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Florida Atlantic University's first student-run news source.

UNIVERSITY PRESS

Florida Atlantic University's first student-run news source.

UNIVERSITY PRESS

FAU student is sent to a mental health center after outburst in class

In less than five minutes, one repeated question and several death threats thrust an FAU evolution class into the national spotlight. After over 400,000 YouTube hits the question is still being asked: What happened on March 21 in GS 120?

It was 11:35 a.m. and Jonatha Carr raised her hand and asked professor Stephen Kajiura a question. “How does evolution kill black people?” she said. Within minutes, Carr then threatened to kill him. Seconds later? Another threat; this one against her classmates. All of them. Junior mathematics major Rachel Bustamante recorded the whole thing and her video ended up on YouTube.

Kajiura’s class was reviewing for a midterm when Carr raised her hand and asked her question. “I and no one else in the class can say exactly what triggered it,” Bustamante said. “We really have no idea.

According to an anonymous student, after Carr asked her question, Kajiura tried to answer, but “[Carr] started clapping and shouting that he hadn’t answered her question, and she was going to ask him one more time,” the student said.

“Never was there a discussion about race or a certain group of people — nothing of the sort,” Bustamante said. The class had been discussing animal reproduction and sexual selection amongst female peacocks when Carr asked her question.

Later Carr shouted to the entire class, “I am having a fucking mental breakdown.” Kajiura tried to interrupt Carr’s rant and continue reviewing, but Carr stood up and shouted: “No, no, no!” She then walked up to a group of white students and pointed towards individuals shouting, “I will kill you bitch.”

The mood of the room changed once Carr stood up, according to the anonymous student. “I don’t think most of us felt Dr. Kajiura was in control or anyone was in control, we were just waiting to see what would happen,” the student said. The student said some classmates left immediately, others sat laughing and several called FAU police. Most, the anonymous student said, including herself, moved nervously towards the exit, waiting to see what would happen.

Next, Carr turns around and walks up to Ryan Murphy, sitting in the row behind her, and calls him a bitch, based on the video. She then yelled “Take that shit off,” and proceeded to smack him in the forehead and knocked his glasses off, according to Kajiura.

Justin White. Photo courtesy of media relations.

Justin White, director of the Spanish basic language program, said he was teaching across the hall when one of Kajiura’s students ran into his room saying “there’s someone acting crazy.” White could hear the noise, so he told the student to call the police, and had his class lock the doors. After a few minutes, White went in to help.

Once he walked into the room, he saw Carr. Standing. Screaming. In the video, White told Carr to leave. She mocked his order, took four steps towards him, and pushed him three times before he grabbed her arms and restrained her.

“My goal in telling her to get out was to take attention off the student,” White said. “I practice Jiu-Jitsu at Renzo and Gracie’s Jiu-Jitsu Academy of Boca Raton, so since I’m aware of what to do, I figured I better get in there.”

While she was kicking and pushing, White said Carr started calling him “the White Devil.” Within a minute, however, White had Carr in his control. “The more quickly I could restrain her, the more likely it was she wouldn’t harm anyone else,” White said.

Carr was then escorted out of the classroom by White and another faculty member. White held the resistant Carr down for a few minutes until police arrived. “I took her to the ground, held her wrists with my knee on her stomach, and I kept her till the police arrived,” White said.

According to a police report, Carr refused to calm down and when reporting officer William Hernandez tried to get her to sit on the ground instead of lying face-down, she punched him in the chest.

That’s when he handcuffed and Baker Acted Carr. (See the sidebar for more information on the Baker Act.)

Hernandez and three other officers then tried to place her in the police car, but she stiffened her body and resisted, according to the report.

“The police were never in any danger, but she did threaten to kill them,” White said.

