UW takes measures to prevent campus harassment

Today marks the one year anniversary of the murder of UW staff member Rebecca Griego, 26, who was killed by her ex-boyfriend Jonathan Rowan in Gould Hall. Rowan then killed himself at the scene. Griego was the program coordinator at the UW Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies.

News of the morning tragedy in Gould Hall 440 spread quickly around campus — mostly by word of mouth. Many students had heard there had been a shooting somewhere on campus and that two people lay dead. An e-mail was sent to faculty and staff members more than an hour after shots were fired.

As the day went on, the University still had not notified students. As reporters milled around the caution-tape barricade surrounding Gould Hall waiting for news from the UW Police Department, students came up and stopped, shocked to find that their classes in the building were cancelled and it had become a crime scene.

Many members of the University community turned to media news sources that day to learn what happened.

Griego had not been without fear for her life in the months before April 2, 2007. She’d recently placed a restraining order on Rowan, 41, who’d made numerous threats of violence against her and her family.

According to the petition Griego filed to get the restraining order, she said Rowan had made a phone call to her place of work telling her he’d always be in contact with her and her dog. He then called her sister, Rachel Griego, and threatened her and her dogs with violence. He’d also called Griego in February, saying he’d commit suicide if he couldn’t see her.

“He is now on the run,” the victim wrote in the January 2007 petition. “He robbed his current [roommates] this morning and called to tell me [that] I cannot find him but he can find me (knows my place of work) and to look over my shoulder because I would see him again. … He has proven to be mentally unstable.”

After the UWPD was unsuccessful in tracking Rowan down, it fell on the Griegos to serve him with legal papers. They also could not find him.

UWPD Assistant Chief Ray Wittmier said that a protection order would not be valid if it could not be proved that the target had been notified of its existence. Searching for the target can take a lot of time, and sometimes they never turn up.

Griego was due to return to court for the third time for another temporary protection order against Rowan when she was killed.

She had emailed co-workers, including her supervisor James Delisle, telling them to be on the lookout for Rowan. She thought Gould Hall was one of the only places he’d be able to find her, and she attached several photos of him. However, the email and photos were not widely circulated throughout the building.

“The closer circle knew what was going on,” said Adriana Johnson, Griego’s co-worker and graduate student in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. “There was someone that was stalking her, we have a picture of him and we have paperwork to serve him in case he ever showed up.”

The unraveling that eventually culminated in Griego’s death and the delay in informing the University community of the incident are recognized by some as a failure of current systems within the University and state for dealing with such situations.

The University received a fine from the state for failure to follow procedure in the Griego case, a fine described as “minimal” by Norm Arkans, UW executive director of Media Relations and Communications. He said the fine referred to procedure involving leadership training in Griego’s particular college.

“It was a fairly technical point,” Arkans said. “It was believed there wasn’t adequate training for leadership in that college.”

Much has been done in the past year to try to amend the deficiencies in policies. The SafeCampus program and the Violence Prevention and Response Program (VPRP) was created and implemented in autumn. SafeCampus provides students and faculty with a phone number to call when issues of workplace and personal safety crop up. VPRP homes in on emerging violent threats, following them and providing people involved with information on how to address the problem.

“On the SafeCampus Web site there is a whole array of resources in one place,” Arkans said. “They provide a lot of public awareness about what people can do in threatening situations or if they see behavior in or out of the workplace that concerns them.”

UW Alert was also created in order to evade future failures to inform students and faculty about emergency situations on campus.

“The University of Washington … has developed UW Alert to disseminate official information during emergencies or crisis situations that may disrupt the normal operation of the UW or threaten the health or safety of members of the UW community,” according to the UW Alert’s Web site.

The alert comes in the form of a text message to people who’ve signed up for the service on the Web site.

“People are in so many different places on campus during the day,” Arkans said. “UW Alert allows us to tell students, ‘There’s been an incident; here’s what you should do.’”

The UW has also installed poles around campus that will broadcast an amplified warning in the case of an incident. The system was tested for the first time Thursday and will be tested regularly in the future.

“If something happens, we can announce over the system, for instance, ‘There is a shooter. The shooter is at-large. Please go indoors,’” Arkans said. “We feel strongly that people are empowered by information.”

Rebecca’s family has also taken action since her death.

Rachel Griego and Diane Perry, Rebecca’s mother, recently helped pass a bill through the Washington state’s Senate, which would allow abusers to be served with legal papers by mail after two reasonable attempts had been made to serve them in person. Previously, a person had to be served in person or the protection order would be invalid.

However, there is some doubt as to whether this new method of serving papers can hold up in court.

“You have to able to show that they have knowledge of [the protection order],” Wittmier said. “I’m not totally sure how the courts will view it and how they’ll work around that. I’m sure it will be challenged some, but we’re going to use the new tool for as long as they’ll let us.”

The UWPD has taken steps in the last year to improve procedures involving domestic violence and protection orders.

“We are scrutinizing our anti-harassment and protection orders much more closely than before,” said Ralph Robinson, assistant chief of UWPD field operations. “We have a better tracking system now.”

The UWPD also hired a crime victim advocate, who will work directly with victims of harassment to make sure they move smoothly through the criminal justice system, Robinson said.

“This person keeps frequent contact with victims that have concerns,” Wittmier said. “They’re that extra piece that keeps track of all … the details.”

Despite the revisions made by the University and the UWPD to help make campus a safer and well informed place, Arkans said it’s hard to tell if these measures are actually helping to prevent a future incident.

“You plan for the unanticipated as much as you can,” Arkans said. “But it only takes one person that does something terrible to make [campus] not as safe a place. You can have someone reek havoc in a population this large, but we can communicate better in a bad situation now.”

[Reach reporter Camden Swita at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]