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Report: 'Errors in judgment' made with Wade

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Wade was an ASU football player at the time of the incident.

Wade
Wade

But the report also said that Gene Smith, ASU's former athletics director, and Dirk Koetter, head football coach, made "errors in judgment" regarding allegations of improper conduct by Loren Wade, who is suspected of shooting Falkner. Wade was an ASU football player at the time of the incident.

The newly-released document came from a committee created by ASU President Michael Crow to investigate the March 26 shooting death.

Wade, 21, admitted to shooting Falkner in the parking lot of Coyote Bay Night Club in Scottsdale. But he also said he accidentally discharged his gun. He was charged with first-degree murder.

Crow commissioned the study, headed by Myles Lynk, a faculty athletics representative and law professor, to investigate what ASU officials could do better in the future to avoid similar incidents.

"No ASU faculty or staff member had reasonable cause to suspect that Loren Wade might be capable of shooting another person," a press release on the study said, adding that no University or Arizona Board of Regents policies had been violated.

"We did not find that coaches and staff in the University's athletic department failed to try and help Loren Wade," Lynk said in the press release. "Rather, we found that they tried to do too much, taking it upon themselves to provide services that can be better provided by other University components."

Crow said no action would be taken against the individuals singled out in the report for their errors in judgment.

"The report had no recommendations regarding individual employees," Crow said.  "It found that individual employees were in a 'system' where they made errors in judgment that were a result of the way this system was organized."

"It's the committee's opinion that individuals did the best they could," he added. "They had errors in judgment, but they were in over their heads."

Smith left ASU to head Ohio State University's athletic department in March 2005. Koetter is still the University's head football coach.

The report recommended a number of changes to University policies and services, aimed at better advising faculty on how to deal with troubled students and preventing future violent incidents on and off campus.

The recommendations included revising the regents' Student Code of Conduct to add off-campus threats to its list of conduct violations, establishing a hotline to ASU's police department that will allow students to make anonymous calls reporting violence or potential violence, improving communication between ASU police and city law-enforcement agencies to alert the school when a student is cited off campus for criminal conduct, establishing a database for tracking violence issues, and training faculty in student-interactive positions on how to identify emotional problems and refer students to appropriate services like ASU's Student Health and Wellness Center or the Office of Counseling and Consultation.

The report also included suggestions aimed at improving campus safety, and recommended increasing the size of ASU's police force from its current count of 65 officers and 23 police aides to 96 officers with 99 aides. It suggested increasing the visibility and number of emergency call boxes on campus.

The report also suggested adding undercover, plain-clothes officers to the patrol, and cites an incident in which an escaped rapist on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List" fled the Ross-Blakley Law Library after spotting uniformed officers.

Crow pledged to begin following the report's suggestions as early as possible.

"We are going to implement all of [the Lynk report's recommendations]," Crow said. "Our intention is to go ahead and implement them right away, although some will take some time.

"I think the report will push ASU in a direction that's a significant departure from other universities," he added, citing the change of responsibility for individual student athletes from the sole concern of the athletic department to a more interdepartmental responsibility.

Christine Wilkinson, senior vice president and secretary for ASU, said all of the reforms should be complete soon.

"There are 26 recommendations, and some will be much simpler to implement," Wilkinson said.

"We hope to have implemented all recommendations by the end of the fall semester."

Part of the report was a questionnaire that Lynk sent to all ASU students. Lynk said that the survey results were interesting, but said that they could not be included in the report due to time constraints.

"I had hoped to make more of what we received in the report, but we received over 2,400 responses," Lynk said. "Wading through that data set was quite a task."

Lynk said the questionnaire produced a few interesting responses that weren't included in the report. Students indicated that they feel ASU is a safe campus. Also, in response to a question asking students how familiar they were with the Student Code of Conduct, 48 percent answered that they were not at all or barely familiar with it.

Reach the reporter at jason.ludwig@asu.edu.


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