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Found this at http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=930

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Thursday and Friday’s editions of the Daily Princetonian carried sharp Letters to the Editor responding to the Anscombe-attack op/ed. Members of the Society were responding with full force saying they were ready for an academic debate, not childish hysterics and name calling. Friday’s paper also contained an article about the most recent death threats, and an op/ed questioning why the administration hadn’t taken the earlier threats against Nava more seriously. Later that day Nava received an e-mail from the IvyGate blog warning him that they had dirt on him.

On Friday evening Nava was attacked.

At 6:55 that night, George received a call from Nava, who was in the Emergency Room at the University Medical Center. George reports that Nava’s speech was slurred and his thoughts seemed confused. Once at the hospital, George and the other students say they met the mother of the child Nava tutors. She reports that Nava entered her house badly beaten and bleeding. She called the police and Nava was transported by ambulance to the emergency room. Nava reports that he “was told by the examining ER doctor that [he] had suffered a concussion, based on the vomiting in the ambulance, nausea, and dizziness.” George spoke with Nava briefly, and then a Princeton Township police officer and campus Public Safety officer interviewed Nava in private.

Nava was released that night and explained the attack to the Anscombe group. He said that night he had driven a Students Volunteer Council car a short distance from campus to the home of the elementary school student he tutors every Friday. After he got out of the car, a blue eyed, white college-aged male wearing a stocking cap—whom Nava described as appearing distraught—called to him for help, saying someone had been injured. Assuming a child had fallen off his bicycle or something similar, Nava followed the man around the corner into a poorly lit area. Once he turned the corner, Nava reports that he was grabbed by someone else and thrown against a brick wall.

According to Nava, the two men then grabbed Nava’s jaw to keep him from screaming and repeatedly punched him and hit his head against the wall. Nava said he blacked out at one point, and that when he regained consciousness they were beating him with the glass Orangina bottle he had been carrying. They then told him to “shut the f—k up”—a phrase that had been included in the earlier threats—and slowly walked away. After Nava was released from the hospital, George invited him to stay at his house, and another student, Jonathan Hwang, volunteered to stay with Nava and wake him every four hours as the emergency room doctor had ordered (because of the possibility that he sustained a concussion).

Late that night, the president of the Anscombe Society, Kevin Joyce, e-mailed George, Hwang, and Girgis to report a startling discovery. He had heard from a friend that when Nava was at the Groton School he had fabricated an incident of hate-speech against his roommate and himself using the phrase “die fags!” (Nava’s roommate was one of the founders of the Gay-Straight Alliance at Groton.)

Hwang, the student spending the night with Nava, picked up the message first and immediately asked Nava about the incident. Nava confirmed that it happened, but told Hwang that it had nothing to do with his assault; this wasn’t a hoax. After Nava got out of bed, he walked into the kitchen and asked to speak with Professor George alone. George took him into another room in the house and Nava told George all about the Groton incident.

George tells me that Nava described it as a “bad part of his past” and that Nava was insistent that the assault on him had not been fabricated. Nava explained to George that at the time of the Groton incident his father had recently passed away, he was suffering from depression, and that he was deeply homesick. Nava thought a threat on his life would convince his mother to let him come home. Eventually the school discovered that Nava was behind the alleged hate crime, and punished him duly.

George asked Nava if the university knew about this. Nava told him that when he applied for admission, Groton had notified Princeton about the incident and that he had written a letter to the dean of admissions explaining his actions. Princeton was satisfied by Nava’s credentials and his explanation, and they granted him admission, provided he took a year off in between and received appropriate counseling. George said to Nava that though the administration had the information about Groton in its files, his immediate obligation was to inform the investigators at the Office of Public Safety. As soon as Nava had breakfast and got dressed, George drove him to the Public Safety office and Nava informed the detective responsible for the case of what had happened at Groton.

After he dropped Nava off, George gathered the other students who received the threatening e-mails to see where things stood. They discussed ways to assist Public Safety in the investigation, both to get to the truth of the matter of what happened to Nava, and to know for sure whether their own lives were in danger. Along the way, other potential problems with Nava’s story emerged. It seemed, for instance, implausible that Nava would have actually received the 250 responses to his “Latex Lies” op/ed that he claimed. And the fact that the first death threat came before the op/ed bothered them.

More, the second e-mailed death threat looked odd. How did the sender know to send a second threat that masked the obscenity with percentage marks unless one of the recipients was also the sender and noticed he hadn’t received the message, and then resent it in a format that wouldn’t be blocked by the spam filter?

On the other hand, people who know Nava see him as a highly respected and accomplished student at Princeton. And those who have personally seen him after the attack insist that it is extremely unlikely that he could have inflicted such damage (including a badly swollen jaw) on himself.

Still, they decided against any large public solidarity events. These events, they had been advised, would likely detract from the investigation, and because it was still too early to know exactly what had happened, it seemed irresponsible to be organizing candle light vigils, days of silence, and so forth. As George put it to me, “people at Duke made huge mistakes in the Lacrosse case by rushing to conclusions, publishing declarations, and holding solidarity events before the facts were fully established; we were determined not to make those mistakes.”

In the meantime, Nava was being transported to the campus health center to have his jaw examined. On the way, he saw someone wearing a stocking cap like the ones worn by his assailants and called out to his security guard to “get that guy’s name”—thinking that this was the perpetrator. Nava’s breath quickly drew short, his heart started racing, and his face became flush. He was having a panic attack. When he reached the health center, he was immediately given counseling—where he was told that he was likely suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—and then given a six-hour sedative.

When Nava came out of the sedation on Saturday evening, Professor George went to talk with him. On Monday the investigation was scheduled to be transferred to the Princeton Township police. If the police discovered a fabrication, Nava would, George told him, be subject to criminal penalties. Nava replied that he had nothing to hide—that everything he had said about the threats and the attacks was true and that he would now be lying if he said otherwise.

George reports that he then questioned Nava very closely and carefully about the legitimate questions on circumstantial evidence and about Nava’s history. Nava insisted that he was not behind any of the threats or the assault. He understood why George and others would be concerned about his history at Groton, but he assured him that back then he was a different person.

So this is where things stand. We have a group of Princeton students and a professor who have received death threats. One of them having been threatened repeatedly and now badly beaten.

Is it possible that it’s a fabrication and an inside job? It is not impossible, but witnesses believe that Nava could not have inflicted the beating on himself. While the Groton incident is disturbing, the Princeton admissions office was satisfied by Nava’s explanation. As for the e-mail account, the Office of Information Technology may be able to uncover more information in the coming days.

On the other hand, there’s good reason to think that Nava is being honest and that he has suffered a terrible assault. His beatings were severe, and the panic he suffered on Saturday, after seeing a student in a ski cap similar to his assailants, is telling.

Right now there is great temptation for both sides of the standard culture-war divide to use this attack for political advantage. The Right can say “look at these terrible Ivy League Universities: hostile to conservatives and now downright unsafe.” While the Left can say “look at this crazy Mormon, threatening and even attacking himself just to play the victim card.”

Unlike the case of the Duke Lacrosse rape scandal, everyone at Princeton University—the administration, Public Safety, and the threatened students and professor—is handling this the right way. Some in the blogosphere—including many who were so critical of Duke’s handling of the “rape”—are falling into the temptation to take sides too early and use this incident for political advantage. There’s no doubt that we have something here of major significance, but the important thing is not to jump to conclusions.