Education: Death in the Dark

One night a fortnight ago, Allen Kaplan of Chelsea, Mass. piled into a car with a group of his chums at Northwestern State College in Natchitoches, La. and headed for Grand Ecore Bluff, a remote lovers’ lane along the high banks of the Red River. Their supposed purpose: to meet a “hot date” the upperclassmen had fixed up for 18-year-old Freshman Kaplan. They parked the car. Suddenly, as the upperclassmen had planned, another student, impersonating an outraged husband, jumped from behind some bushes and fired a shotgun. The group scattered on the run. The upperclassmen made their way back to the car and waited for Kaplan’s sheepish return. But he never came back.

Last week, after seven days of searching, Kaplan’s body was found spinning in a whirlpool at the base of a 40-ft. bluff near the site of the prank. Frightened and confused in the dark, he had evidently run the wrong way, plunged over the bluff into the flood-swollen Red River and drowned.