“It’s target-rich for the bad guys. It is a soft target. There’s really no police presence,” former NYPD detective Michael Alcazar tells Inside Edition.
A chilling wave of murders of college students has been raising concern about violence on campus after four students were slain in two weeks.
Parents send their children to college expecting them to be safe on campus, but since January, there has been an unusual surge in murders, rapes, and other serious crimes on college campuses across the nation.
“It’s target-rich for the bad guys. It is a soft target. There’s really no police presence,” former NYPD detective Michael Alcazar tells Inside Edition.
Questions are being raised about how colleges choose roommates for students.
At the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, a music student and his girlfriend were fatally shot in his dorm, police say, in a dispute with his roommate over cleaning a messy room.
Sam Knopp’s roommate, 24-year-old Nicolas Jordan, was charged with two counts of murder.
“There was an argument over a bag of trash Knopp places near Jordan’s door. Jordan threatened Knopp and said he would kill him if he was asked to take out the trash again,” court documents say.
The Roommate App was founded by Ben Porter. It matches college students with roommates. Porter says students often have no say in who they live with.
“We might not realize the person that we are living with may actually be dangerous to us,” Porter says.
Over the weekend in Kentucky, an 18-year-old student at Campbellsville University was found strangled to death in his dorm room.
Josiah Kilman was a member of the Christian college’s wrestling team. Police have charged another member of the wrestling team, 21-year-old Zeke Escalera, with murder.
National outrage is growing over the murder of nursing student Laken Riley at the University of Georgia. Riley was beaten to death on a jogging track on campus.
Police arrested Jose Ibarra, 26, for her murder.
Authorities say Ibarra, from Venezuela, crossed the border into Texas in 2021. He was arrested in New York City last year for child endangerment but was released and fled to Georgia.
