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It was 10 p.m. last Sept. 28, and Fernandes had just got home. The flasher attached to her phone was blinking, the sign that it was ringing. It was Gallaudet. Fernandes jumped into her Camry, raced back to campus and arrived in time to see a colleague standing on a bench so he could be viewed by the crowd, as he signed the latest news. A freshman had been bludgeoned to death.
Months before, Eric Plunkett, 19, had framed his Gallaudet acceptance letter and told his mother, "In four years, I'll replace this with my diploma." Now his battered body lay in his room in a dorm called Cogswell, discovered when a hallmate named Joseph Mesa Jr. told a resident assistant that Plunkett had missed class and there was a peculiar smell coming from his room.
When Fernandes, delegated by Gallaudet President I. King Jordan to try to handle this bizarre situation, arrived, stunned freshmen were wandering through Cogswell's lobby. "We were shell-shocked," says Tawny Holmes, freshman class president. "I went back to my room and just felt unsafe." Student-body president Chris Soukup hurried over to Fernandes to say the university's gay community was in a state of high alarm. Plunkett had just been named secretary of the campus Lambda Society. And Lambda members claimed that there had been a marked increase in death threats against gays. Some, Fernandes discovered, were hard to document. But at least one had left a paper trail. A freshman had gone to the school's judicial-affairs committee and asked what to do if someone was picking on you; the complainant was Eric Plunkett.
The issue got nasty. A national gay-rights group announced that anti-gay activity on campus added up to a pattern of harassment. At an event called Enrichment Day, a Baptist participant sparked the ASL equivalent of a shouting match when she argued, within weeks of Plunkett's death, that God would not allow a homosexual into heaven. Gay students feared walking on campus alone. The university quickly took a hard line on anti-gay speech. Jordan wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post asserting, "If deaf people ought to know about one thing, it is the importance of inclusion and access for all." Still, Fernandes recognized her community's delicacy, the ease with which one group could "go floating away, because people were afraid for their lives."
Five days after Plunkett's body was discovered, District of Columbia police announced the arrest of Thomas Minch, another freshman, for second-degree murder. The arrest was a surprise, as police had excluded Gallaudet administrators from their deliberations. Investigators said Minch had admitted that earlier on the night of the murder, during an argument, he either pushed or hit Plunkett, who fell to the ground.
Although new on campus, Minch had attended camps for deaf youth leaders with many of the current students. Most found it impossible to believe he could have killed Plunkett. Tawny Holmes spent the night of the arrest with her boyfriend reviewing camp videotapes "to try to see if we could see it in him." They couldn't. Others, of course, felt mostly relief. Fernandes remembers driving home smiling, thinking, It's over.
And then, the next day, D.C. prosecutors vacated Minch's arrest, citing insufficient evidence. The police, however, made it clear he was still a suspect.