Hernandez told Carr he would use a taser on her if she didn’t cooperate. She didn’t. So Hernandez used his stun gun. White said this was done for Carr’s safety. “When she was put in the squad car she went ballistic,” he said. “She kicked off her shoes and could have hurt herself.” Carr was administered the taser twice more in the police car on her way to South County Mental Health Center — once in the left side of her torso and once in her left shoulder. According to the report, Carr refused to walk into SCMHC on her own, so staff and police had to carry her inside.

“While at SCMHC I spoke to Joyce Carr who is Carr’s mother, who just wanted to make sure that her daughter arrived safely at the facility,” Hernandez said in the report.

Meanwhile, back in Kajiura’s class, no one told the students Carr was taken to the local hospital. “I hadn’t realized she’d been grabbed by the police so I was not very comfortable,” the anonymous student said. Kajiura thanked his class for remaining calm and continued lecturing for the midterm after Carr was escorted out of the classroom. The test, however, was later postponed because of the incident.

Two days later, the next time there was class, they weren’t alone. Terry Mena (associate dean of students) and Ingrid Johanson (associate dean of the College of Science) showed up with police and counseling staff. The students were allowed to ask the officers questions. Bustamente said the main question was: What took the police so long to arrive?

The cops held a Q&A, but according to both Bustamente and the anonymous student, the police seemed defensive and insisted they had done their best.

Mena denied comment on what happened at the meeting.

“We want to assure you that University law enforcement responded immediately to the situation and apprehended the individual appropriately,” Senior Vice President of Student Affairs Charles Brown said in a statement afterwards.

According to the anonymous student, several people asked for a university official to provide protection for the rest of the semester. “They said if [Carr] came back we should call the police, and if she did come back they were confident she would not have a weapon,” the anonymous student said.

According to Bustamante, several students felt administrators were trying to defend themselves during the meeting. “It had a ‘clean up the mess’ kind of feeling,” Bustamante said. Both her and the anonymous student said Kajiura spoke first in the meeting, and appeared to be defending the way he acted during the incident in front of administrators.

Evidently, Johanson spoke with students about Carr and was, according to the anonymous girl, “Very intent on telling us that we should respect her feelings. She was concerned for the girl’s well being and her reputation.” Bustamente said this speech about Carr led to claims that there was no way the University could have predicted Carr’s outburst, and that administrators “admitted they never expected anything like it.”

The two students also mentioned that Mena talked to them about filming the incident. “He kind of reprimanded us,” Bustamante said.

Once Carr was escorted on the day of her outburst, Bustamante took another video. In this one, Kajiura talked to his shaken students saying, “If you guys have [the incident recorded] on your phones or anything like that,” he says in the video. “Save them for now, just in case a need will pop up later.”

Both Bustamante’s videos and the UP’s online report following the incident went viral, and were cited or linked to from international news sites such as the Drudge Report, Huffington Post and the Daily Mail. 

Carr is currently facing battery and disturbance charges. No one confirmed whether or not Carr is expelled. According to Brown’s statements, those details are confidential under state and federal law.

In the class following Carr’s outburst, White showed his students the YouTube videos. White wanted to share his jiu-jitsu skills with them so they would know, “what to do, and what not to do if it happens again.” Even though there is evidence of Carr attacking him, White does not plan on pressing charges. “As a professor, I hate to see a student get a stain on their record for a momentary lapse in reason.”

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  • Q

    QuinnApr 25, 2014 at 7:40 am

    This is going to come off incredibly racist, but I’m so sick of African American people pulling stunts like this, then pulling the “my people are so oppressed” card. Let’s get something straight. YOU are not oppressed, your ancestors were. You can do anything you want to do in life. Hell, because of what your ancestors went through, you basically have life on a silver platter, there are scholarships just for you so you can go to college, funds to start business’s, laws in place for the express purpose of making sure you get your fair share. If you’re oppressed, it’s because of the choices you make. I think if your ancestors could see how some of you act now, after all the heartache and struggle they went through, they would be sick. I see so many successful black people, and rarely do I hear them complaining about how hard they have, these are the people who appreciate the opportunities they’ve been given, instead of whining because something doesn’t go their way. Do yourself a favor, tear up the race card, and move on. Stop bitching, and making excuses. Just because you’re black doesn’t give you carte’ blanche to act any way you please; if a white person did that, you’d be all over it. I feel for the family Mr. Martin, and I really do think justice was not served in this case, but don’t take the actions of one person out on a class of students. In closing, black, white, yellow, purple, whatever, if you act like she was acting, I would except no excuses, your ass deserves to be drug to the ground and tazed. For the safety of the students and herself, i hope this girl gets her life together, but I would not let her back in.

