I appeared this morning on Varney & Co. on Fox Business to talk about the impact of the murder of two students at Brown University, and how the lack of information is fueling speculation.
Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)
[Introduction]Varney::Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson joins me now as a professor and a Providence Area resident. Are you happy with the investigation so far? There’s been an awful lot of criticism.WAJ:The lack of progress is very frustrating, and this is very unusual because in most of these school shooting cases, which unfortunately are too common, the killer is caught right away or commits suicide on the spot or shot. But here it’s very unusual. We don’t know who this person is. There’s a lot of speculation.The school has not released a lot of information. And that silence from the school and the silence from the FBI allows a lot of speculation to flourish. And certainly people are very nervous in Rhode Island as they should be because we have a killer on the loose.Varney:Are we going to have to turn our campuses into what I would call fortified areas to guard against this kind of threat?WAJ:Well, you can’t. That’s the problem. And we revisit this with every school shooting, but at least with a school shooting at the K through 12 level, there’s a particular building you can secure. This is a wide ranging campus. This is a city campus. This is a campus that has hundreds of access points.And we really need to understand what happened here. Who is the killer? Is it somebody who could have been prevented through various security measures or would those have been futile? Is it a student, a former student? Is it somebody completely unconnected?Until we get those facts we really can’t come up with a remedy. What’s really what’s lacking here is the lack of facts. A lot of speculation, a lot of concern, but very few facts have been publicly revealed so far.Varney:I think your heart has to go out to those students. Many of them were locked down for what, 10, 12 hours right in the middle of finals, and now they’re leaving. I think finals have been canceled in some cases. Is that the level of anxiety which you’re seeing across the board at top universities in America?WAJ:Well, I think this is everyone’s nightmare. Every school’s nightmare. Every university prepares for this, but you can never be fully prepared.When it happens, it always takes you by surprise. And that’s what we’re seeing, what looks like a very discombobulated response from Brown is not for lack of planning and not lack of preparedness. It’s that when it actually happens it’s very hard to implement those plans. So yes, I think there’s a lot of anxiety.I think with the assassination of Charlie Kirk on a campus there’s a question, no answers yet, but there’s a question whether this was a targeted killing.We know that a particular classroom in a particular building was targeted. This wasn’t something that took place in a public area. And I think we need to get those answers. But until we have the facts, until we know who did it, until we know why that person did it, I think that the anxiety is going to continue.Varney:Yeah,, I think so. Professor William Jacobson, thanks for being here. We appreciate it.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY