From Horseplay to Homicide

As sure as the snows of February, there are snowball fights at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Last week, when a five-inch fall set 200 undergraduates to pelting away across campus-cutting West Cumberland Avenue, it seemed at first like any free-for-all--but by the time this one was over, three men were dead. One was a passing truck driver, who got his skull fractured by an ice-cored snowball. Another truck driver, also under barrage, got so incensed that he grabbed a pistol from his cab and shot "I don't know where"--it was, it turned out, into the head of an 18-year-old freshman. And the third victim, a 58-year-old packer, died of a heart attack minutes after (and, maintains his widow, because of) running the snowball gauntlet on West Cumberland Avenue.

Inevitably, University of Tennessee President Andrew D. Holt ordered an investigation, and inevitably it would leave unsolved the generations-old campus question of how horseplay escalates into homicide, high spirits degenerate into low tragedy. How, for instance, did the dead freshman, an unobtrusive nephew of a U.T. English instructor, and his friends come under the gun? Most riot-weary authorities cite mob psychology as a prime factor. "When people feel they're lost in a crowd," notes San Francisco State College Dean Ferd Reddell, "they always grow braver. That's why one way to handle them during a mob scene is to call them by name and bring them back to the realization of their individuality."

Yale Administrator Henry Chauncey believes that gatherings do not smolder into mobs "if proper police methods are used. If the opposition is jovial, then the students are jovial. But if it's brutal, then they become brutal." The only--and probably unconquerable--difficulty is for the cops to sense the golden mean. Could they have better handled the Tennessee rioters last week? Even as the police tried to get the dying freshman to a hospital, Knoxville police were under continuous ambush, and the snowballing continued for hours after the ambulance had shrieked off.

The Tennessee riot deepened the occupational angst of the U.S. deanery. Some theorized that times of depressingly gloomy weather and heavy academic load bring on incidents; others, particularly in the North, found fairer weather and increased leisure a more volatile combination. Most seemed to go along with Fred Turner, dean of the University of Illinois for the past 22 years, who says: "I've never been able to detect any pattern, except that the cause of the mean and ugly ones is usually something unexpected."

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