[Warning: This post is violent, grotesque, and true]
--
If someone meets with a mafia boss, it doesn’t mean they’re a criminal. If they meet with a mafia boss every week, it still doesn’t mean they’re a criminal but now it’s a lot more likely.
Repetition is evidence.
--
Two weeks ago, Franco Medina Andulo, 29, and Sergio Palomino, 28, were shot and killed outside of a club in Puerto Rico. They were on vacation with classmates from NYU Stern School of Business. According to police reports, the two were killed in the crossfire between two separate parties, with no other injuries.
A brief video showing a woman holding a gun in a crowded area was released; though a gunshot is heard, the video offers no further information as to what occurred. The woman has been apprehended and released on $150,000 bail. According to Captain Edwin Figueroa, they’ve recovered more shell casings than are consistent with the video, and that the video may not tell the whole story.
--
David Lat was an assistant prosecutor for the United States attorney’s office in Newark. In 2004, Lat started an anonymous blog called “Underneath Their Robes,” self-described as a “combination of People, Us Weekly, Page Six, The National Enquirer and Tigerbeat, focused not on vacuous movie stars or fatuous teen idols, but on the federal judiciary.”
The blog was a huge hit in the legal world, eventually leading to Lat being outed as the writer. As news requests flooded the U.S. attorney’s office, Lat took the site down. Though many wanted him fired, U.S. Attorney Chris Christie took a fatherly tone and praised Lat for his work, saying he didn’t want Lat to resign since it would look bad for the office. Lat left law to go write for Wonkette not long after.
Over a year earlier, just two weeks after Lat had started his blog, his sister Charlene walked to David’s midtown Manhattan apartment while he was at work. She fell to her death from his 25th floor apartment. She was a graduate student at New York University.
--
In the early 2000s, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated collusion among several semiconductor manufacturers in the DRAM price fixing scandal. In October 2005, Samsung Electronics pled guilty and agreed to pay $300 million.
One month later, American and Korean media reported that Lee Yoon-hyung, the daughter of billionaire Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, was killed in a car accident in New York City, but reporters couldn’t find the facts to support it.
After The Korea Times investigated further, a police report settled the matter: the first year NYU graduate heiress was found hanging from her Manhattan apartment by an electrical cord.
--
Allan O. Hunter had an impossibly American resumé: He was a special agent for the F.B.I. during World War II before joining the precursor to the C.I.A., the Office of Strategic Services. After a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, he practiced law and helped develop and operate an active-seniors retirement community before being chosen by Nixon to run Fannie Mae, the country’s largest housing finance provider.
His son, Allan O. Hunter Jr., co-founded Rent.com in 1999, the country’s largest apartment listing site. He served as the company’s president until it was acquired by eBay in 2005 for $433 million. That same year, Hunter Jr. was named as a director of the holding company of the Virgin River Casino, two hours outside of Las Vegas.
Allan O. Hunter III went by Trey. He rarely spoke about his family and was reportedly “tormented by family issues.” Nevertheless, he was enjoying his first month at NYU where he pursued a career in screenwriting. According to sources, he got in a fight with his girlfriend and jumped off the roof of the building shortly after 5 a.m. His baby sister was born 10 hours earlier.
--
These are just some of the suspicious deaths that have taken place at New York University over the last two decades. Since the year 2000, at least 31 suicides or accidental deaths have been reported at NYU; many of them much more public than is typical. Many of these are suspicious for their individual circumstances, but all are suspicious when taken collectively, representing something far scarier than overworked students in an isolating city.
Beyond the deaths, several headlines out of NYU are bizarre, wretched, or uncanny.
In 2013, student Asher Vongtau stepped out to get some fresh air at 7 a.m. on a Saturday after partying all night. Soon after, someone pulled a fire alarm. When the alarm was cleared, Vongtau had vanished. For 36 hours, he was trapped between two buildings, having fallen from a high floor or possibly the roof. Vongtau has no recollection of how he had fallen.
In 2015, student Jaime Castano set his roommate on fire while she was sleeping, sang while he filmed it, and posted it to Snapchat.
