Falling through the cracks

UNCW officials do not perform random background checks on students within the university.

When asked how many students were living on campus with criminal records, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students Michael Walker said, "We don't track that."

Background checks are performed on flagged applications and also at the discretion of faculty but not at random, leaving chances for convicted felons and students accused of crimes to fall through the cracks.

When an application is sent to the university, the applicant provides information about his or her personal history in Section C: Campus Safety Questions. This includes a selection of yes or no questions about whether or not he or she has ever been charged with a crime or suspended from any educational institution.

According to Walker, "If you answer affirmatively to any of these questions then your application gets flagged for further review."

This means the application is pulled and the Campus Safety Investigation process begins. During this process, the "flagged" applicant is asked to give further explanation of the charges and the outcome of the charges as it played out in court. Then, the university conducts a background report.

"The [background checking] system is just very incomplete," UNCW police chief David M. Donaldson said. "There are limitations in the system."

Donaldson said the problems with background checking systems ranged from applicants misspelling their names to the expensive costs and labor-intensive time it takes to conduct the research.

Currently, the university utilizes a number of "scatter shot methods" to monitor student behavior, including regular communication with a Wilmington Police Department liaison, local news sources and UNCW campus police officials.

"After you're enrolled, if something happens you have no obligation to tell the institution and we have no definitive way of knowing things that they do and things that happen off campus," Walker said.

In the past four years, several students with criminal charges have flown under the radar, and two student deaths have shaken the campus community.

In the case of David Sword, the freshman who died Oct. 11, 2007 in his dorm room, North Carolina court records show Sword had been charged with multiple misdemeanors in Wake county and was scheduled to be in court Nov. 2, 2007.

According to the court records, Sword's charges ranged from "misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia" to three counts of "misdemeanor assault by pointing a gun."

Results of preliminary autopsy reports showed no direct correlation between his death and the charges he was accused of. Toxicology reports have not been released stating whether or not illegal substances were in his body at the time of death.

May 5, 2004, UNCW student Curtis Dixon confessed to the rape and strangulation death of fellow student, Jessica Faulkner, who died in Dixon's dorm room the day after her last final exam of the semester. Dixon was awaiting a capital murder trial in Butner, N.C. but before he had the opportunity to defend his case he committed suicide. Dixon did not have satisfactory academic credentials for admission in 2003. His father was found responsible for submitting false information on his undergraduate application to UNCW about his dishonorable discharge from the Navy and Curtis Dixon's criminal and academic past.

According to the Task Force on the Safety of the Campus Community's final report issued Dec. 14, 2004, "Over the past three years, more than 250,000 individuals have been enrolled as students on UNC campuses, yet only 21 students committed a violent crime on state campuses during that time had a prior criminal history. 13 of these 21 students did not disclose their prior criminal background on their application for admission."

This means that roughly one in 12,000 students committed a violent crime on campus between 2001 and 2004.

Because a majority of the students applying to and attending college fall in the range of 18-24 years old, university officials are faced with state laws that absolve convicted felons of their crimes once they have their 18th birthday. But with the amount of students living on campus increasing annually, student safety is becoming a growing issue facing university officials statewide. The campus police cannot do it by themselves and safety starts before students even enter the university.