Kerri Dunn taught criminal justice but she was a shoplifter. While earning a PhD in psychology, she was ordered into counseling for stealing.
Dunn, 39, was a hero to many students at Claremont McKenna College, lifting her voice for the oppressed. Then she became the professor who may have betrayed them.
She railed against hate crimes. Now she is suspected of staging one.
Dunn -- a Catholic converting to Judaism -- prided herself on being passionate and outspoken. But court records and interviews with colleagues, students, friends and police reveal a woman of contradiction and secrets.
Dunn had returned from a campus forum on racial intolerance March 9 and found her car spray-painted with slurs, the windows smashed and tires punctured. A hate crime, authorities said. A week later, Claremont police alleged that Dunn, who has a law degree, had done it herself.
Dunn has denied any wrongdoing and declined to comment for this story. The FBI and the Los Angeles County district attorney's office are investigating.
Gary S. Lincenberg, her California attorney, will not comment on the alleged hate crime or on her police record. James Michael Rierden, an attorney in Nebraska who represented Dunn for an arrest four years ago, said she pleaded guilty to shoplifting, paid a $200 fine and agreed to counseling.
"I was surprised," Rierden recalled. "In light of ... her going to law school, I found it even harder to understand -- just the risk she was taking as far as her legal career. I felt, 'We have a pattern here [for shoplifting] and maybe she needs help.' "
Pam Manske, a friend of Dunn's, chalked up the shoplifting to high jinks. "She'd been a student -- sometimes students do goofy things," said the commercial real estate agent.
Dunn's sister declined to be interviewed for this story and other family members did not return calls.
Students and colleagues at the Claremont Colleges said their questions about Kerri Frances Dunn might go unanswered.
John Seery, a professor of politics at Pomona College, said: "It looks as if we were punked."
A Cross Burning
As a psychology teacher at Claremont McKenna College, Dunn was passionate and engaging, and railed against discrimination.
Since January at the Claremont Colleges, four students had burned an 11-foot cross and someone had scrawled a racial slur on a calendar with a picture of George Washington Carver, a black agricultural scientist.
