Outsiders Not Part Of Quincy Incident

As Harvard police continued to investigate the incident in which a student fell through a ground-floor window at Quincy House last week, House officials yesterday sought to assuage student fears and said it was unlikely that anyone from outside the University was involved.

A roommate of the victim said he doubted that the incident was the result of a malicious attack. The roommate added that the victim was in the hospital yesterday, having surgery on his hand.

The Crimson is withholding the names of the victim and his roommate because the victim could not be contacted yesterday.

The March 7 log released by the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) said that an unidentified assailant had allegedly left a taxi cab without paying the fare early that morning, pushed the victim through a glass window, and then climbed through the broken window. The log cited the cab driver as the witness to the incident.

But in an interview yesterday, the victim’s roommate said he thought the incident was an accident.

“I just heard it was someone in a taxi running away,” the victim’s roommate told The Crimson. “I don’t think it was someone attacking” the victim.

Quincy House’s Allston Burr resident dean Judith F. Chapman urged anyone involved in the incident to reveal what had happened.

“It might be an accident and it’s unlikely that people from outside of Harvard were involved,” she told The Crimson. “If it was a student, it really would be in their best interest just to come forward.”

Chapman and the interim House masters e-mailed Quincy students yesterday morning to play down fears that the victim had been attacked by someone outside of Harvard. They feared that students would presume that someone had been able to enter Quincy to violently attack a student.

“The full details of the incident are not known, and may never be completely known,” Chapman and masters Lee and Deb Gehrke wrote.

“We strongly believe that this was an isolated incident.”

Lee Gehrke declined to comment for this article. HUPD spokesman Steven G. Catalano said in a statement that the incident “is being actively investigated.”

He declined to comment further on the incident.

—Anton S. Troianovski contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Nan Ni can be reached at nni@fas.harvard.edu.