Murder In A Silent Place

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

A DEAF OASIS

It is summer session at Gallaudet University. A few lazy clouds threaten to water the already green campus and bathe a modest statue of founder Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. Off the main quad, an orange steam shovel dips, lifts and pivots, grumbling to itself. Few students hear it. Gallaudet is the country's foremost college for deaf people. When Jim Haynes, at work nearby, instructs his philosophy class that "Plato argued that the concept behind this desk is more real than the physical thing itself," he does so manually, in crisp American Sign Language (ASL). His 12 students watch his hands intently, with the exception of a girl who is deaf and almost blind. She focuses on an interpreter, who repeats Haynes' signs a foot from her face, providing a level of service that would be remarkable at most colleges but is commonplace here.

The philosophy class ends, and several young men offer an impromptu campus tour: This lot is where the new high-tech center will be built. This circular driveway is the main outdoor hangout. And in this otherwise empty dormitory, a lone television set is playing. The TV, visible through a window, glows on, always tuned to the same channel, day and night. "After the second murder, they evacuated the building," says one of the students through an interpreter. "And they forgot to turn it off. Kind of eerie."

This is the story of a kind of paradise and how, over a six-month period starting last fall, it was almost consumed from within. Chartered in 1864 by Abraham Lincoln, Gallaudet is host to only 2,000 students each year. But to America's estimated 2 million deaf people, the university's symbolic heft outstrips that of the U.S. Capitol, five minutes south by car. The deaf Harvard, Wharton and Brookings rolled into one, it has produced generations of leaders, activists and entrepreneurs. Whether in classrooms where teachers lecture in sign language, on playing fields where athletes key into the vibrations of huge drums rather than audible signals or in the cafeteria where gossip and flirtation are no less hot for being silent--Gallaudet embodies a heady ideal: an oasis where the deaf person can shed the role of handicapped outsider and step into a cultural majority, where the tyranny of spoken speech is stripped away and, in the words of Provost Jane Fernandes, "the dreams open up."

No human community is Eden. In addition to America's usual dividers--race, class, religion, sexual orientation--the students face lingering, debilitating fears of powerlessness and exclusion and wage often bitter linguistic debates over topics abstruse to the hearing world--ASL vs. cued speech; mainstreaming vs. specialized education; and the use of cochlear implants, surgically installed devices that counter some deafness. But until this year, Fernandes was convinced that the school's overriding bond of deaf solidarity would inevitably prevail.

Of course, up until this year she shared an assumption described by school psychologist Alan Marcus. "That a deaf person would kill another deaf person," says Marcus, "is a foreign idea. Fight with. Argue with. Cheat on. Steal from. Embezzle, maybe. But not kill."

It is a premise that requires revisiting in light of the indictment this month of one of Fernandes' students in the brutal murder of two others.

MURDER

It was 10 p.m. last Sept. 28, and Fernandes had just got home. The flasher attached to her phone was blinking, the sign that it was ringing. It was Gallaudet. Fernandes jumped into her Camry, raced back to campus and arrived in time to see a colleague standing on a bench so he could be viewed by the crowd, as he signed the latest news. A freshman had been bludgeoned to death.

Months before, Eric Plunkett, 19, had framed his Gallaudet acceptance letter and told his mother, "In four years, I'll replace this with my diploma." Now his battered body lay in his room in a dorm called Cogswell, discovered when a hallmate named Joseph Mesa Jr. told a resident assistant that Plunkett had missed class and there was a peculiar smell coming from his room.

When Fernandes, delegated by Gallaudet President I. King Jordan to try to handle this bizarre situation, arrived, stunned freshmen were wandering through Cogswell's lobby. "We were shell-shocked," says Tawny Holmes, freshman class president. "I went back to my room and just felt unsafe." Student-body president Chris Soukup hurried over to Fernandes to say the university's gay community was in a state of high alarm. Plunkett had just been named secretary of the campus Lambda Society. And Lambda members claimed that there had been a marked increase in death threats against gays. Some, Fernandes discovered, were hard to document. But at least one had left a paper trail. A freshman had gone to the school's judicial-affairs committee and asked what to do if someone was picking on you; the complainant was Eric Plunkett.

