As news unfolds about the gruesome murder of four students at the University of Idaho, campus safety is on many minds across the U.S.
Around two weeks before the Idaho murders, a man was removed from the Stanford University campus in California. Although he wasn’t a student, 20-year-old William Curry had been lurking and living in campus dorms there for almost a year.
On this episode of the “Something Offbeat” podcast, host Mike Rogers spoke to Theo Baker, the Stanford Daily reporter who worked to break the story.
“I suspected there was more to the story I started hearing from people, so I dug into it a little bit more. I reported over the weekend, I talked to a few dozen people and what I put together was a portrait of a man who has been doing this for about a whole year,” said Baker. “Who has been going from dorm to dorm, who has been pretending to be a Stanford student in various different guises, and ingratiating himself with different members of the community, having relationships, even.”
Robert McDonald – a security expert and criminal justice professor at the University of New Haven who spent two decades in the U.S. Secret Service – also joined the show to explain the ins and outs of college campus safety.
“So, there are a number of things that are in place in a lot of universities, in classroom buildings, in dorms and things like that,” he said. “But those things are only as good as people utilizing them.”
New episodes of ‘Something Offbeat” drop every Monday. If you have suggestions for stories the show should cover, send them to us at somethingoffbeat@audacy.com.
Related