    Reply
  • J

    Jonathan RauscherApr 1, 2012 at 10:58 pm

    From what I know, and what I’ve read here, there are a few unknowns. For all we know, she could have become mentally unstable recently, and it’s just coming out now. I pass no judgment personally until there’s more information.

    Reply
  • O

    obviousMar 31, 2012 at 2:06 pm

    As far as I’m concerned what she displayed was a hate crime and should be prosecuted accordingly.

    Reply
  • C

    Common SenseMar 31, 2012 at 1:49 am

    She is Bipolar, this was a person with a disease. When she comes back to FAU to finish and graduate try to not give her any crap. She worked for FAU as a Chem 2 SI leader, and she has an almost stellar GPA…

    Reply
    • J

      Joe WilsonMar 31, 2012 at 7:49 pm

      she’s not coming back..she has been expelled and it will not end well for her….she is a vicious animal who belongs in a cage not walking around human beings.

      Reply
  • M

    MaryiaMar 28, 2012 at 1:13 pm

    Im going to just leave that racial stereotypical statement that you made alone…It’s difficult to explain situations like this to idiots like you that love living in the ignorant bliss that exists in the world and chooses to make statements about a person based on their race. SMH..therefore I will no longer comment. And who knows maybe one of those angry spirits will visit you and slap the hell out of you just for that comment you made…Good Day!

    Reply
  • D

    deeMar 28, 2012 at 11:38 am

    angry spirits?? yeah. maybe it was the eastser bunny. or perhaps the tooth fairy that got her. i think i saw santa claus there as well….all mytical figures conspiring against a random girl in a random class at a random school. that makes sense.

    seriously. so every criminal out there can just say they were “touched” by angry spirits? you must be off your meds. have you ever been around a really angry black woman? it doesn’t stray too far off this track. you can consider that to be a racist statement, but stereotypes are not always inaccurate. i’ve seen black women in restaurants act like this. i’ve seen black women act like this in schools i’ve taught in. you can’t get a word in edge wise. their mouths just run and run and run. i’ve seen black women on the street acting like this. flipping their hair. moving their hands all over the place. cursing, smacking, screaming, interupting, talking non-stop. this isn’t some isolated incident, this is common for many black women. not all, but many. if you disagree than you are either in denial, or have never been around a black woman when she loses her shit. however, most of the time, after a deep breath or two, they can regain their composure. not jonatha.

    did you listen to the video? did you hear the things she was saying? there was no speaking in tongues or seizures or excorcist moments there….her head didn’t spin and spit out pea soup. it was just a young black woman, with a lot of pent up anger, that let it out in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

    spirits? angry spirits? i tell you, you find some scientific proof to back up your claim of “angry spirits”, and i’ll listen. otherwise, you’re not that far off the track of jonatha’s crazy train. she has serious anger issues. she has problems resolving issues in her head. she lashed out in a very bad way, and made her bed. don’t defend the woman by claiming that imaginary “demons” were entering her body and talking for her. she’s responsible for her own actions. she’s responsible for her hatred and vitriol, not demons, spirits, the easter bunny or santa claus. she was as in control as any other day. she made her decision to lash out. she made the decision to scream and threaten people. she could have gotten up and left, but she decided to stay and hit people.

    who knows. perhaps you are as mentally ill as she is.