The issue got nasty. A national gay-rights group announced that anti-gay activity on campus added up to a pattern of harassment. At an event called Enrichment Day, a Baptist participant sparked the ASL equivalent of a shouting match when she argued, within weeks of Plunkett's death, that God would not allow a homosexual into heaven. Gay students feared walking on campus alone. The university quickly took a hard line on anti-gay speech. Jordan wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post asserting, "If deaf people ought to know about one thing, it is the importance of inclusion and access for all." Still, Fernandes recognized her community's delicacy, the ease with which one group could "go floating away, because people were afraid for their lives."

Five days after Plunkett's body was discovered, District of Columbia police announced the arrest of Thomas Minch, another freshman, for second-degree murder. The arrest was a surprise, as police had excluded Gallaudet administrators from their deliberations. Investigators said Minch had admitted that earlier on the night of the murder, during an argument, he either pushed or hit Plunkett, who fell to the ground.

Although new on campus, Minch had attended camps for deaf youth leaders with many of the current students. Most found it impossible to believe he could have killed Plunkett. Tawny Holmes spent the night of the arrest with her boyfriend reviewing camp videotapes "to try to see if we could see it in him." They couldn't. Others, of course, felt mostly relief. Fernandes remembers driving home smiling, thinking, It's over.

And then, the next day, D.C. prosecutors vacated Minch's arrest, citing insufficient evidence. The police, however, made it clear he was still a suspect.

"What was happening? We didn't understand," recalls junior Tom Green. Says graduate student Dana Berkowitz: "Feelings were all confused and messed up." Information and its proper dissemination is a loaded issue in a deaf context. Marcus, the psychologist, notes that 90% of deaf Americans are born into hearing families and many are left with a "sense of feeling left out and in the dark. Someone might be talking at dinner, and the whole table breaks out laughing except for the deaf person, who says, 'What? What? What?' And they're only given two sentences or told 'We'll tell you later.'" The erratic, whipsaw police investigation was for Gallaudet's students a nightmare recapitulation.

That night Fernandes visited the campus' six dormitories. At each, students met her by the hundreds. "They were yelling. They were arguing. They were crying," she says. They hurled frantic questions. Was a murderer among them? Was she going to cancel any classes? Would the school close down? After each answer, interpreters shouted her ASL into speech for the hard-of-hearing who did not sign; others pressed her words tactilely into the hands of the deaf and blind. At one dorm the oversize crowd spilled outside, and Fernandes signed in the halo of a sidewalk light, her audience spread out into the darkness. She went to bed at 4 a.m.

In time, the campus relaxed. Minch had retreated to his hometown of Greenland, N.H. Recalls Darlene Prickett of the Gallaudet publicity office: "Most people felt that with him gone, things could start going back to normal." Accordingly, on Feb. 2 the Phi Kappa Zeta sorority threw a party, open to all, at a downtown establishment called the Diva Club. "We don't care what kind of music it is, as long as the bass is going, the rhythm," says junior Rebecca Goldenbaum. It was the first big bash of the new semester. Like many of the revelers, junior Jason Lamberton straggled back to campus at dawn, as the trees blew in a cold wind. When he arrived, he recalls, "I saw the police cars lining up, and I had to rub my eyes and pinch myself. It was the same scene all over again." And it was again at Cogswell. The victim this time was Benjamin Varner. An incorrigibly curious freshman, Varner, 19, had once been limited by a teacher to a mere seven questions a day. Now he lay in his room, stabbed at least 19 times, his throat slashed.

Instead of cell phones, many deaf people use instant messaging and pagers set to vibrate rather than beep. "A few hours after the body was found," says Goldenbaum, "everyone [in deaf America] knew. They knew in California. They knew in New York." And shortly afterward they knew that Minch, who had been in New Hampshire, could not have committed the crime.

"Have you ever seen the movie," asks Marcus, "where there is a killer on the loose and one of the potential victims is trying to trace a call from the murderer and a phone company operator tells her, 'The call is coming from inside your house! Get out!'? That's the way it was here." A police detective informed a crowd at the cafeteria that "anyone here could be a suspect." The mental-health center was swamped, and two students withdrew from the university. Fernandes couldn't sleep. She had moved out of her home and into a house on campus. Every night she wandered the dorms until 1 a.m., talking to students, kicking out chocks they had stuck in self-locking hall doorways.

A CONFESSION

At the instant on Feb. 13 in the school auditorium when police interpreters signed the news of Joseph Mesa's arrest to the entire campus body, the yell of relief was so loud that junior Ron Rood says, "I felt for that moment that I was hearing." Then there was a silence as the crowd considered the friend and classmate who police said had admitted double homicide. Son of a U.S. Army chief warrant officer, Mesa is a native of Guam. He was an enthusiastic athlete in high school; the Washington Post noted that when he was a school wrestler, it had once taken three boys to pin him. After transferring to Gallaudet's Model Secondary School for the Deaf, he had academic problems. His lawyer later suggested that he reads at about a fourth-grade level. But he is a handsome young man, deeply devoted to his girlfriend (also from Guam), with a wide circle of friends. Even today, Abbas Ali Behmanesh, a junior, attests that "he's very generous. He's willing to help anyone who needs his help."

Behmanesh, however, had long known of Mesa's dark side. In 1999 the older student was a resident assistant when Mesa's roommate accused Mesa of lifting his ATM card and stealing $3,000. Behmanesh called in school security, and when Mesa confessed, the school suspended him for a year. Before he left, Behmanesh says, the two had a long talk in which Mesa attributed his bad habits to involvement with a criminal gang in Guam. Says Behmanesh: "He said, 'I saw a lot of blood.'"

This would have been news to the D.C. police, who were unaware of Mesa's record and apparently fixated on Minch until the second murder. In April, officers told the Washington Post that when Minch confessed to hitting Plunkett, the head detective stopped the interview cold, arrested him and erroneously told other police Minch had confessed to the killing. Meanwhile the detectives failed to notice that Plunkett's wallet was missing and that someone had used his debit card after he died. They had failed to run a routine check on Mesa's school records, even though he was the one to sound the alarm over Plunkett's disappearance. The Post story amounted to an accusation that a better investigation could have prevented Varner's murder. D.C. executive assistant chief Terrance Gainer conceded, "We need to do better."

Varner's killing produced clues impossible to bobble. "There was blood all over the bedroom," testified Detective Darryl Richmond at Mesa's bail hearing in February. There were bloody footprints made by Nike Air Max sneakers. Reportedly tipped off by a $650 forged check of Varner's made out to Mesa and cashed after Varner's death, police searched Mesa's room and came up with a pair of bloody Air Maxes. After initially protesting his innocence, Mesa finally told Richmond, "O.K., I did it." With the aid of two interpreters, Richmond said, Mesa made a 3 1/2-hr. video statement: he had walked into Varner's room, noticed a paring knife under his microwave and slashed him to death before stealing his checkbook. He also confessed (according to a police affidavit) to "choking, beating and kicking" Plunkett "until he was sure that he was dead." Asked Mesa's mood at the time of the confession, Richmond testified, "He said he was glad he was telling us because the Gallaudet community was in an uproar and he felt bad about that."

On June 8, an Assistant U.S. Attorney announced the government's intent to seek a maximum penalty of life without parole for Mesa, following his indictment on 15 counts, including two of first-degree murder. His lawyer, without offering details, entered a plea of not guilty. The trial is scheduled for November.

