Zhifan Dong is the second University of Utah student in four years to be killed after reporting threats from a boyfriend to school officials.
A trove of documents released by the University of Utah on Tuesday reveals a series of failures leading up to the death of a Chinese student, allegedly at the hands of her ex-boyfriend.
Salt Lake City police found international student Zhifan Dong, 19, dead in an off-campus motel room on Feb. 11, when they responded to reports from the University of Utah police department that a man was threatening to kill his girlfriend, officials said. Dong’s former boyfriend, Haoyu Wang, 26, was also in the room when police arrived and claimed he had killed Dong before trying to take his own life with drugs, according to the report. Wang has been charged with murder and will face a competency hearing on Aug. 8, according to court documents.
For weeks before Dong’s death, the university knew she was in a dangerous intimate partner violence situation, according to a timeline released by the university. On Jan. 14, Dong reported Wang’s suicidal ideations to housing staff and made them aware that her boyfriend had been arrested by police two days earlier after an altercation with her, the timeline notes. She was issued a temporary protective order by police after the incident. The university added in the timeline that there is currently “no process or regulation requiring local police departments to notify colleges or universities of arrests or protective orders involving students.”
Bailey McGartland, Dong’s roommate who is also a student at the school, told the campus newspaper she helped Dong file reports of domestic violence and requests for wellness checks.
“I felt so angry,” McGartland told the Daily Utah Chronicle. “It was absolutely preventable.”
The documents, which were made public after The Salt Lake City Tribune pushed for public records on the case to be released, describe how former campus-housing employees delayed notifying the university’s police department about reports of intimate partner violence. They also provide evidence of “insufficient and unprofessional internal communication,” University President Taylor Randall said, as well as “processes, procedures and trainings in housing that needed to be clarified and improved.”
“Although the university made extensive efforts to support and ensure the safety of Dong and provide assistance to Wang, our self-evaluation revealed shortcomings,” Randall said.
Administrators also chastised housing staff in a letter to them in mid-March for not elevating Dong’s case to a “welfare” matter, a higher classification of concern. The letter was among the documents released this week.
Comments
Post a Comment