NEWS
By JILLIAN FREITAS
Senior Conner McGinn was assaulted late at night by three or more male students.
“It was a big blur. At one point, I was curled up into a ball, covering my head with my arms and hands,” McGinn said.
McGinn, a Pi Kappa Alpha member, boarded the bus headed to the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) kick-off party around 9 p.m. A male student was drunkenly making inappropriate comments to women on the bus and making them feel uncomfortable to the point where some decided to leave, said sophomore Matt Bernhardt, SAE risk manager.
As a member of Creating a Rape-Free Environment for Students and vice president of the Inter-Fraternity Council, McGinn suggested to SAE member senior Luke Johnson that they ask the male student to exit the bus.
Johnson agreed with McGinn and the two of them asked the student to leave. But the student refused.
After refusing to move a second time, he was physically removed from the bus by McGinn, Johnson and a third male student.
“He got really rowdy and [Johnson] had to hold his arms and I tried to keep his feet on the floor,” McGinn said. “But then he head-butted me and I got the first cut on my forehead.”
The offending student was finally pushed off the bus by an SAE member.
“[The male student] was built like a linebacker and almost twice the size of [McGinn],” Bernhardt said. “He was instigating it and [McGinn] was trying to defend himself. We had to break it up.”
Shortly after, another student was removed from the bus for his drunken behavior. But that confrontation was quickly resolved, Bernhardt said.
McGinn cleaned the blood from his wound and the bus departed for the party at 9:30 p.m.
Upon returning from the party, McGinn retrieved his bicycle which was parked on campus and started riding toward the dorms as a shortcut to reach his home.
“I was going around the new residence [center] and this guy came out of nowhere and pushed me off my bike,” McGinn said. “He started shouting that I had no right to kick him off the bus and that’s how I knew who he was.”
McGinn had been drinking at the party, but claims that he was not overly intoxicated at the time of the assault. He remembers seeing the face of the first male, who was the same person he forced off of the bus earlier that night. But then two or three more men arrived and began punching and kicking McGinn.
“They were kicking the back of my head and my face,” he said. “I got the shit beat out of me.”
When McGinn got the opportunity, he ran into the Sandhu Center parking lot, the closest place with the brightest lighting, he said. McGinn saw a handful of students standing at the far end of the structure and ran up to them, asking if they could call Public Safety.
“At this point, I had no shirt on and I was covered in blood,” he said. “I feel bad for the people I came up to because I’m sure I was a horrible sight.”
Senior Brandon Vaughan saw McGinn immediately after the incident from his dorm window in the Sandhu Center.
“I saw [McGinn] stumbling into the street with blood pouring down his face. He looked pretty bad and confused,” Vaughan said.
After Public Safety responded to the incident, McGinn was rushed to UCI Medical Center in an ambulance.
“They put me on a stretcher and we bust through the doors and there were all the bright lights and the yelling,” McGinn said. “They cut off my clothes and they were sticking needles in my face, making me take x-rays and CT scans.”
McGinn received roughly 25 stitches on his forehead and under his right eye and right upper lip. He suffered a fractured nose and a fractured hip.
Orange Police Department officers met with McGinn while he was in the hospital. The case has been given to the Detective Bureau, where an investigation will be conducted, said Sgt. Dan Adams, public information officer. There is no time frame for the conclusion of the investigation as cases are prioritized at the detectives’ discretion, he said.
At 10 a.m. on Sunday, McGinn’s friend, senior Will Burns, picked him up from the emergency room. McGinn said he and Burns laughed because during their freshmen year of college, Burns injured his knee at a party and McGinn carried him to the hospital.
Now, McGinn’s nasal passages are swollen shut and had surgery to treat a septal hematoma, bleeding in the soft tissue of the nose. McGinn may have a permanently perforated septum, a hole in the cartilage between his nostrils. The damage would cause him to have difficulty breathing for the rest of his life, and he may develop a whistling sound when breathing out of his nose. Although his pain is so strong Vicodin does not help much, McGinn thinks that his situation could have been much worse.
But McGinn does not feel anger toward the men who beat him and he refuses to release their names to keep them safe from physical retaliation.
“Keeping me in good spirits is that I don’t regret for a second what I did. I mean, I wish it didn’t happen, but I don’t regret it at all. I don’t think I did anything wrong,” he said.
McGinn went out of his way to be helpful that night with managing the crowd, Bernhardt said. But he wants to make sure that this doesn’t happen again at any of SAE’s events.
“Ideally this is an isolated incident,” Bernhardt said. “Because the size of Chapman is going up, we are looking into how to control our open parties in the future. Maybe our parties can’t be completely open to everyone.”
Although Vaughan usually hears and sees minor arguments and fights on Friday and Saturday nights on the sidewalk of Grand Street, he has never seen anything quite so violent at Chapman before.
“I’m surprised that Chapman hasn’t sent out any e-mails about it. I know there are legal aspects, but it’s a concern for student safety and people should know about it,” he said.
Chapman administrators could not be contacted by press time, but McGinn said several administrators contacted him to inquire about his health. They told him that the students involved will be dealt with on three levels – criminal, campus conduct and a civil suit, pending McGinn’s decision to press charges.
“It was malicious. It’s not just something you stumble onto,” Vaughan said. “The [students who beat McGinn] shouldn’t be part of the Chapman community anymore.”
McGinn is not sure whether he will heed his mother and his friends’ advice to sue the students who assaulted him.
“The way I see it, they screwed up their lives a whole lot more than they did mine,” he said. “I got a couple of cuts and bruises, but it will all heal.”
Contact this reporter: jillian.freitas@thepantheronline.com
