This week in the news

Students careful after killings at three colleges

Three slayings in less than a week
have sent three Southern college campuses
into grief and brought renewed
attention to campus safety-a topic
already on the minds of parents and
students after recent mass killings at
Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois
University.

Although the latest available figures
show college slayings have declined,
many students still are on edge.

“I definitely have to say looking out
for your surroundings is something I’m
doing a lot more,” said Rebecca Simon,
an Auburn University freshman who
lived in the same off-campus residence
hall as Lauren Burk, the Auburn student
whose body was found this past week
on a roadside about five miles from
the university in one of the recent
high-profile killings.

“I’m very aware of who’s around
me,” Simon said.

After rising between 1999 and 2002,
campus homicides dropped substantially
between 2002 and 2006-but that
was before the April 2007 killings of
32 people at Virginia Tech. The final
numbers from 2007 likely will show
a substantial uptick, according to S.
Daniel Carter of the nonprofit group
Security on Campus.

It’s unknown whether the latest
killings mean violence affecting
college students is worsening. The
latest Department of Justice figures
showed campus violent crime declining
9 percent during the latest 10-year
period, but those numbers extend only
to 2004.

Experts generally agree college
campuses are substantially safer than
the society at large when it comes to
crimes such as murder-though not
necessarily when it comes to sexual
assault. Though it’s difficult to measure,
an informal estimate based on the
total number of college students puts
the average on-campus murder rate in
recent years at less than one-fiftieth the
national average.

Brief by Justin Pope, Associated Press
Education Writer

Va. man charged with threatening U. of Illinois student, others

A Buchanan County man was behind
bars this past Wednesday, charged with
making online death threats against a
University of Illinois student and others,
as well as referring to the Virginia Tech
shootings.

U.S. Attorney John Brownlee said
Allen Leon Sammons, 27, of Oakwood
was arrested and charged with transmitting
a threat across state lines.

According to court documents,
Sammons’ former girlfriend reported
he sent her harassing e-mails and
posted threatening comments about
her online in August. The girlfriend
was a University of Illinois student,
and Sammons attended a community
college in Wise County.

After an investigator warned Sammons
to stop this activity, he e-mailed
the investigator, threatening to follow
in the footsteps of Virginia Tech killer
Seung-Hui Cho and others, who carried
out public acts of violence.

“I wonder if Marvin John Heemeyer
or Cho Seung-Hui faced similar crap
before being pushed over the edge … If
I get the courage, it will be very public,
might even air on CNN, over-and-overand-
over,” Sammons wrote, according
to court documents.

Brief by The Roanoke Times, via The
Associated Press

General Assembly passes budget five days late

The Virginia General Assembly
passed its $77 billion state-government
spending plan for the next two years this
past Thursday night before adjourning
five days late.

Fixing last year’s flawed highwayfunding
law, however, will have to
wait.

The House, with no debate, passed
the budget unanimously. A divided
Senate, however, approved the two
bills that direct state spending on
votes of 26-14 after protracted partisan
posturing.

In the Senate, Republicans delayed
the vote for more than an hour, contending
that the spending plan is built
on revenue estimates that will prove
too optimistic for Virginia’s troubled
economic times.

“What troubles me deeply is the
cloud over revenues,” said Sen. William
Wampler, R-Bristol, who helped draft
the final compromise that was passed
this past Thursday.

The austere new budget, tempered by
a projected $2 billion revenue shortfall
through mid-2010, contains cuts both
to state operations and to state support
for local government-particularly law
enforcement.

But the budget assumes a 6-percent
increase in personal-income-tax collections,
a level Sen. Walter Stosch,
R-Henrico and an accountant, said was
unrealistic. Stosch also said estimated
proceeds from the state lottery appeared
inflated, and he decried less money for
local governments to use than they had
anticipated.

More than $1 million is reserved
for updating basic academic standards
for public schools, boosting it past $11
billion for two years. There are two
pay raises of 2 percent each for state
employees, state-supported college
faculty and state-augmented localgovernment
employees, and one such
pay raise for teachers.

Brief by Bob Lewis and Dena Potter,
Associated Press Writers