Cops: Anti-Gay Leader
Faked Own Attack
by AP From the Web,
December 18, 2007
Mount Laurel, New Jersey -- A
Princeton University student who argued that his conservative views were not
accepted on the campus confessed to fabricating an assault and sending
threatening e-mail messages to himself and some friends who shared his views,
authorities say.
Princeton Township police said that Francisco Nava was not immediately charged
with any crime, but that the investigation was continuing.
Nava claimed to have been assaulted Friday by two men off campus, police said.
But he later confessed that scrapes and scratches on his face were
self-inflicted, and that the threats were his work, too, said Detective Sgt.
Ernie Silagyi.
A spokeswoman for the Ivy League university said punishment, which could range
from a warning to expulsion, was pending Monday.
"The university takes all matters related to the safety of its community members
very seriously," said spokeswoman Lauren Robinson-Brown. "It's
particularly concerning that a student would fabricate such matters."
Nava did not respond immediately to an e-mail from The Associated Press on
Monday, and a phone listing for him could not be located.
Nava, a 23-year-old junior politics major from Bedford, Texas, found himself at
the center of one campus controversy recently when he wrote a column for the
student newspaper criticizing the school for giving out free condoms, which he
said encouraged a dangerous "hook-up culture."
A short time later, Nava made his first report to the university public safety
office that he was receiving threatening messages in his campus mailbox. A
friend says Nava told him one message read, in capital letters: "ONE MORE
ARTICLE AND YOU WON'T LIVE TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY."
Other members of the Anscombe Society, a conservative student organization, who
have spoken out against premarital sex and same-sex marriage, said they received
similar threats. So did Robert George, a professor in the politics
department.
Robinson-Brown would not say exactly how the university responded to the
threats. But she said that, in general, when students are threatened they
are given access to counselors, assured that the campus security force will take
their calls right away and can be moved to new dorm rooms.
Another student wrote in the campus newspaper Friday that the threats Nava
received did not get the same forceful response as anti-gay graffiti that
appeared this semester outside the dorm rooms of some gay students.
Brandon McGinley called it a double standard, which made it seem OK to "use
intimidation tactics to silence the voices of morally conservative students."
But the threats, like the attack, are apparently a hoax.
"Everyone feels saddened, shocked and surprised to have been dragged along in
this," McGinley said. "We're all extremely concerned for (his) mental
state."
McGinley said it was a surprise that Nava, who was a resident assistant in a
dorm and a member of a campuswide committee on religious life, would be involved
in such a hoax.
But he said that after the purported attack, Nava's friends began comparing
notes and found some several inconsistencies he told them about threats and the
attack. He said they told authorities about them.
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