US AGAINST US

In the end, what is striking about the Gallaudet murders is how non-deaf-specific they are. Though in his confession he allegedly claims to have killed for money, no one truly knows why Mesa may be a murderer; there is no suggestion yet that his deafness played a role. The police appear to have fumbled the case out of sheer incompetence, not because it occurred in a deaf venue. Indeed, the murders' most troubling long-term implication for the Gallaudet community is not a suggestion that deaf people are somehow different from anyone else but that, as regards the cardinal stain of murder, they are the same.

A persistent American myth regarding the deaf is that they are children of nature, well meaning and helpless. Mercy Coogan, Gallaudet's public relations director, has heard countless variations on the theme since Mesa's arrest. "People want to know how a deaf person could do this," she says. "The tendency is to say, 'Ah, God love 'em.'" This kind of condescension infuriates the deaf. And yet they too--for their own reasons--are stymied by Mesa's alleged confession.

The great genius of deaf activism over the past half-century has been to develop the idea that rather than a disability, deafness--especially among ASL speakers--can constitute a separate culture as rich as any based on a spoken language. Nobody who spends more than a day or two at Gallaudet would debate that assertion. Nor would anybody doubt that the community enjoys a rare, fond solidarity, which may be traceable to the fact that many deaf people spend their first decade or two in an ocean of hearing people, isolated from others like themselves. Says freshman Stephen Farias: "When I meet hearing kids, it's like, 'How you doin'?'" It's boring. When I meet deaf kids, it's like, 'This kid is cool.' If I see a kid signing at the mall, I'll go up and introduce myself."

"Even if you really hate this person, if they're deaf, they're still a part of us," says Tawny Holmes . "It's almost like the bald eagle; we're an endangered species or something. We won't kill each other." Affirms biology professor Michael Moore: "Murder is not within our...it's not us."

What, then, is Joe Mesa's alleged deed? An aberration? Or something new in the community? In the past few decades, just as the deaf have established a national profile, some of their cultural distinctives have been eroding. Deaf children, once segregated in residential schools, are often mainstreamed today. Cochlear-implant operations, once opposed by some deaf people as insulting and possibly harmful, have gained in acceptance. Pagers and e-mail are supplanting bulkier TTY, the small teletype that enables deaf people to use phone lines. Because most televisions now come equipped for closed-captioning, deaf Americans, historically less well informed--even less fashionable--than their peers, are catching up.

Could serial murder be another cultural import, a virus floated in on the shared ether? Only if one assumes that it wasn't dormant in the community all along. In 1980 a Gallaudet student stabbed another to death and threw him out an eighth-story dorm window; the incident is little remembered on campus today. This may be because it contradicts the classic (and largely accurate) deaf model for misfortune--that it emanates from the hearing world. Says the publicity office's Prickett: "Most of the stories that get passed around are about a deaf person being hurt by misunderstanding or ignorance on the part of a hearing person. That's what made these murders so shocking, and that's what will take some digesting--that it's not only them; it can be us against us. The deaf community has to own it."

The cruelly dashed promise of Eric Plunkett and Benjamin Varner and the horrible loss to their families remain an open wound. Then there is Thomas Minch, fully exonerated of any guilt, who has sued the D.C. police for $2 million and has thus far not answered the university's invitation to return to campus. And there is the still raw sensibility surrounding the school's gay community. Perhaps the most hopeful sign is that Mesa's girlfriend, whom the police cleared of any complicity in the murders, is planning to return to Gallaudet in the fall.

Fernandes is sleeping again. "I go some days and no one pages me at home," she says. During the crisis, she received e-mail from deaf people all over the country, from Seattle, Miami, Santa Fe. Many had no personal connection to her or the school. Several volunteered to drop what they were doing and fly to Washington to help patrol the dorms. Now that she has had time to ponder, she is left with the odd impression that nationwide, "deaf people have probably become tighter because of what was happening here."

Fernandes' office has a panoramic view of Gallaudet. Cogswell lies behind her. But her vista takes in the campus' green heart, its little crowds of students signing garrulously between classes and its tiger lilies and zinnias, blooming after a hard winter. "And if nothing else happens here," she says, "the community will prevail."