Student Says KSG Failed Her

A student at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) who was allegedly assaulted this fall by her then-boyfriend and classmate says that the school has not taken enough action during the past six months to keep the alleged offender off campus.

In an ongoing criminal proceeding, Ayacx C. Mercedes, 34, is charged with the assault and battery of his former girlfriend Raquel Reyes ’99, after an incident during the early morning hours of Oct. 13, 2002.

Both Mercedes and Reyes, 26, were second-year students in the Kennedy School’s Master of Public Policy (MPP) program at the time.

According to reports by the Harvard University Police Department officers who responded to the scene, Mercedes admitted at the time to hitting Reyes.

“Mercedes stated that Reyes was his girlfriend of over a year and he had indeed struck her in the face three times with his hand,” wrote Officer Jack O’Kane in a police report dated Oct. 13.

After the incident, Mercedes was taken to jail, while Reyes went first to University Health Services and then to Mt. Auburn Hospital for a face X-ray and treatment for swelling on her lip, jaw and cheek and bruising under her eye, according to police reports.

Mercedes pled not guilty to charges of assault and battery and was released Oct. 15. The charge carries a maximum prison sentence of two-and-a-half years and a maximum fine of $1000.

Several motions—including a failed effort yesterday by the defense to suppress evidence—have been heard in the ongoing case before Cambridge District Court.

Mercedes could not be reached for comment, and his attorney did not return repeated calls to his house and office.

A court spokesperson says that it is unclear when the case will actwill actually go to trial.

As the case remains unresolved, Reyes says she has been frustrated that Kennedy School administrators have have not taken adequate disciplinary action against Mercedes—especially in not banning him from campus.

When she complained, administrators told her to file a restraining order with the courts, which she did in December.

“They knew he had done it,” Reyes says. “He himself had said what he had done, and he was still allowed to be on campus.”

At the Kennedy School

Reyes says she still has nightmares about the incident and was forced to drop into the school’s less-demanding Masters of Public Administration program because she could not complete course requirements in the MPP program in time to graduate this June.

Despite the fact that he took a leave of absence at some point last semester after the incident, Mercedes repeatedly appeared on campus, according to Reyes.

“I kept running into Ayacx at school,” she wrote in a document submitted to the court yesterday. “Every time I saw him, I was overwhelmed with anxiety and memories of what he had done to me.”

According to Reyes, KSG’s Senior Associate Dean Joseph McCarthy told her she should take out a restraining order if she wanted to avoid seeing Mercedes.

“I told him how uncomfortable I was that he was still on campus. His response was, ‘It sounds like you should get a restraining order,’ which was again frustrating because the Kennedy School had the authority to make sure he wasn’t allowed on campus,” she says.

On Dec. 17, Reyes took out a restraining order in the Waltham District Court that prevents Mercedes from coming to her Watertown home, the Kennedy School and St. Paul’s Church—which Mercedes also attended—on Sundays and holidays.

Reyes said that McCarthy, who directs all degree-granting programs at the KSG, has seen the publicly-available police report describing Mercedes’ on-site admission.

McCarthy has the discretion to put students on leave and to prohibit them from coming on campus, but he declined to comment on whether he took either of those actions in Mercedes’ case. He declined to comment on any details related to the case.

According to Reyes, the Kennedy School administration allowed Mercedes to take a “medical leave”—as opposed to an explicitly mandatory leave.

While McCarthy confirmed that Mercedes is currently on leave, he would not say whether the leave was voluntary or involuntary.

“If a student committed a violent act and I was afraid that the student or felt the student might a) either commit another violent act or b) intimidate a student who was the alleged victim, I would put the student on leave immediately,” he says.

Since she took out the restraining order, Reyes has been pushing KSG to convene an administrative review board on the case that would decide whether to expel Mercedes or to otherwise discipline him.

But McCarthy and Kimberly S. Budd, an attorney in the University’s General Counsel’s Office, said University-wide policy requires schools to wait for the results of pending court cases before taking disciplinary action beyond putting accused students on leave.

“No matter what the quality of the evidence is, if it is still a matter being adjudicated in the courts, we are under instruction from Harvard not to take it up administratively—for fear, I believe, that we might prejudice the matter one way,” McCarthy says.

“What we found is that [this policy] allowed the accused to have his day in court and go through the criminal process without having been forced to make statements for the disciplinary process here,” Budd says.

But Reyes, who has also spoken with Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye about the issue, said she thought the concerns about due process were misguided, given that Mercedes admitted to hitting her, according to police records.

“You can be expelled from school for using a false ID to buy alcohol,” she says. “When you know conclusively that one of your students violently beat up another one of your students, that’s not enough to take action?”

The Court Case

Reyes said that swift action from the KSG is especially needed because the court case has already taken more than six months.

“Delaying, delaying, delaying is really stressful for me,” Reyes says.

In the latest hearing yesterday morning, two motions filed by Mercedes’ attorney were denied, according to Middlesex District Attorney spokesperson Emily LaGrassa.

The first asked the judge to suppress evidence, LaGrassa says, although she didn’t know further details. According to Reyes, the motion was an attempt to suppress police records of Mercedes’ alleged admission that he had assaulted Reyes.

The second motion requested that Mercedes be placed on “pretrial probation”—a six-month period during which his behavior would be monitored by the court, after which a judge could dismiss criminal charges.

Mercedes, who is in the United States on a student visa, could be forced to leave the country if he is convicted or “admits to facts sufficient for a finding of guilty,” according to documents filed by his lawyer, Joseph Belton.

Belton is a third-year law student representing Mercedes as part of the Suffolk Law School Voluntary Defenders program.

According to documents Belton submitted to the court in support of the pretrial probation motion, Mercedes has enrolled voluntarily in the Emerge Program, a “counseling and educational program for men who want to address abuse in relationships.”

Before the alleged assault, Mercedes was actively involved in Kennedy School life, serving on the student government both last year and this fall.

Mercedes, who is from the Dominican Republic, had planned after graduation to apply for a Ph.D. program and to “devote his life work to poverty improvement,” court documents say.

According to court records, students and staff at KSG submitted character statements on his behalf—although one of those statements, by former student government president Kimberly M. McClure, was given without knowledge that it would be used in the court proceeding.

McClure said that when she learned of the charges against Mercedes, she asked him to withdraw the statement and he agreed.

LaGrassa said the court will next take up the case May 7, for a status hearing on any new motions the defense might bring forward.

Reyes, who concentrated in English during her undergraduate years, has studied at Harvard for six years.

She will head to medical school next fall. She has until May 15 to decide between Harvard and Johns Hopkins University—a decision, she said, which will likely be impacted by whether next month’s hearing gives her hope that the case will be resolved soon.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.