Moon rise, dusk South East Street looking East
Alcohol once again played a major role in overnight mayhem Friday, with the seasonably clear comfortable weather and bright full moon playing a supporting role.
Not that I believe a full moon has the power to bring on temporary madness.
Not that I believe a full moon has the power to bring on temporary madness.
But after one particularly bad run late last night for first responders, I'm starting to wonder ...
The initial bad signs started earlier than usual (9:15 PM) with a UMPD officer reporting "a fleet of yellow school buses full of drunk kids" driving slowly around the outskirts of campus. Three minutes later AFD responded to the first ETOH (alcohol OD) call of the night: A male resident of Van Meter Dorm passed out in the basement "laying in his own vomit."
AFD on scene UMass Parking lot 34, 11:45 PM
At 9:24 PM UMPD requests another ambulance for a student in lock up who passed out. A few minutes later the same officer requests, "clean up in the cell block bathroom."
A little before 11:00 PM AFD responds to JFK Southwest Tower 12th floor for an ETOH male passed out in the lounge. About 45 minutes later UMPD requests an ambulance for a student passed out in the parking lot of lot 34 off Massachusetts Avenue.
Then comes the call from Hell: A young man flipping out from a combination of "booze, speed and ecstasy". A1 transports him to the Cooley Dickinson Hospital with a UMass police officer along for the ride because the patient was so "agitated."
About an hour later the UMPD officer who rode shotgun in A1 reports back to Dispatch that the perp assaulted one of the medical staff in the ER.
Monkey Bar is busy around midnight
At the stroke of midnight, with the glorious moon high in the sky, A5 responds to Puffton Village for an ETOH college aged female. And with that call all five ambulances are now tied up, almost all of them for "substance abuse" runs.
Fortunately no serious medical incidents requiring an ambulance occur, as AFD would then have to rely on mutual aid, and the patient would have to wait until an ambulance from a surrounding town arrived to transport them to the hospital (Although an AFD fire engine would have responded with an emergency first responder aboard to stabilize the patient until that ambulance arrived).
Busted! DUI Fearing Street midnight
FST #fail
Also at midnight APD pulls over a car on Fearing Street for driving with no lights (must have been the full moon). The young man is given a Field Sobriety Test, fails, and is arrested. At the time Fearing Street is a bee hive of activity with clusters of students ambling in every direction.
At 12:25 AM an Amherst police officer near 695 Main Street reports a young man being taken into "protective custody" because at this point, "he can't even figure out his name."
12:45 AM Fearing Street: Four school buses filled with "college aged youth"
At 12:45 AM I come across the four yellow school buses dropping off a crowd of boisterous passengers on Fearing Street at exactly the same location of the DUI arrest a half hour earlier.
At 1:45 AM I hear yet another report of a drunk young male only this one is wandering in the middle of a main thoroughfare, South Pleasant Street. And since the address given is pretty much my house, I head that way (at reasonable speed of course) from town center.
The 20-year-old male is attempting to thumb a ride but is being a tad too, err, aggressive about it. I swerve to avoid him, although I was taking a left to go into the access road to my house anyway, and the headlights immediately behind me belong to an APD supervisor.
After a 15 minute or so "discussion" the young man is taken into "protective custody." By now the APD cell block is filling up with youthful perps awaiting the Clerk of Courts arrival to send them on their way with a promise (and $40 processing fee) to appear at Eastern Hampshire District Court on Monday morning.
Meanwhile the moon, so far overhead, is still beaming brightly ... looking peaceful.
This is pathetic. No, not the college students being college students, that should be expected. What's pathetic is the sad old man who has a serious issue with the fact that when put in a setting like a college campus, people aged 18-22 are going to drink, often to excess. It's a culture that is inevitably a part of our society, and blindly complaining about it does not solve anything or suggest what we can do about it to make things better. How about you do something useful with all this time you have to write these blog posts and collect this information that serves only to shame college students for partaking in this culture. Suggest some useful approaches to the issue of keeping students who drink and party safe, instead of getting all these facts and conveying "HAH! - you're caught, another boozed up kid off to jail!" in your posts. Your tone is sarcastic and harmful in most of your blog posts and cannot possibly be seen as noble. You don't seem to care about all these students, and see them as a complete nuisance.