In 2017, NYU student Christian Gutierrez pleaded no contest to animal cruelty and theft after a dozen albatrosses were bludgeoned and mutilated in Hawaii.
--
Twenty-year-old Tumi McCallum’s death was like these; though It was prosecuted as a simple case of a jealous and possessive lover, this case is not just suspicious but almost unexplainable.
Her mother was a professor at NYU, and Tumi was staying in her apartment while her mother was traveling. Tumi was found dead in her bedroom in August 2007, her bedroom door locked from the inside. Her boyfriend Michael Cordero eventually confessed to the crime: he had been jealous that she had a party and didn’t invite him, so he reportedly “squeezed her neck with such force that she bled from her nose before dying.”
Cordero maintained that it was entirely unplanned; ultimately pleading down from murder to a 25-year manslaughter sentence.
But when Tumi was found, she had suffered so much blunt force trauma to the face that she was unrecognizable, her bed splattered with blood. Her body was surrounded by empty 40-ounce malt-liquor bottles, and not just empty condom wrappers but empty boxes. Despite this grotesque staging of a gang rape, police reported no sexual assault.
So, the story that reality has presented us is this: In an unplanned fit of jealousy, Michael Cordero strangled and killed Tumi McCallum after she had a party. He then bludgeoned her violently and repeatedly in the face. He either already had several 40s and boxes of condoms, or he bought them, came back, and spread them around her corpse, though he did not sexually assault her. Despite this horrific crime, he pled down to manslaughter.
It doesn’t add up but what else could? I mean, this would explain it better, right?
Tumi McCallum was violently gang raped by a group of criminals powerful enough to get the police to say no sexual assault occurred and get her boyfriend to take the fall. Their vile scene wasn’t just to let someone know what they did to their loved one, but to let them know they could get away with it.
Hell, it doesn’t even sound far-fetched at NYU.
But what would compel these monsters to do this to her of all people? I’m still sniffing that one out, but it’s looking like one hell of a satire.
--
But why so many deaths? Surely not everybody’s dad colluded to defraud the U.S. government, right? Facts are scarce on many (NYU has not released the names of almost all suicide victims since 2018), but I have a few theories.
One: You’re an overachieving freshman who’s long dreamed of the magical promise of academia. At some point, you are met with the sudden realization that the institution you put your faith in engages in shameless, villainous criminal activity. You commit suicide.
Two: You are let in on some bit of criminal enterprise and you express revulsion. You are killed and it is covered up as a suicide.
Three: You’re having trouble fitting in and New York City is isolating, but you feel such a wave of relief when someone comes up to you after class with a warm smile who wants to be your friend. They look you in your eyes and they open up to you, such a blessing in the city of uninterested glances. They show you a New York you were too afraid to explore: the art of haggling with the bootleg CD guy; the exotic perfection of dim sum; and the art (oh the art!). They are your first spring day in Washington Square Park.
They know a bar that doesn’t card and the two of you slide into a booth with a pitcher. They grab you by the wrist and look you in the eyes:
“Would you ever fuck a dog?”
You burst into laughter, already drunk with adventure.
“I’m just saying, lotta sexy dogs out there.” You nearly fall out of the booth.
An extra pitcher later and you’re propping each other up on the long stumble to the dorms, passing a clove back and forth. An old man walks past with an old beagle. “Eh?” They look at the dog and give you a nudge. “Eh??” They wink and smile.
A block later and you muster up the courage. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t have perversions.”
“Oh?” They stop and grab your wrist, looking into your eyes.
“Okay, but like. You can’t tell anybody this, okay?”
“Are you kidding, I fuck dogs!” They laugh and give a reassuring smile.
“Well…when I was a kid, I used to…”
You feel a wave of panic as your shameful skeleton pours out, but they look you in the eyes and give you the biggest, warmest hug of your life.
The next morning at brunch, they lean in toward you. “Hey, remember that thing you told me? About the [redacted]?”
The panic sets in again.
“Well, I’m going to need fifteen thousand dollars or else I’m telling the whole school.”
You commit suicide.
--
Did you know that Jeffrey Epstein, the world’s most notorious blackmail artist, attended NYU?