YPSILANTI, MICH. — As most students at Eastern Michigan University were heading home for the holidays in December, the school put out a news release announcing that student Laura Dickinson had unexpectedly passed away in her dorm room.
There was no foul play, the school said. Staff members assured worried students they were safe. The campus fell into mourning, with candlelight vigils for the lanky 22-year-old member of the crew team.
Neither students nor Laura's parents knew that investigators had found a grisly scene in Room 518 of Hill Hall.
Dickinson's body was on the carpeted floor, naked from the waist down. A pillow covered her head and traces of semen were on her leg.
For 10 weeks, neither her family nor fellow students knew that authorities were investigating several suspects as part of a criminal inquiry into Dickinson's death. Then, on Feb. 23, Orange Amir Taylor III, an Eastern Michigan student, was arrested.
Only then did the university acknowledge that Dickinson had been raped and killed in her dorm room by someone who took her keys and locked the door when he left.
The school's secretiveness has left many students and residents of this suburb southwest of Detroit, with a population of 22,000, shaken and outraged. For many, this bucolic campus -- founded in the mid-1800s to train teachers -- had been violated.
The school "lied to us," Laura's father, Bob Dickinson, said. "They let us bury her thinking that a healthy 22-year-old girl died by some freak accident."
School officials will not say why they kept silent. But some parents and people in the community believe administrators endangered students in an effort to protect the university's image.
An independent investigation initiated by the school's Board of Regents agrees. In a 568-page report released this month, investigators with the Detroit law firm of Butzel Long detail how school officials violated the Clery Act, a federal law requiring colleges and universities to disclose information about campus crimes and warn students of threats to their safety.
The report, as well as court documents, show that Eastern Michigan University police either suspected or believed all along that this was a homicide.
Some university officials did not know there was a criminal investigation, and unknowingly passed along misinformation, according to the Butzel Long report. Others made a conscious decision to not warn the public or tell the Dickinsons.