ReplyDeleteAh, did I hurt your little feelings?
ReplyDelete(Now that you have awakened).
But seriously.
ReplyDeleteIf you or someone you loved was seriously injured around midnight last night, that would have been the straw to break the back of AFD.
They would have had to call in a mutual aid ambulance to transport you to CDH. Which takes extra TIME.
And then when you got there, the other young man who was flipping out on ecstasy could have beating up on the medical person who would otherwise be taking care of you or your loved one.
THAT, my young CAN friend, is the very definition of "nuisance."
where did the school buses come from? and who paid for them? I saw them early in the evening on the side of the road near the SW dorms before they started doing party transport.
ReplyDeleteAnon 1:39... Are you serious?
ReplyDelete"...collect this information that serves only to shame college students for partaking in this culture."
"Suggest some useful approaches to the issue of keeping students who drink and party safe."
Isn't that the responsibilty of the drinker?
I guess the days of personal responsibility are gone. I guess what they say about the "millenniums" is true... they are characterized by a sense of entitlement. And, in my opinion, they are WEAK.
Richard Marsh.
'Culture ... inevitable ...' Is that like if you're in the South, you have to expect, 'Hey, Bubba, watch this ...' and then stupid hurts?
ReplyDeleteGive us a break, kid. Some of our kids went to UMass. and didn't pass out from drinking nor did they need ambulance trips for drinking and drugging.
You want constructive suggestions? 1. Alternate each beer with two glasses of water (the same for hard liquor).
2.Don't drink so much, use your energy on sex. Oh wait, if you've drunk too much, that's out of the question.
3. Go home to Mommy and Daddy and do your drinking there.
4. Volunteer doing paperwork triage at the ER on Friday and Saturday nights. (That's getting the name and address, etc. of the victim for insurance.)
5. Spend the night playing board games, video games, cards (with or without money), having conversation, noodling on guitars.
Binge drinking is NOT accepted in any culture. This is not a young adult learning anything except if s/he can beat the odds and not die of alcohol poisoning.
Keep up the good work, Larry. Can we brainstorm a UMass Leaders' group with minimal alcohol but creating a social event? UMass would provide the space, the kids could enter with alcohol on their breath, but none would be served, etc.
Larry, Why don't you be the journalist you claim to be and find out why there was a fleet of yellow school buses apparently transporting college students to parties? Who owns the buses? Who hired them? Who was on them? Who was driving? What was the purpose?
ReplyDeleteWhere *did* the school buses come form? And were they actually college=aged young people, or where they high school students?
ReplyDeleteWas this part of the Student Bridges stuff????
@ umass there are some students that arnt just party people. A good number of college students are hardworking people, who do not participate in these activities.
ReplyDeleteBTW -- both MA & Federal Law requires that commercial motor vehicles (including school buses) either have the name of the owner and/or operator clearly posted on the sides of them, *or* obtain an ICC number and post that -- with which, at worst a telephone call, *anyone* can get the name & contact information of the owner.
ReplyDeleteMemory is that even with an ICC number posted, MA law still requires the name and municipality be clearly posted on the side of the vehicle, and there are requirements as to it being readable as well.
Did anybody bother to read the sides of these school buses? Whose buses were they? Knowing that would go a long way to answering the question of who hired them (one always could, after all, call the company and *ask* them) -- and just because the occupants were drunk and "college-aged" doesn't mean they were UMass students.
I'm still thinking "Student Bridges" -- the program that attempts to encourage Springfield High School students to apply to UMass. And which does so in some very questionable ways, neither of which are (a) helping them fill out their applications or (b) helping them obtain the basic skills necessary for academic success in higher education, but I digress....
Sides of the buses had "Durham School Services" on them.
ReplyDeleteBut that's a pretty BIG bus company.
Funny that people complain because students do the right thing and let professional sober drivers take them around town in buses. No one complains about the bus that shuttles drunk kids to campus and back and yet groups ask for proper transportation and somehow they did somethign wrong. Congrats to the smart people that hired buses. For $75 an hour it is somethign the town needs to help students get around on weekends while those useless two town Trolley buses sit in a lot in North Amherst.
ReplyDelete