“You get so deep, you don’t know how to stop it,” he said.
He said that though he was untruthful, he never had any malicious intent.
“At the end of the day, all I wanted to do was to be friends,” he said. “The people that met me, the people that knew me, know that I never asked them for anything. I never coerced them into anything.”
Liu said that many accusations leveled against him in students’ online chatter are unfounded. He specifically insisted that assertions in The Harvard Independent’s story are unfounded, including allegations that he stole a freshman’s Harvard ID and that he participated in The Crimson’s Grand Elections ceremony.
Liu said he did not take someone else’s ID but that he did forge an ID, one that he described as “not really even passable.” For over a month, since the Occupy Harvard encampment began, security personnel have been posted at the gates of the Yard to check every entrant for a Harvard ID.
According to Anastasiya Borys ’15, who lives in the entryway that Liu spent time in, students noticed early on that Liu was not in the Freshman Register and assumed that he was an Extension School student.
“He used to hang out in Weld a lot,” said entryway resident Selina Y. Wang ’15. “We assumed that he was in the Extension School. I guess we didn’t think much about it, but then we started getting suspicious about it when he started to have people swipe him in everywhere.”
When Liu was apprehended by police on Thursday, these students who had come to know him as a familiar face or even a problem set buddy said they were shaken.
“People were just kind of shocked. We had joked before that he didn’t even go here,” Borys said.
Reina A.E. Gattuso ’15, a Crimson magazine writer who lives in the entryway, said, “I personally found it a bit unsettling, and I think some of my peers did. There was definitely a lot of curiosity and a sense of ‘Why is this guy doing this?’”
Liu said that he sympathizes with the students’ concern and did not intend to cause disruption to the entryway.
“I understand the position. They’re scared. It doesn’t make any sense. They feel betrayed,” he said. “I made a mistake. My mistake was being lonely.”
—Staff writer Amy Q. Friedman can be reached at afriedman@college.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Justin C. Worland can be reached at jworland@college.harvard.edu.