Somber tone as UC Merced reopens

The bridge at the center of UC Merced is more than a paved link between two halves of the campus. Every freshman Bobcat ceremoniously crosses the bridge at the start of their journey towards a degree. Every graduating student crosses it again as a symbol of completion.

On Friday, the bridge became a symbol of healing for a community shaken by an anger-fueled spree of violence that ended on the span with the death of an 18-year-old computer science student.

Two days after the student stabbed and wounded four people on campus, Bianca Negrete went out in the predawn darkness and, alone, crossed the bridge. She repeated her steps before choosing a spot at one end. As fellow students began arriving for the reopening of UC Merced, she greeted them and offered to walk by their side.

“I thought it was necessary to be here before classes for those who aren’t comfortable walking across alone,” said the 21-year-old. On Thursday night, she posted an announcement on a UC Merced classifieds page, offering to accompany anyone wanting her support.

By mid-morning, she was joined by other students offering smiles and friendly greetings to anyone crossing the bridge. Some students walked across with their arms linked together.

“So far,” Negrete said, “nobody has crossed alone.”

On Wednesday morning, Faisal Mohammad, a slender freshman in glasses who seemed to know few people at UC Merced, walked into a classroom about 40 yards from the bridge carrying a 10-inch knife, a backpack filled with zip-tie handcuffs and duct tape, and two pages of handwritten instructions for a plan to take revenge against fellow students, according to investigators. The note, Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said, expressed Mohammad’s anger over having been kicked out of a study group that had found him to be disruptive.

The Santa Clara teen’s careful plan fell apart, Warnke said, when a construction worker heard screams coming from the classroom where Mohammad had stabbed one student and decided to go in. Mohammad slashed at the 31-year-old man, who was wounded in his abdomen, before running from the room. He stabbed another male student and attacked a female university advisor before running toward the bridge. It was there campus police confronted Mohammad who, according to one student witness, Meghan Christopherson of Fresno, lunged with his knife toward an officer, who opened fire and killed him.

Following the attack, the worst day of violence in the campus’ 10-year history, officials canceled classes until Friday. Even so, the normal bustle was noticeably dimmed and not everyone returning was ready to walk the bridge.

Kristie Sanchez, a fourth-year student who works in the library cafe, found a detour around the span on her way to work, saying it seemed “kind of creepy.”

Myron Malata, a psychology student in his fourth year, said one of his classes Friday was held in the Social Sciences and Management Building rather than the Classroom and Office Building where the stabbings happened. He’d been on his way to a midterm in the building the day of the attack.

“I was in the parking lot when it happened,” he said. “It feels really weird (today), knowing that building is where everything happened.”

As the sun rose high over the nearby Sierra Nevada range Friday, student government representatives spread out to adorn trees and lamp posts along the main pathway with ribbons in the school’s colors, blue and gold. Some students gathered at the bridge waved hand-painted signs reading “Bobcat Strong.”

A message posted nearby read “Good morning, bobcats, we’re here to walk with you across OUR bridge.”

Under the hashtag #takebackourbridge, it said: “You are not alone.”

After two days of canceled classes, many students opted to take a long weekend off from school, and several professors honored their requests to postpone lectures.

Dave Martin and Terese Thompson, precalculus and calculus lecturers at the university, said they expected their classes Friday to be thin.

“With everyone gone today, there’s a somber tone on campus,” Thompson said.

Martin said he would review his lecture Monday for students who were absent. Thompson planned to throw out a whole midterm grade for students whose scheduled test was disrupted by the attack.

“There’s no time in the course to make it up,” Thompson said.

Though faculty and staff were as shaken as students by Wednesday’s violence, Thompson said many spent the time since then answering emails and making arrangements for missed classes and assignments. “We basically had to soldier on,” she said.

Thompson and Martin said they think things slowly will go back to normal on campus next week as more students return.

As Martin said: “It will take time.”

This story was originally published November 6, 2015 at 4:28 PM with the headline "Somber tone as UC Merced reopens."