Mirror - Vol. 30, No. 12 - December 02, 2004

              The
Police capture suspect in Mark Fisher murder
BY ASHLEIGH B. EGAN
After more than a year of silence, frus-tration
and searching, a suspect was arrested
last week and charged with the murder of
Mark Fisher '06.
Antonio Russo, an 18-year-old high
school dropout from Brooklyn, was* ar-rested
Tuesday, Nov. 23 after a grand jury in
Brooklyn indicted him in the Oct. 12,2003
killing, according to Newsday.
He pleaded not guilty to the second-de-gree
murder, robbery and weapons charges
at this arraignment the following
day and was ordered to be held
without bail.
Police suspect that at least one
other man was an accomplice to the
killing, according to Newsday.
Fisher's family spoke to The
Mirror about their hopes for the
future of the case.
"Hopefully this is just the be-ginning,"
said Nancy Fisher, Mark's mother, the
"We hope there are more arrests to follow, that
we think about three or four arrests in the
FISHER
next week or so."
According to Newsday, al-though
Russo has denied any in-volvement
in the crime, sources
said that he had talked openly on the
street about shooting Fisher.
A source told The Associated
Press that according to accounts of
Russo's statements, Fisher resisted
Russo's demand for his wallet and
$20 he had withdrawn from an ATM
night.
Friends of Fisher's from Fairfield
express their happiness in this break in the
case.
"It was about time they made an arrest,"
said Chris Peters '06. "It's good they're
moving deeper into the case and that people
are going to pay for what they did."
Russo's arrest on Tuesday was the first
result from the year-long investigation,
often stalled by silence of those who were
with Fisher in the final hours before he was
killed.
SEE "NEXT" ON P. 6
THE RED SEA RETURNS
Chris Donato/The Mirror
Cheering them on: Fans get riled up during the men's basketball team's key game
against Manhattan Tuesday night. The Stags ultimately won in double overtime. For
more, see "Men's" on p. 20
Task force investigates ways
to recruit AHANA students
BY.AUDREY ADADE
The Fairfield administration is
tackling one of the school's most
immediate concerns, by diversify-ing
the student body and faculty.
Irene Mulvey, secretary to
the general faculty, said "The
faculty would surely be all in
favor of anything that would help
to increase diversity on campus,
and faculty would be interested in
being involved in a major way in
any such efforts."
"Trying to attract and retain
a high-quality and diverse faculty
is one of the top priorities of the
university and certainly of the
faculty," said Mulvey. "For at
least 10 to 12 years, these issues
of increasing diversity among
all segments of the university
community —students, faculty,
administration, staff—have ap-peared
repeatedly on the Academic
Council's agenda."
The comments came after Orin
Grossman, academic vice president,
announced this month that he was
developing a task force to examine
how the university can attract and
retain more AHANA students.
The work of this task force
will include a more comprehensive
look at diversity issues at Fairfield,
such as the hiring of AHANA
faculty and the development of
curriculum with more multicul-tural
content.
"The bottom line is we all
should be doing better; there
should be more diversity of stu-dents
and faculty. I am discussing
with deans more pro-active strate-gies
to recruit minority faculty,"
said Grossman.
There are only three African-
American professors among the
144 professors in the College of
Arts and Sciences. Elsewhere in
the university, there are only a
handful of African-American pro-fessors
amongst the 203 full-time
tenure track faculty members.
SEE "TASK" ON P. 6
Fairfield reports most liquor law violations in CT for '03
BY MEGAN J. MAHONEY High number attributed to "truth in reporting"
Fairfield University was
ranked number one statewide in
reported alcohol violations last
year with 651 reported incidents
filed with the U.S. Department of
Education's Office of Secondary
Education's annual campus crime
report.
First reported in the Con-necticut
Post, Fairfield was also
ranked the 28 highest school for
reported violations nationwide.
But, not to worry, it may not be as
bad as it seems.
"I know it looks like we've
got more alcohol problems than
other schools," said Mark Reed,
dean of students, to the Connecti-cut
Post. "We know that's not the
case."
One of the possible
explanations for Fairfield's
high ranking was in the schools
varying interpretation of a viola-tion
as described in the Clery
Act.
The Clery Act requires uni-versities
and colleges to furnish
their security statistics every year.
Fairfield University published a
booklet in the fall which lists all
violations and is distributed across
campus to students, faculty and
the public.
The University of Connecti-cut,
home to over 25,000 students,
listed only 136 liquor violations ac-cording
to the report. This number
may seem very low considering
the large student population. The
university police only reported
the arrests made for alcohol viola-tions,
not the "unverified" judicial
referrals made by housing officials
like resident advisors, according
to the Post.
SEE "EU." ON P. 4
MIRROR SNAPSHOT ciery Act filings show
LIQUOR VlOI>TIONS„™X«SSl
Mwnber of reported alcohol violations in 2t»3:
Source: US Department of Education Web site Graphic by Joshua O'Connell/The Mirror