Student death still causes misconceptions about Willkie

Near the end of last semester, Gregory Willoughby passed away in his closet after intentionally inhaling hydrogen sulfide. The presence of the chemical, which is toxic when inhaled, caused the evacuation of Willkie Quad for several hours.

During this time, students were asked to stay in the quad’s parking lot with no immediate explanation as to why.

While the entire building was outside of their rooms, many students saw and talked to their neighbors, something that doesn’t seem to occur as often in Willkie, where there are no floor lounges and suite doors close automatically.

The incident led to many misconceptions and rumors, both about the effects of Willkie’s environment contributing to Willoughby’s death as well as about the University’s actions in communicating with students during and after the buildings were evacuated.

A room with history?

Although Willoughby’s death made many question Willkie’s secluded environment, this stereotype is not always correct.

“I think that the biggest lesson we took from this is that the outside student perception of Willkie is that it’s quiet as a tomb, and nobody interacts, and nobody knows one another,” said Jeanne Lady, Residential Operations Administration associate director for Willkie. “What the staff inside of Willkie knows is that the students choose their level of participation, and it’s not necessarily the environment for every student.”
Sara Ivey Lucas, assistant director of assignments for Residential Programs and Services said although Willkie may not be the place for some students, it remains a popular living space.

“By-and-large, over the last 12 years Willkie’s always been full,” she said. “There have been incidents in Willkie, but there have also been incidents in Teter and McNutt and Collins where students don’t feel connected.”

Ivey Lucas said the Assignment Office’s biggest response after an incident such as Willoughby’s death comes from quelling rumors.

“After the suicide in April, we had probably 30 or 40 students call us to say, ‘I’ve got to be moved because I can’t live in the room where this happened.’ It’s like, ‘Okay, well you’re not, you’re in the other tower, or you’re on a different floor’ ... (But) it did cause some folks to call us and say ‘Hey, is this really the right kind of place for me to live?’”

Ivey Lucas said when she was an undergraduate at IU in the early 1990s there was a student who shot themselves in their room in Collins.

“It took some time for the community to recover from that and heal from that ... but by the time we got to the next academic year there were very few of us left who remembered what had happened, so there wasn’t any stigma for the person of ‘you live in the room where this thing happened.’” she said.

Ivey Lucas said there is currently someone living in Willoughby’s old room but that this person had not been officially notified by RPS of the room’s history.

“No one even asked me if I should tell the student or not,” she said. “It’s just a room from the way my office sees it.”

Caught in between

As students waited in the Willkie parking lot last April, many grew frustrated with their situation; they were being locked out of their rooms, and they didn’t know why.
However, they weren’t the only ones.

“Nobody knew what was going on. It was hours, literally hours, before any of us knew what was going on,” said Bob Weith, director of Residential Operations Administration.

Three days after the incident, Patrick Connor, executive director of RPS, sent an e-mail message to Willkie students addressing the “concerns residents have expressed about the limited amount of communications with Willkie students.”

In terms of RPS’s internal response, Weith said word was out to all professional and student staff members that same day.

“One of the first things that we go into is to attempt to control rumors,” he said.

Even once students had been allowed back inside their rooms, the Willkie staff gave students the option to move somewhere else for the night, but even at that point they still couldn’t say what had happened, not until there was a formal release given by the University.

“Until the police and whoever supervises them, which is the dean of students, authorizes us to give a release, we can’t do anything. And that’s more to protect the investigation and to protect the information, so the accurate pieces of information are going out rather than the inaccurate,” Lady said. “Somewhere there’s that disconnect between what students believe they should know right in the moment and what procedure dictates what we have to do, and unfortunately, our staff gets stuck in the middle of that sometimes.”