College Attacks Lead to Security Questions
Nov. 18, 2005 — -- Behind the idyllic college campus quads and serene brochures sent out to prospective students, there may be some more disturbing images that the country's colleges don't want you to see.
College administrators note that the crime rate is lower at American universities than in the nation's cities. But that doesn't mean the country's 17 million students are not at risk.
The latest statistics show there were more than 35,000 reported crimes on U.S. college campuses in just one year.
There are crimes like purse-snatching in broad daylight, car break-ins and shoplifting at the school store. But as "Primetime Live" discovered, there are also cases of horrifying crimes committed on campus.
Jessica Smith was a freshman at the University of Tennessee in November 2002 when she was assaulted while walking from her car to her dorm room.
Her assailant -- hoping to steal her car -- struck her in the head with a brick. Smith attempted to escape, but she was bleeding profusely from her head and could not outrun him. He struck her repeatedly with the brick and eventually left Smith lying in the parking garage in a pool of her own blood.
"She was on her knees, and that's when he went up behind her, picked up the brick and hit her four or five more times in the head," said her father, Gary Smith.
Smith remembers nothing of the incident, but her parents can't shake the memory of that night.
"I guess the scariest part was the priest who met us at the door," Gary Smith said. "The next four or five hours was the toughest while she was having brain surgery."
Smith survived the surgery, but the attack knocked out any notion of continuing her college education and her hopes for a career in pharmacy. She now struggles with basic tasks like reading and writing. It's been a frustrating ordeal because she is still smart and aware enough to know that she's not the person she used to be.
"Sometimes, when I think of a word in my head, I can't think of how to say it or where it goes in sentence," Smith said. She is often unable to pronounce seemingly simple words and has trouble writing short sentences.
"Like a second-grader trying to write a sentence," she said.
Perhaps even more frightening is what happened to Katie Autry in her dorm room at Western Kentucky University.
Emergency crews responded to a fire alarm in Autry's dorm in May 2003, where several hours earlier she had been dropped off after drinking too much at a campus fraternity party. The fire had started on Katie's bed, and she was still breathing when the crews arrived. She was rushed to a hospital, but doctors were unable to revive her.
"She obviously had severe burns. In fact, her body was still smoking," said Dr. Lee Carter.
"The burn was so thick, the skin was hard as wood when you'd tap on it."
It turns out it was no ordinary fire. Autry was torched alive by two attackers who were trying to cover up a sexual assault. They sprayed her with an aerosol hairspray can, lit her on fire, and left her to die.
"I never dreamt anything like this could've happened to Katie … and I pray that it never happens to another person," said Autry's aunt, Virginia White.
"We weren't allowed to touch her. That was hard, because you wanted to hug her and tell her that you were there and it was gonna be OK."
Autry's family attorney, Ben Crocker, says what happened to Katie is unthinkable. But he said the real crime is the way that her killer -- a man named Stephen Soules, who was not a Western Kentucky University student -- got to Autry.
"Most of us expect when our kids are at a university dorm that non-students can't just come in and out and go up to rooms as they please. That's a huge area where security broke down, and that led to Katie's death," Crocker said.
University rules require all doors be locked, and non-residents to sign in when entering campus buildings. But Soules said he walked in the front door, past several people in the lobby. He said no one asked him for identification or asked him to sign anything.
That doesn't surprise Danica Smith, who was Autry's roommate at the time.
"The security was pretty much non-existent," Smith said.
The university says they are not responsible for Katie's death and did everything they could to protect her. Instead, they allege she snuck the boy in herself. Crocker, Katie's lawyer, says this is absurd.
"Everyone is responsible for their own conduct. But unfortunately, in this case, that had nothing to do with it. She did nothing wrong. Katie was in her own dorm room," Crocker said.
"Any implication that she snuck him in? It's a low blow," said Virginia Smith.
As for Jessica Smith and her family, they want the University of Tennessee to admit that needed security wasn't there the night Jessica was attacked. And they want school officials to acknowledge security should have been in place, because of some 200 previous thefts, acts of vandalism and alcohol-related incidents in or near the garage where Jessica parked. The school maintains the crime wasn't foreseeable.
The University of Tennessee insists they take adequate precautions to ensure their students' safety, including the use of patrols and guards. But the university wouldn't comment on their presence on the night of Smith's attack because of a pending lawsuit.
That offers no solace to Jessica Smith, forever damaged by the attack and a living example of why parents should ask if there's security behind those idyllic campus scenes.
"Nobody thinks it's going to happen, but it does," said Smith.
For more information about crime on campus, check out the Web site for Security on Campus, Inc.
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