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Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

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Re: Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

#161

I work on campus (very very close to the engineering building) and I previously lived near Brookline. So all of this hits home. But what got me was the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building (a la South Korean film Parasite). It made me so sad but also not surprised, that building does have a single occupancy bathroom with show…

My assumption is most Ivy leaguers (specifically undergrads) generally have no monetary constraints after graduating so this very much reads to me as a bohemian “by choice” decision to be more interesting than an actual tragic story.

This generalization is very, very wrong. I can tell you, from my personal college network, many students had monetary constraints coming in, and many certainly had monetary constraints coming out. Some of that was choice of career path; some was not.

Re: Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a homeless guy living in the gym at Rutgers prior to the late 1990s and it's why you had to show ID to get into any of the gyms/dorms. Very similar story of: - he was older - dressed normally - everyone assumed he was an assistant coach, grad student etc They mentioned it multiple times in safety briefings and even at "how to be a club officer" meetings to ensure that everyone participating/involved was act…

It's not uncommon. University buildings are pretty open even today. I worked with a homeless guy who was a university employee, so he had a legit staff ID card. He just didn't want to spend money on rent. He knew where the empty rooms were that nobody ever used, where the showers were. I bet every major university has a few people living/sheltering in campus buildings.

RMS famously lived out of his office at MIT for a while.

Re: Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

#163
post #23

I work on campus (very very close to the engineering building) and I previously lived near Brookline. So all of this hits home. But what got me was the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building (a la South Korean film Parasite). It made me so sad but also not surprised, that building does have a single occupancy bathroom with show…

But resentment over what? I haven't seen anything on this.

Graduate student violence is more common that it should be. For example, you hear about suicides every year.

I can't help but suspect that sometimes it may be related to graduate school itself, which can be stressful and unforgiving, with minimal support, and where supervisors often hold both academic power over their students' futures and financial power over their livelihoods. (And switching supervisors, even at the same institution, typically requires restarting research from scratch.) It can't be good when, after a lifetime of top-tier success, you are facing failure for the first time, with no preparation for handling it and no obvious path forward.

Re: Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

#164
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they found him? If he was alive, he probably would have been caught eventually, no?

Maybe. The average homicide clearance rate in the US is only around 60%. But that includes a lot of killings where nobody really cares about anyone involved. This was a much higher profile crime so it would get a lot more attention. But there are high profile cases that get a lot of (at least local) attention that don't ever get solved either.

It is really difficult to ascertain motive and suspects when it’s a chronic homeless case getting murdered. It could be a thing from drugs to just looking at a crazy guy wrong one night, you literally have no leads unless there is a video or some other piece of hard evidence. It isn’t really about caring, judt that the environment they live in is so chaotic and uncontrolled that you’d have a suspect pool that is too big to reasonably investigate.

Re: Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

#165
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Makes me furious, but it doesn't surprise me.

I assume he will also no longer be able to live in the engineering hall basement. Beyond personal moral satisfaction, coming forward only means sacrifice. But a number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective. A terrible event all around.

> number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective

I disagree. The shooter’s victims fell to a random act of violence. (As in the victims were randomly selected. The shooter didn’t randomly occur.)

It is tragic. But it was a crime committed by one man, now dead, who targeted the innocent.

The tipster is more than innocent. He is a hero. His eviction is not a random act of cruelty, but a result of his heroism. And his assailants aren’t a monster, whom we don’t expect to strive for goodness, but us.

Re: Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

#166

I work on campus (very very close to the engineering building) and I previously lived near Brookline. So all of this hits home. But what got me was the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building (a la South Korean film Parasite). It made me so sad but also not surprised, that building does have a single occupancy bathroom with show…

[deleted]

Re: Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all of that and they basically just got lucky. the guy walked to brown from his car parked nearby and shot up some kids, waited days, went to a guy's house in Massachusetts, killed him and never even got caught - he committed suicide and was only found days after his second killing if anything this whole saga makes me happy smart people aren't killers more often because this guy basically got away...

I keep seeing this sort of sentiment everywhere and I'm trying to understand it. The same thing happened after Charlie Kirk was killed and the arrest there hinged on a confession by the killer to his dad. A lot of commentary then that the police/FBI got lucky. Ditto Mangione. They got lucky he was found in a random McDonalds. What exactly is the expectation here? Is there some sort of wide-spread belief that the worl…

D) the FBI stitches it up to protect the real criminals and brings out some poor fool to take the blame.

Re: Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

#168

I work on campus (very very close to the engineering building) and I previously lived near Brookline. So all of this hits home. But what got me was the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building (a la South Korean film Parasite). It made me so sad but also not surprised, that building does have a single occupancy bathroom with show…

My assumption is most Ivy leaguers (specifically undergrads) generally have no monetary constraints after graduating so this very much reads to me as a bohemian “by choice” decision to be more interesting than an actual tragic story.

This is definitely incorrect. If you graduate with a low-value degree from an Ivy League, you're still going to be just as unemployable as somebody that graduated from Party U with a low value degree. The only real difference is that at top schools there are less people that are completely directionless in life (since you're less likely to get admitted in such a case) so if somebody is graduating with e.g. a philosophy degree, then they're probably doing it explicitly with the intent of going to e.g. law school or on an academic path, whereas many people at lower ranked universities end up there largely through inertia and may pursue degrees of minimal value with no real thoughts beyond taking the easiest path to achieving a college degree, which is the direction they were pushed onto without ever really thinking about it.

And even for valuable degrees, the advantage yielded is far less than you might think. It's not like the movies where you have dozens of companies begging you to come work with 6 figure starting salaries and fat bonuses up front. You open a few more doors, and people have a better than average initial impression of you, but at the end of the day - it's not a world-shifting advantage. The overall edge in outcomes is not because of the university, but because of the sort of people that the university admits. The sort of guy who graduates class president, valedictorian, wrestled at state, and with a near perfect score on his SAT is going to do disproportionately well in life completely regardless of whether he ends up at MIT, Party U, or just skips university altogether.

Re: Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say

#169
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume he will also no longer be able to live in the engineering hall basement. Beyond personal moral satisfaction, coming forward only means sacrifice. But a number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective. A terrible event all around.

> number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective I disagree. The shooter’s victims fell to a random act of violence. (As in the victims were randomly selected. The shooter didn’t randomly occur.) It is tragic. But it was a crime committed by one man, now dead, who targeted the innocent. The tipster is more than innocent. He is a hero. His eviction is not…

Last sentence went a little insane.
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