College Students

Brian Barker wants to hear the long-silent carillon at USC's bell tower once again sound the hour and play the school's fight song. So Barker, an accounting major who graduates from USC on Friday, is raising money from classmates to restore and enhance the system of slender metal chimes. "It's one of the greatest feelings," said Barker, who recalled hearing the USC chimes years ago before they fell into disrepair. "You get a sense of tradition."

Boxers or briefs? Bikinis or thongs? Bras or negligees? So many choices -- and that's just for the men. Three times a year, UCLA's unofficial Undie Run brings out thousands of skivvy-clad students looking to unwind -- and then some -- from finals week by meeting at midnight to run from the corner of Gayley Avenue and Strathmore Place to the school's intramural field.

The two young men were close in age, shared the same turf in the neighborhoods near USC but led very different lives. Then, with the slamming of a metal gate, they had a chance encounter late one night in September. After drinking with friends, Bryan R. Frost, a USC student and aspiring film director, walked past a sliding gate just north of campus and, on a whim, shoved it closed. The loud clang drew the ire of Travion T. Ford -- street name "Poison" -- who was visiting his mother's apartment there.

College student, what's in your wallet? A health insurance card, one would hope, says James C. Turner, president of the American College Health Assn. and executive director of student health at the University of Virginia. "College students typically see themselves as healthy and immortal, but I've seen students injured or become ill, and the medical costs without insurance can mean starting your life saddled with debt far higher than just tuition," he says. Most college students -- 67%, according to a 2008 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office -- have health coverage under a parent's employer-based plan.

Community college student Kristen Grand dreams of transferring to Cal State Long Beach so she can earn a bachelor's degree in social work and become an adoption caseworker. But the process of accumulating the right course work and filling all the requirements is overwhelming, the 26-year-old says. "It's kind of stressful," Grand said after class at Long Beach City College one afternoon this week. "Finances, for one, and whether I'm going to get the right amount of counseling to figure out what I need to do."

A Los Angeles man was found guilty of second-degree murder Monday in the fatal stabbing of a USC film student last year during a street fight sparked by the noise from a slammed gate. Travion T. Ford, 25, who sometimes worked as an usher at USC football games, faces a sentence of 16 years to life in state prison for the Sept. 18 murder of Bryan R. Frost, 23, near the university. Sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 29. The jury of seven men and five women found Ford not guilty of first-degree murder, which would have required greater proof of premeditation and intent to kill.

Police discovered Sunday what they believe is the body of Yale University graduate student Annie Le, hidden in a wall of a campus research lab where she was last seen five days ago. Sunday was to have been her wedding day, with 160 guests including relatives from her hometown of Placerville, Calif. The body was found in an area of the lab building where utility cables run between floors. Peter Reichard, New Haven's assistant police chief, told reporters four hours later: "We are assuming that it is her."

After the Connecticut medical examiner concluded that a body recovered from a Yale University research lab was that of graduate student Annie Le, friends, colleagues and students who didn't know her tried to come to terms Monday with her brutal death. Le's body was found Sunday, the day she was to marry a Columbia University graduate student. The 24-year-old doctoral student in pharmacology had been missing for five days when police found her remains stuffed behind a wall of a lab where she was doing research with animals.

As FBI agents and Yale University police combed the basement of a laboratory building for missing bride-to-be Annie Le, the man accused of killing her moved among them in an apparent effort to cover his tracks, a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said. That behavior aroused suspicions about Raymond Clark III, but the final piece that led to his arrest Thursday was the discovery that evidence in the ceiling and in the crawl space where Le's body was found contained the DNA from both Le and Clark, according to the law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

Even after police suspected that lab technician Raymond Clark had killed Yale University grad student Annie Le and stuffed her body behind a wall, he had unfettered access to the campus -- but was under constant surveillance, officials said Monday. Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said the school didn't disable an identification card that gave Clark access to campus buildings until after his arrest Thursday, four days after Le was found strangled in the lab building where they both worked.