Killer of Mother Denied Admission to Harvard

BOSTON — Gina Grant seemed to be the perfect candidate for Harvard University: an IQ of 150, honor society member, tennis team co-captain, tutor of underprivileged kids.

Now Harvard has taken back its offer of early admission after learning that Grant bludgeoned her mother to death with a lead crystal candlestick five years ago.

“I deal with this tragedy every day on a personal level. It serves no good purpose for anyone else to dredge up the pain of my childhood,” Grant said in a statement. “I’m especially distressed that my college career may now be in jeopardy.”

The university would not comment on Grant’s case, acknowledging only that an early admission offer had been rescinded. Spokesman Joe Wrinn said Friday that Harvard occasionally withdraws such offers because of a sudden drop in a student’s academic performance or because a student lied on the application.

The Harvard application asks whether a student has ever been on probation. Grant had been on probation until she was 18 as a condition of pleading no contest to the September, 1990, killing of her mother in Lexington, S.C.

The university did not release Grant’s application. Grant’s attorney, Margaret Burnham, said Grant was not obligated to disclose something that happened when she was a juvenile.

After the killing, Grant, now 19, moved to Cambridge, Mass., to live with her aunt and uncle. She began attending Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School in 1992. Officials there said Grant is a student in good standing, but would not comment on her academic record.

Grant received her acceptance letter from Harvard in January. In the following weeks, someone anonymously provided Harvard officials with newspaper clippings about the killing.

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Copies of the articles, obtained by the Associated Press, report how Grant wept at a hearing when police described how she stopped to wipe up pools of blood in the kitchen after smashing her mother’s skull.

Grant’s mother, Dorothy Mayfield, 42, had been hit at least 13 times. Mayfield, described in court as an alcoholic, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.30 when she died, three times the amount at which drivers are considered legally drunk.

At the time, police said Grant and her mother had been fighting. Grant’s attorney, Jack Swerling, said his client had struck out in self-defense.

But South Carolina prosecutor Donnie Myers argued the killing was premeditated. After the killing, Grant and her football-player boyfriend, Jack Hook, tried to make the death look like suicide by sticking a carving knife into the side of her mother’s neck. Hook pleaded no contest to being an accessory to murder after the fact.

At the time, Grant was a nearly straight-A student and the head of her student government. A judge who placed her in juvenile detention for a few months granted her permission to move north and begin her life anew. Grant’s father died of cancer when she was 11.