Deaths hit NCCU hard

School suffers 8 since Jan. 4, 2007

DURHAM -- Each time Geoffrey Cooper enters the Campus Echo office, he passes a photo of a smiling Denita Smith, the slain N.C. Central University student for whom the college newspaper's newsroom is now named.

It is a sobering reminder that even the young are mortal.

"Every time I walk past that picture, it gets to me," said Cooper, now the Echo's editor in chief.

Since Smith's death Jan. 4, 2007, the school has been visited by death again and again. Eight NCCU students died in the course of the 2007-08 academic year. The causes ranged from car crashes to homicide. No two deaths were connected.

Two of the dead, seniors Cannon Tyrell Fuller and Cassandra Freeman, will receive degrees posthumously at graduation Saturday.

"In all my years in higher education, I've never experienced this number of student deaths," said Frances Graham, NCCU's interim vice chancellor for student affairs. "It's really unbelievable, actually."

At Duke, three students died this school year, including Abhijit Mahato, the graduate student shot dead in his apartment. At UNC-Chapel Hill, four students died since last summer, including the student body president, Eve Carson, who was shot dead this year.

At NCCU, a small campus of 8,300 students, the deaths seemed at times to come in bunches, as when three students died in February. Two students died in wrecks, and four others died from what the university called "health complications."

NCCU draws heavily from Durham high schools, and four of the students -- Freeman, Larry Leathers, Sean Roach and LaRisha Hart -- were Bull City natives.

Support staffs strained

The effect on NCCU's student services and mental health support staffs was profound, Graham said. Some university officials spent much of the year in condolence mode, gathering information, sending flowers, notifying grief counselors. The campus was host for two memorial services and a funeral this year.

"I think our counseling center is exhausted," Graham said. "It will have record numbers this year."

Keith Anderson, who heads the mental health best practices task force for the American College Health Association, said an unusual number of deaths in a short time may force some introspection.

"It's an unusual event for people in the prime of their lives to die in these kinds of numbers," said Anderson, a psychologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "It will get people thinking about their own mortality."

One NCCU student, LaTrese Curtis, was a homicide victim. Curtis, who lived in Raleigh, was found stabbed to death in late January beside Interstate 540.

The most recent to die was Fuller, a popular senior who died unexpectedly in early April while working at a group home in Creedmoor. Students held a memorial for him at Campus Crossing, the off-campus apartment complex where he lived. A group of 30 students, faculty and staff members piled into buses and cars to attend his funeral in Cherryville.

Cooper, the Campus Echo reporter and editor, said he struggled recently to persuade Fuller's friends to speak to him for a newspaper article. His death shook a lot of students, Cooper said.

"This is a real tight-knit place," he said. "When a death happens, you cannot avoid it. Even though we're from all different places, we're one big family."