Harvard Affiliate Arrested at Red Sox Celebration

A 17-year-old Harvard affiliate was arrested for disorderly conduct by police early last Thursday morning while celebrating the Red Sox World Series victory in Boston.

Sasha A. Panasyuk, an assistant system administrator in the physics department, pleaded not guilty last Thursday at his arraignment and said he was unfairly arrested.

“We were being more celebratory than destructive,” said Panasyuk. “There was a big group of people. The police line was marching towards us; the crowd wasn’t moving fast enough. I was on the outskirts and they sort of just pulled me into their clutches.”

Panasyuk said he was visiting friends at Northeastern University when he was pulled out of the crowd and arrested on Boylston Street and Park Drive, according to Boston Police Department (BPD) spokesman John T. Boyle. Panasyuk alleges that the police did not read him his Miranda rights or inform him of the reason for his arrest.

“Everybody thought the police had a quota of people to catch,” Panasyuk said. “There were so many random people that were arrested for no reason. While we were getting to the jail, it took [the police] 45 minutes to find a not full jail.”

Among the 39 arrested by BPD during the Red Sox celebrations the night of their World Series victory, 21 were from universities or colleges in the area, the department said.

Boyle said police reports identified Panasyuk as a Harvard student, but Panasyuk—who graduated from high school last spring and said he may apply to Harvard in the future—denied telling police he was a student at Harvard.

According to his father Alexander V. Panasyuk, a computer scientist at Harvard’s Smithsonian Observatory, the family will use a state-provided attorney to fight the charges at a pre-trial hearing on Dec. 28.