: er s nk o p a om r c F t a s n e e L Guabriela Friday, February 19, 2016
G
Indiana’s Oldest College Newspaper
pg. 6 & 7
vol. 164, issue 29
Wabash employee suspected of double homicide found dead, financial motivation identified:
Public Safety reveals how DePauw would react in emergency situation
Wabash’s campus was swarmed with police early afternoon Wednesday following the alleged crime by employee Lucius Oliver Hamilton III. PHOTO CREDIT TO THE BACHELOR, WABASH COLLEGE STUDENT NEWSPAPER
By Julie Block news@thedepauw.com Wabash College employee Lucius Oliver Hamilton III, suspected of killing his niece and her 4-year-old son, was reportedly found dead Wednesday afternoon of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Police found him around 3 p.m in a fourth-floor room of the Hilton Downtown Hotel in Indianapolis.
Hamilton, 61, is believed to have shot and killed Katherine HamiltonGiehll and her son Raymond on Wednesday morning in their home in the 6800 block of Old Hunt Club Road in Zionsville, Ind. A neighbor called police to the scene shortly before 9 a.m. There, they found the mother’s body by the front door and the son’s in front of the TV in the living room. It was the mother’s 31st birthday.
“In my 32 years in law enforcement, I have never witnessed a crime so heinous and heartbreaking,” Boone County Sheriff Michael Nielson told reporters on Wednesday. Hamilton then reportedly checked out a van at around 9:30 a.m. from Wabash College, where he served as an alumni career officer and a major gifts officer. He was also a 1976 graduate of the college. Wabash can-
celled classes for the rest of the day on Wednesday for the first time since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Students were instructed to stay indoors as police officers searched every building on campus for the suspect. The lockdown was lifted around 3 p.m. Police say that Hamilton’s motivation was “strictly for financial gain.” Investigators believe there was an on-
going dispute over a family trust worth millions of dollars, which spurred the attack. Investigations into the details of the dispute are ongoing. Director of Public Safety Angela Nally said that, while DePauw continued with “business as usual” on Wednesday, she did reach out to Vice President for Student Life Christopher Wells to notify the President’s office of the issue. “Our strategy at that time was just to monitor additional information and if necessary make changes, but our initial assessment of the situation was that there was no immediate threat,” Nally said. Nally said that if an emergency as severe as this one were to take place closer to DePauw, the first course of action would be to send a text message to all students, faculty and staff instructing them to “shelter in place,” meaning to stay put in whatever building they are currently in until instructed to leave. These messages are few and far between, however. Nally says this is “on purpose.” “I don’t send nuance-y messages that students are having to deal with because when we send a message I expect that students are going to see that this is serious and that they need to do the things that we’re asking them to do,” Nally said.
WABASH cont. on pg. 3