    Reply
  • M

    MaryiaMar 28, 2012 at 4:30 am

    She was touched by a an angry spirit as the person from the early comment stated. Unless you have experience with encounters like this it is difficult to believe. But it quite evident that she was not in control of her body and her movements at the time of the incident. This is not to say that what happened was okay but she was definitely not in control of the situation.

    Reply
    • W

      WTFMar 28, 2012 at 12:45 pm

      This might be the dumbest comment I have ever read. Angry Spirits? Lol
      After being in college for four years now I have come to realize that most African Americans can not handle conversations about race with out assuming someone one is racists or someone is out to make Black people look bad etc.

      Reply
  • J

    JDMar 27, 2012 at 10:57 pm

    I totally agree with Dee on this one, this type of behavior should not be tolerated or ignored. If she is allowed a pass not only will she not learn a lesson, but also her classmates will come to believe that type of behavior is acceptable, and that everyone can have a racial meltdown at least once and get away with it. Red flags are flying here, this is not how you get your point across. Our culture has become so tolerant of everything that we overlook potential dangers and their warning signs.

    In the wake of all of the high school and university shootings, outbursts like this should be taken seriously. Reading the article I noticed that other students expressed concerns that she would be back, and asked what they should do. The administration is ultimately responsible for all of the students who attend the school, and they would be wise to cut ties with a high risk student like her. What would happen if they allow her a second chance only to have her do the same thing, but more violent or with a weapon? It is obvious that she doesn’t know how to control her anger or communicate like most human beings.

    Reply
  • D

    deeMar 27, 2012 at 4:05 pm

    WOW!!! now thats a great way to deflect accountability. funny thing with people of miss carr’s generation, nothing is ever their fault. she didn’t get up and act the fool. she didn’t hit anyone or call people names…..a GHOST did!!! maybe she fell off her meds. she was upset about something. yeah, she did nothing wrong. you folks raised a generation of pussies that were taught that nothing they do is wrong, its everyone elses fault. no accountability with these 20 somethings. i’ve seen children that are more responsible. i don’t know what you did wrong, maybe the fact that everyone gets a blue ribbon. everyone gets the same size trophy. maybe years of telling them that they can be anything they want to be, and when someone questions it, sueing/firing/slandering that person, because god knows that lil’ johnny and lil’ jane are perfect, special, wonderful little angels with no faults and all the potential in the world.

    perhaps this chick should take a lesson from this and realize that the world doesn’t revolve around you and your opinions. she’s an angry, self-involved narcissist that didn’t get he way and she reacted like all children that don’t get their way act, screaming and kicking. she needs to learn that she isn’t always right. that maybe other people have problems, too, we just don’t get up and hit, curse, and threaten people as a result.

    keep coddling your kids. keep telling them its everyone else’s fault. keep raising kids with no fear of consequences. that kid will be the one that kills you someday. good luck with that.

    put this bitch in jail. she doesn’t need to be taught a lesson, too late for that, she needs to face the consequences for her actions. if i had threatened that many people i’d be in jail. if i had hit another person, there’d be no passing go for me.

    Reply
    • R

      RudyMMar 31, 2012 at 5:29 pm

      Attributing behavior like this to some sort of madness is nothing new and not necessarily a reflection on a generation that one feels has been coddled and absolved of responsibility for their behavior. The idea that someone may behave in an extreme way due to being possessed by spirits (not an idea endorse) or due to madness is quite ancient.

      We don’t have all the details in this situation, and the root cause could be drugs, including the psychiatric ones which frequently turn small psychological problems into major, disabling ones. That doesn’t mean she gets a free pass. Crazy or not, this sort of behavior can’t be tolerated, and something has to be done about it one way or another.

      Reply
  • L

    Linda KennedyMar 27, 2012 at 10:02 am

    I watched this video over and over last night and my heart goes out to the students and staff involved in this incident. In my opinion and the opinion of my daughter (20 years old student) this lady seemed to have a spirit enter into her and she was provoked and responded. My heart goes out to her and I truly hope and pray she doesn’t lose her college and that she is not viewed as a threat.

    Reply