe because I know that I can run pretty fast and if I got into a compromising situation I feel like I’ll take my chances against most people.
I remember Spring Fling two years ago when the original stabbing happened, which hit much closer to home then this one because the victim happened to be someone I was friendly with.
I remember how shocked everyone was on campus and how outraged everyone was at the poor response by our Public Safety and the little or no steps that they took to improve the situation.
I also remember a meeting that was held in the Widener Lecture Hall where students were encouraged to come and voice their concerns.
What you heard at that meeting were real suggestions about how problems like this could be eliminated, such as screening for dangerous students in the application process and following up on dangerous reports made to the public safety office.
You would think the “higher ups” at Cabrini would heed this advice at least a little bit, but they did no such thing. Instead we saw a crack down on drinking? And noise violations? Wait, wait but what about closing the exits and checking everyone at the front gate? All these precautions did was make over excited parents feel safe about sending their kids to school here. They lacked any type of rhyme or reason to implementing stricter policies that had nothing to do with the problem.
The original stabbing was premeditated, it wasn’t because kids were partying to hard and decided to play with knives, to me I doubt that would ever be the case.
If someone wants to kill me they can certainly walk right off Eagle Road and run up to me and do it, there isn’t anything that anyone can do to stop that person.
What scares me isn’t the prospect of that actually happening, but the response by the college’s authorities if it did. If I was killed on campus they would lock down the campus and send everyone an email hours later poorly explaining what happened, when by that point everyone would have heard a million different stories.
It needs to be said by someone and I’ll be the one to do it that our Public Safety, Residence Life and anyone else who works with the resident students are just awful. I hope they are smart enough to let students voice our concerns again and I hope this time they aren’t as stupid as last.
I plead with our colleges authorities to make one right decision in my four years here, stop focusing on noise and parking tickets and red cups at sporting events and start thinking about how to handle a crisis in the right way, that’s what you’re here for, to make us feel safe, not persecuted and kept in the dark when a major event like this does happen.
