Community remembers professor Belton with candlelight vigil

IU professors, students and Bloomington community members made their way to the Bloomington Courthouse square on New Year’s Day to remember IU assistant professor Don Belton, who was stabbed to death Dec. 27.

The hundreds of attendees filled the entirety of the block's sidewalk as they walked around the square to keep warm.

Adjacent to where the vigil took place is Monroe County Jail, where Michael James Griffin, 25, is incarcerated after telling Bloomington Police Department he repeatedly stabbed Belton on Dec. 27.

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Inside the Pourhouse Cafe on Kirkwood Avenue, manager Pam Voorhies worked quickly. The store was closing, but she fielded carryout for customers and for the professors coming to pick up the coffee the cafe donated to Belton’s candlelight vigil.

“It was neat that she wanted us to be a part of it,” Voorhies said of D. Rae Greiner, an IU assistant professor of English, who organized the vigil.

Four women, IU professors, walked into the cafe, picked up several coffee pitchers and squeezed them into a MINI cooper en route to the courthouse. 

Fifteen minutes before start time, already a swell of people stood around the southeast portion of the square, dressed for below freezing temperatures. 

“It has been incredibly taxing, emotionally draining and saddening,” Greiner said. 

 Not only is Greiner’s friend and colleague gone, but she has been dealing with inadequate media coverage and negative comments and feedback resulting from such coverage, she said.

 Many other friends and colleagues also said the Belton they knew had yet to surface.

“We want to change public perception … while they are still paying attention,” Greiner said.

With candles, people shuffled around the sidewalk bordering the square; a bird’s eye view would show the square almost fully illuminated, as about 200 gathered there.

Former IU undergraduate Justin Way was in South Bend, home from graduate school in Columbia, N.Y., when he received the news from a friend. 

Way took Belton’s 2008 advanced fiction writing workshop, recalling how in Belton’s class students would not read the typical fiction.

“That’s a thing about him, he opened up your reading taste to be more eclectic,” Way said. 

He added that Belton’s class was the antithesis of the competitive atmosphere writing could often have.  Way said his attitude toward writing changed because of Belton.

“It really is tragic,” Way said, reflecting on Belton’s near departure to Honolulu the morning of Dec. 28. “I always remember telling how he wanted to go to Hawaii, write a couple of poems and come back.”