Ryan ChartrandImagine this:
You’re out late with your friends on a Saturday night, and instead of going home, one of your friends decides to crash at your house near the university. You lend her some pajamas, give her a teddy bear to use as a pillow and say “goodnight” at about 4 a.m.
Sounds pretty typical, right?
Now picture that when you wake up, your friend is gone, there is blood on the couch and all that’s left of her is her purse, cell phone and clothes from the night before. Even the teddy bear is gone.
For some students at the University of Nevada, Reno, this isn’t the stuff of their imagination, it’s reality. Their friend, 19-year-old Brianna Denison, had been missing for more than a month until her body was found in a field eight miles from campus on Friday. Since then, police have stated that she was strangled by a serial rapist who has attacked at least two other women near the university.
We’ve all seen signs for missing people and we all know the reality is out there, but so rarely does anyone truly feel the depth of the situation. So rarely is this missing person someone we know.
I knew Brianna Denison, and though I can’t claim to have known her well, I saw her every summer for the better part of my life when we visited our grandparents’ houses in Mendocino, Calif. A week ago, the smiling girl I used to play Barbies with was only a few photographs away from Kristin Smart on the FBI’s list of kidnapping and missing persons investigations. Now she can be nothing more than a memory to me and those who knew her.
Denison, originally from Reno, was a psychology student at Santa Barbara City College and was visiting home for winter break. It sounds so average, doesn’t it? A little closer to home, Kristin Smart was a Cal Poly student who went missing just after her friend walked her within a block’s distance of Muir Hall, her dorm, after an off-campus party at 2 a.m. She would be turning 31 years old on Wednesday.
According to the National Crime Information Center’s Missing Person File, there were 110,484 active missing persons records as of Dec. 31, 2006. That’s more than twice the size of San Luis Obispo. Though adolescents aged 18 and younger accounted for the bulk of that number, approximately 12,657 of those records represent people between the ages of 18 and 20, aka the ages of a good portion of Cal Poly’s student population. Furthermore, females under the age of 21 are more than twice as likely to be abducted than a male of the same age.
We can all agree that the quiet city of San Luis Obispo is generally a pretty safe place, but you can never be completely sure. After a series of sexual assaults that took place in the last year within blocks of campus, and the alleged rape of an 18-year-old a couple of weeks ago in the San Luis Obispo Creek (before 8 p.m. no less!), no one can be sure of anything.
Students at the University of Nevada, Reno have realized this – why can’t we? What will it take? One student told the Associated Press that most of her peers now carry some form of defense, such as a Taser or pepper spray. And even if there isn’t a serial rapist on the loose in San Luis Obispo, it’s still not a bad idea.
Regardless of our blue light system and the escort van service, there comes a point where each student needs to be responsible for him or herself and the people around them – and I don’t see that a whole lot. Nothing makes me more nervous than seeing freshmen girls walking around Grand Avenue and off campus late at night – and I see it ALL THE TIME. If you’re not learning now, when will you? It’s a big world out there and this is only the beginning. Everyone deserves to at least make it to their 31st birthday.
Kristen Marschall is a journalism senior and the editor in chief of the Mustang Daily.