BSU Community Reacts To Apparent False Police Report

BSU Community Reacts To Apparent False Police Report

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Story Created: Nov 19, 2006 at 5:41 PM MST

Story Updated: Nov 19, 2006 at 10:06 PM MST

By Art Swift

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Remember the scene last week at BSU? It appears a gathering of some one thousand people may have occurred under false pretenses. The rally was on behalf of a 20-year-old student who says he was beaten on Friendship Bridge on the greenbelt. Now, police say the student made up the whole story, even inflicting his own wounds with his fists and a stick. He sent an email to KBCI stating he knows people are upset with him. Police may charge him with filing a false police report.

"I know the young man, and it's a little difficult to think that he would falsify such a report," Ellwood Howard of B-GLAD, the gay student alliance at Boise State, told CBS 2 News. "I guess humans are capable of pretty much anything."

Howard questions whether the student actually filed a false report or just said anything to make the controversy go away.

"Is his recanting legitimate or is he doing it just to get that out of his life?," Howard asked. "I mean, whether he did it or not, that's still up in the air. I don't think anyone's going to really know for sure."

Ironically, the student has been a prominent member of the Boise State student government, the group that staged the rally. What do students think now, after wearing buttons of support and freshly made T-shirts?

"It's seems kind of messed up," Tyler Shea, a BSU student, told CBS 2 News.

Shea is disappointed by the student's alleged action.

"What do you think that does for the movement of gay rights, for example?" CBS 2 asked.

"I think it takes a lot of the legitimacy out of it," Shea said.

Shea is one of several who say the next time something violent occurs, people may not believe it so quickly, and that would hurt the cause of victims.

"There's plenty of honest ways to get people rallied for personal freedoms and to kind of band together and not allow Idaho to be a place where that kind of stuff happens, that you could do it honestly as opposed to making something up like that," Shea said.

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