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The Best Defense Against Fear? Gallaudet's Got It
The Washington Post
Tuesday, February 6, 2001; Page B01
Some years back, on a very snowy morning, I learned a lot about Gallaudet University in a very short time.
I was on my way from the Gallaudet campus in Northeast to Union Station when a moderate snow turned suddenly into a blizzard. The campus shuttle bus was canceled, so a random collection of students and I set out on foot.
As we trudged through the narrow streets, a young student from the college for the deaf slipped and hurt her foot. Someone emerged from a row house and invited her to come get warm. A block later, another student suffered a twisted ankle; this time, three Gallaudet students hoisted her up and carried her forward.
Half an hour into our hike, a Metro bus came by and stopped in mid-block for us, to the applause of the students. The driver of Bus 8662 valiantly pushed on until a couple of blocks from the station, when he spied a crowd of more than 150 people waiting for a bus. "Everybody off," he announced. "I'm going home."
Off we went, deaf and hearing alike, except that the Gallaudet students, before going their separate ways, hugged as if we'd been to Everest and back.
There's a lot of that easy intimacy at Gallaudet. I've seen it every time I've been on campus. Of course, the school has its harsh debates on critical questions of deaf culture, such as just how far the deaf should assimilate into the larger society.
But more than most campuses, Gallaudet has fostered a sense of cloistered protection, creating a haven separate from the city and the hearing world. Students come from around the globe to immerse themselves, usually for the first time, in a place where they are the majority.
Eric Plunkett, the 19-year-old freshman who was clubbed to death in his dorm room on campus last fall, was so proud to enter this world that he framed his acceptance letter and placed it in a prominent spot at home, telling his mother he would replace the letter with his diploma in four years.
Now Benjamin Varner, another 19-year-old freshman, is also gone, stabbed to death in the same dormitory. Neither case is solved. A good many people on campus believe the killer is among them, inside the gates.
"Common sense indicates something's going on here," said Chris Soukup, the tall, dashing 22-year-old from South Dakota who is the student body president. "To get into the dorms, you need one of these" -- an ID card with a bar code that releases the locks. "If you're a visitor, a student has to let you in. No matter how you look at it, a student was involved."
Soukup and other students are hungry for answers. They have become well versed in the sad story of the D.C. police department's failure to close homicide cases. "There's one number everyone is throwing around," Soukup said. "Fifteen hundred -- the number of unsolved homicides" in the last decade.
There is considerable mistrust of the police here, stemming largely from two moments. First, a detective speaking in the student cafeteria after Varner's death said every student was a suspect. Then, officers said their investigation was being slowed by the problem of communicating with deaf students.
"I have a sizable irk with the D.C. police because they keep talking about communications 'problems,' " Soukup said. "If this was a body of Spanish-speaking students, they would hardly use that terminology. Fact is, many students can speak just like me, and for those who use interpreters, they can talk just as fast as we are."
Despite such frustrations, the atmosphere at Gallaudet is not one of suspicion, but of coming together. There is a pride in the deaf security officers who now check the identity of every visitor and who ride their bikes around campus, one hand on the handlebars, the other signing, "Good morning," to early risers.
Students walk arm in arm to morning Mass. A professor sits in close conversation with a crying young woman. And still, it's college: A boy runs down a broad walkway and mugs his friend from behind, prompting gales of laughter. Pop music thunders from dorm rooms, the bass cranked up so the students can rock to the vibrations.
Yet something has changed. "Numbness is felt in strange and different ways," sophomore Robert A. Hawkins, who grew up in Montgomery County, told me in an e-mail interview. "The mood is tragedy-stricken, numb, many people aren't openly afraid, but are deep-down afraid."
Ben Varner's father, Willie, and his sister, Jennifer, appeared before reporters late yesterday. A man stands to talk about his lost son, and nearly everyone cries, and it is hard to look him in the eye.
"We just want you to know we're doing okay," the father said to family back home in San Antonio.
His daughter interrupted: "We're not doing okay. But we're going to get through this. . . . Tell your children and brothers and sisters that you love each other" -- because "God takes them away."
In their sorrow and their anger, the Varners went out of their way to thank Gallaudet, to praise the place where their Ben had blossomed in just a few months, soaking in friends, knowledge and a sense of belonging.
"I have no regrets about him coming to Gallaudet," his father said.
"Gallaudet," a song written after Plunkett's slaying and posted at www.deafqueer.org, says: "Suddenly, one of your own has left this life without saying goodbye. . . . Fear has settled in your soul, leaving you so afraid." The lyrics speak of a healing love, a light distinct to this place.
Murder foully steals intimacy even from those who survive. But there are some lights it cannot extinguish.