COMMENCEMENT LOCKDOWN

JUNE 2002

The arrest of Palestinian activist and suspected terrorist Jaoudat Abouazza in Harvard Square triggered a “lock-down” on Commencement Day 2002. Police had considered heightening security in anticipation of the “American Jihad” speech by Zayed M. Yasin ’02 and a World Bank protest in Cambridge scheduled for the next day. But it was the arrest of Abouazza that led to the metal detectors, bomb technicians, and National Guard presence at Commencement.

Abouazza, 24 at the time, was arrested near the Au Bon Pain in Holyoke Center on traffic violations and weapons charges.

THE SNOW PENIS

FEBRUARY 2003

Some of Harvard’s rowers took a break from stroking down the Charles in order to erect a nine-foot snow penis in Harvard Yard on Feb. 11, 2003.

Complete with a vein and two large, well-defined testicles, the phallus rubbed campus feminists the wrong way. Amy E. Keel ’04 said she and her roommates destroyed the snow penis because “pornography is degrading to women and creates a violent atmosphere.”

It was the cock block to end all cock blocks, making it into the Economist, Playboy, and Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live.”

TOWN-GOWN KILLING

APRIL 2003

A nasty exchange of words outside of a Cambridge Pizza Ring turned into a deadly stabbing early on April 12, 2003, when a liquored-up Harvard graduate student killed a local teenager. Alexander Pring-Wilson, then a 25-year-old graduate student at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, used a pocketknife to kill Michael D. Colono, 18, of Cambridge.

Pring-Wilson called it self defense; a year and a half later, a jury called it voluntary manslaughter. The killing catapulted Pring-Wilson into the infamy of Court TV and made his case into a cause célèbre. He is now serving his six-to-eight year prison sentence. The verdict is being appealed.

HUPD SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT