Attention-seeking students fabricate crimes to generate the media and community response that real campus tragedies command.
When University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson was found shot to death, e-mails sent out by campus officials immediately alerted the university community to the violent act. Local news media also swarmed the campus, providing coverage to vigils and memorial services.
Three weeks later, an e-mail sent out to the university community again alerted them to a threat on campus. A student told campus police how a Black man attempted to rob him in the early morning hours. When being interviewed by a local television station, he showed off stitches in his head, and even recalled the similarity of his situation to that of the slain student body president.
The student, Brian Sharpe, later recanted his story. Experts suggest Sharpe and others like him who report false crimes are driven by the attention given to a real crimes.
“It’s a copycat behavior where somebody has the idea put into his mind by reading current events and gets carried away with the grand importance of it all,” says Dr. Daniel B. Kennedy, a professor in the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Detroit Mercy.
In April 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a student at Virginia Polytechnic State University in Blacksburg, Va., launched a rampage on the school’s campus. When it was over, 32 people — including Cho — were dead, and 25 more were injured. Immediately, campuses across the country reacted to the tragedy, beefing up security procedures and rethinking how they would react to something similar.
It was around the same time that false reports also saw an increase. Kennedy says that the impulse to report false crimes may be triggered by actual crimes, and fueled by the power the person reporting hopes to wield.
“For anybody with a need to demonstrate a sense of power or reassure himself that he is powerful or significant … by doing this, he can attach himself to the importance of the story by making himself part of the story,” he says. “It’s duping delight — something you find with a lot of sociopaths and criminals — which is the sheer joy of manipulating people.”
