[Boston Globe - 5/2/00] NEW YORK - John Paul Denning, a sophomore at New York University, was in an unusually cheerful mood as he strolled to class one bright morning last fall. Just back from a road trip to visit his girlfriend at Smith College, he was looking forward to hunkering down to his studies and getting together with some new friends later on.
And then, suddenly, this: He was surrounded by police officers, who put him in an ambulance, which drove him to Bellevue Hospital, where the doctors took away his shoelaces as a precaution against suicide and committed him to the ward for the mentally disturbed.
Inside the ambulance, confused, Denning had asked what was going on. A paramedic showed him printouts of some e-mail, with certain passages highlighted:
"I want to go out and shoot as many people as I can and then shoot myself to even the number...
"Most things these days make me want to slit my own throat and count the number of people I can bleed on before I die...
"Maybe I should stop showing people my new gun, but I'm so proud of it. Makes me feel like a real New Yorker."
Denning recognized these words. He had written them. But he hadn't meant them. They were bits of dark humor, addressed to a friend back home in Iowa City who would understand their intent. How did this paramedic get hold of them? Were they the reason he was being hauled away?
It took him days to realize it, but this 19-year-old had become yet another character in a murky tale about the perils of privacy and the wispy line dividing prudence from paranoia in the post-Columbine era.
Some recent landmarks on that line: Just last week, a student was suspended from Boston Latin Academy for writing a story about taking a chainsaw to his English teacher. Earlier this year, in Denton, Texas, a 13-year-old boy was jailed for a week for writing a Halloween story in which he imagined shooting his teacher. The teacher gave it an A-plus, but the principal, who also read it, phoned the police in alarm. And a couple of months ago, as the result of a task force report on the lessons of Columbine, the governor of North Carolina set up a Web site urging schoolchildren to turn in seemingly dangerous classmates by calling a toll-free number.
Denning spent three days at Bellevue before a doctor finally talked with him at length and let him go.
Upon his release, Denning discovered that he had been suspended from class and banned from campus for violating Policy #4 of the Housing and Residence Life Handbook, which prohibits "Violence, actual or threatened, against another person or oneself."
It all ended well enough. A university board of inquiry cleared his name, if somewhat warily, and readmitted him to the school. But it was quite a way to begin his first year in the big city, after transferring from the University of Iowa.
"I came to New York for a drastic change of pace," Denning said over lunch months later, with an ironic smile. "I figured I'd have an amazing amount of interesting experiences."
NYU officials would not comment on the story, citing federal privacy laws. But some acknowledged its outlines, and Denning provided dozens of documents, whose authenticity has been confirmed.
The story begins with something as common to campus life as tension among roommates. Denning shared a two-bedroom suite with three other students, and didn't get along well with any of them. He stayed up till the wee hours and slept till noon. He didn't go out much. He confessed to bouts of depression.
When he left on the road trip to Smith, his roommates discussed his quirks at great length. One of the them - according to a handwritten statement that another wrote for the board of inquiry - "became increasingly worried about John and kept referring to Columbine High School and that if someone had checked their e-mail ... the killings would never have happened. Talk like this began to worry [us] more and more."
Denning had told his roommates they could use his computer. So they turned it on, and hunted around for his e-mail file.
"What we found," the statement went on, "blew our minds. He talked about killing himself and shooting other people and how sad and angry he was all the time."
They printed out the most horrific letters and gave them to the dorm manager, who took them to the housing director, who passed them on to campus security, who called the New York Police Department.
One of the roommates (who, out of concern for privacy, asked that his name not be used), said in a recent interview that they never figured their action would put Denning in Bellevue - but added they have no regrets.
"From his point of view, we were blowing things out of proportion, he was just joking, but we didn't know that," he said. "We didn't know this kid. We'd been living with him for only a couple of months. From where we stood, we had every right to take his e-mail at its word."
According to officials at several Boston-area universities, the massacre at Columbine High School has heightened sensitivities to the slightest warning signs of a dangerous person in their midst.
However, when told of the Denning story, they say - cautiously and not for-the-record - that NYU might have overreacted.
One official at Harvard said, "We generally don't bring in the Boston Police unless there's criminal activity." An official at Boston University said, "I think we would have had the dorm's R.A. talk with him first." A Boston physician who has investigated campus suicides said, "Breaking into someone's e-mail sounds like a thin reed on which to build a commitment" to Bellevue.
Jon Katz, the author of "Geeks" and the forthcoming "Voices from the Hell Mouth," compares agitation over e-mail to the Salem Witch Trials. "Despite the impression of Columbine," he said, "violence among young people has been dropping over the past decade. It's now at its lowest point since the 1920s."
Katz added, "People have the right to express violent fantasies. They have the right to be depressed. They don't have to be civil or positive or constructive in their private e-mail."
But John Beckman, NYU's spokesman, has a different view. He would not comment on Denning's case specifically, but said, "Generally, if we were confronted with a particular claim of possession of a firearm, combined with evidence of an intent to do harm, what choices would we have?
"The university has a very elaborate support system and well-trained but unarmed security officers," he noted. "But we don't consider ourselves expert at dealing with emotionally disturbed and armed people. In New York City, the group that does have that expertise is the NYPD."
As for taking action on the basis of stolen e-mail, Beckman said, "Again, in general, it is fair to say that information that comes from intrusion into another person's privacy makes everybody uncomfortable. But it doesn't change what you learn. You can't un-know a piece of information that you see as a threat to your community."
Even Denning realizes things must have looked bad at first glance. "I can see how some of that e-mail, taken out of context, might make people worried," he said. But, he added, the darkest letters were written in a 24-hour period, "when I was having a bad weekend" - and to the same person, a friend back home named Justin.
When the doctor at Bellevue finally talked with him, Denning recalled, "He asked me about the e-mail, and I explained Justin has a vulgar sense of humor, so that's how I wrote to him. I gave him Justin's phone number. He called. There was an answering machine that made a joke out of `Army of Darkness' - a pulp horror movie - and had all kinds of chain-saw noises in the background. From that, the doctor believed my story and said they'd release me the next day."
Upon release, Denning and his parents, who flew in from Iowa, were told by university officials that he had two choices. He could leave school, get the full year's tuition refunded, and have his record at NYU expunged as if he had never been there. Or he could request a hearing to consider whether he should be expelled, which could taint his record for life.
Denning chose the hearing. "I wanted to vindicate myself," he said. In the end, the panel - a dean, a professor, and a student - accepted his claim that the letters had been a joke and that he posed no danger.
However, the panel added, "Given the nature and content of the threats, it was reasonable" for NYU administrators "to consider the threats as being legitimate and to take all appropriate action."
Denning was let back in school if he promised to stay away from his old dorm - he was assigned new roommates in a different hall, more than a mile away - and to meet with a counselor.
The old roommates were sent a note through the campus mail, telling them never to peek at other students' e-mail again.
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[posted 5/3/00]
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