Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
According to witness reports, a male Swarthmore student fell down a flight of stairs from Upper Tarble during Swarthmore’s annual Halloween Party. Although Upper Tarble was dry, there was a bar in Paces.
“I saw a kid slip on the stairs and heard his head thud as he slid down,” explained one anonymous party-goer. “I ran around and down the stairs to where he lay, and one of the PAs was checking his pulse. … We turned him over and found that he was bleading from somewhere. He shortly there after began to regain consciousness.”
Chief of Police Brian H. Craig reported, “we got the call at 12:21 am.” He continued, “Apparently, [the student] was found behind the snack bar and was semi-conscious. He had fallen down several steps and had a laceration on his chin. There was a strong smell of alcohol on his breath. He was taken by ambulance to the Crozer-Chester Medical Center.”
The student was “cited for underage drinking.” Craig further said that in such cases, the Swarthmore Police Department is “typically concerned for the student’s safety,” and wants to ensure that they are not on a “path of destructive behavior.”
Initial reports suggest the student was conscious and largely unharmed, and Assistant Director of Student Life Kelly Wilcox ’97 said that “his friends and the PAs responded really well.” She wanted to applaud the student body on “what has been a good year so far.”
Wilcox added that “discussion was already in progress about whether parties should happen in Upper Tarble… this will just be another piece of the puzzle.”
how is this news? this is no one else’s business but the victim’s.
lol @ “how is this news?”
i see you muff.
This is news because it pertains to ongoing discussion about where the party should be held and whether it’s good to have a party with drinking in a space that involves going up and down stairs. Also I heard that the way people exited the party at the end was changed (and made rather difficult) because of the police presence that came along with the ambulance. These two facts alone make it news worthy.
but then maybe the gazette should have included those details as well, mark. I think this piece could have been included in a larger article about the party’s problematic location, but on its own, it doesn’t have enough hard facts to make it legitimate news.
The Daily Gazette’s job is to publish breaking news stories as they happen, and to follow up with more extensive news stories as more information becomes available, just like any news source does. The article now is longer and more detailed, but it is important when something like this happens to get the information out as soon as it occurs.
I appreciate the Gazette’s commitment to publishing breaking news quickly. In cases such as this however, I think it is important to consider whether or not the information is of a newsworthy nature or could be classified as gossip. Unfortunately I feel that the first version of this story came under the latter category. The updated version is better, however I agree with “anon” that the basic information would have been better presented within a larger discussion of the problematic location of the party or presence of police officers, with less attention on the details of the accident, which I feel should be reduced with a respect for the privacy of the individual involved.
This semester, both the Gazette and The Phoenix have written about alcohol-related citations. In a situation with an ambulance and reported police presence at the largest party of the year, it seemed reasonable to expect a citation to be forthcoming. Which there was.
Furthermore, the news was clearly important to the Swarthmore community. While we normally only get ~400 visitors on Sundays, since we don’t publish many new articles then, we broke 1,200 due to the story.
Finally, I agree that privacy is an issue here—especially when the end result was only a citation. This is why the Gazette never published the name of the student nor any identifying information. If you know who the student is…you would have known whether or not the Gazette had published Sunday morning.