University of Georgia in Death’s Shadow

The University of Georgia student newspaper is usually filled on Monday mornings with stories of overzealous weekend partying or sports results. But this semester, death has pushed it all off the front page.

Since January, 11 students on this campus of 30,000 have died of various causes--a heart attack, cancer, a drug overdose, a wreck on the way home for Easter and a fraternity prank gone wrong.

The campus has been shaken by so much death among those so young. Three weeks ago, the toll was eight, and school officials scheduled a memorial service at sunset Monday. Since then, three more students have died.

“It’s profoundly sad,” said Rick Rose, an assistant vice president whose job is to offer the university’s condolences to parents and friends of students who die.

The University of Georgia has never lost more than eight students in one term. Any more than three in a semester is out of the ordinary.

At Monday’s service, the chapel bell, usually silent except for victorious football Saturdays and late-night student pranks, tolled 28 times--once for each university faculty and staff member and student who died this academic year, including the 11 since January.

The idea, administrators said, was to get the campus to think of the deaths as more than just a number.

“This is not a tally sheet,” Rose said. “Each one of these people is the most important thing.”

Kim Weld, a freshman, came to remember one friend--Philip Walsh, who was killed in a car accident last month. But she was struck by the magnitude of the death toll.

“The bells kind of make you think,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like such a big number until you see it in front of you.”

Travis Denison, a member of the university’s student government whose friend Chris Moseley also was killed in a car crash, said students opened the campus paper every Monday almost expecting to read about another death.

“Every weekend they were dying,” he said. “It’s so hard to believe.”

The students left behind mourning families across the state, from the beaches of St. Simons Island to the mountain town of Dahlonega to the suburbs of Atlanta.

Only one of the deaths received much attention outside this college town: Ben Grantham, a 20-year-old student from St. Simons Island, was killed in a late March car crash that authorities say was a fraternity initiation prank.

Grantham was riding in the cargo hold of an Alpha Tau Omega brother’s sport utility vehicle, handcuffed and possibly blindfolded, when the vehicle flipped and hit a tree, police said.

The most recent death was that of Katie Elizabeth Turner, a first-year graduate student from Columbus, Ga., who died April 22 of lymphoma--the second student to die that weekend.

To one of her professors, Robert Nozza, she was a star--a student who had taken to a hearing-impaired child at a summer camp and devoted her life to helping similarly disabled children. She had the perfect balance of intense study habits and gentle patience to succeed, Nozza said.

“All these students, they don’t realize this of course, but we kind of think of them as more than just numbers. More than just names on a transcript. We get attached to them in ways they don’t even realize.”