Saturday, May 3, 2008
Frat-Row Murder Suspect No Stranger to Fights
Law Enforcement & Crime Sat, May 3, 2008 at 7:57 PM
Suffused with horrific irony is a detail in a two-year-old Daily Planet article (dated January 17, 2006 and headlined "Principal Gives BHS Good Marks in Annual Address") about Andrew Hoeft-Edenfield, the man arrested today as a suspect in the frat-row murder of Cal senior Christopher Wootton. (Or, if not the suspect, someone with the exact same unusual name and around the same age.)
The article is about changes made that year at Berkeley High School, where Hoeft-Edenfield was apparently a student. Reporter Yolanda Huang wrote:
"Andrew Hoeft-Edenfield commented that the creation last year of on-site suspension, instead of sending students home was also a good idea, and that since transferring to Berkeley, he hadn't gotten into a single fight."—Anneli Rufus
Comments (6)
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Fists versus weapons. Young men fight and behave aggressively, this is not new information, it is biological and socially accepted, even reinforced in many contact sports. However carrying a weapon and using it to gain advantage over your opponent in a fight is what caused this homicide. It might have just ended with the police making arrests in a drunken melee, and hopefully the University disciplining the violators.
Unfortunately these events are not as rare as some would believe. This past fall a 2004 BHS grad now a student at UCSB survived a near fatal stabbing at a house party in Isle Vista. His attacker was a non student , drunk with an attitude and a weapon. Same problem, a knife was pulled making it an unfair and dangerous fight.
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... And you know, the first commenter--the one who related the fight vignette that this weekend's victim blogged--raises a legitimate question. The incident related in that post casts some doubt on the portrait of this guy as a choirboy who could only have been involved to break up a fight (as some reports have suggested). That incident, and the victim's other writings, are at least as relevant as the scrap you pulled out of the Daily Planet.
Anneli, it's great that you worked Google to find some trace of the suspect, but honestly, how do you infer from that Planet snippet this kid was "no stranger to fights." From the same evidence, you might have spun it as "he was a highly sought-out source on Berkeley High affairs" (he was quoted by a reporter) or "he was a well-known supporter of innovative discipline measures at BHS."
This is much more informative than mainstream papers. This seems to be a tragic result, again, of young men who need to fight & repeat the F word in their blogs to affirm their "masculinity". Risky attitude when mixed with alcohol. Neither of these "men" get my respect.
Chris was a great guy. Though he may have fought on occasion, he was a good man with a good heart. He is one of the most intelligent and intellectual individuals I have ever met. We at Cal thoroughly miss him.
I know nothing of the arrested suspect, but all I can say is, sometimes people get drunk and make mistakes, but they can't always be rectified.
The Cal student who was killed is also no stranger to fights, too:
Here's what he wrote on his MySpace blog:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=5611522Writing
"Writing blogs is kinda wack but I've told this story about 17 times and it's a good story but I am tired of telling it.... Alright, so this is basically a recap of my weekend in which my brother Josh came to Berkeley to give me a surprise visit. So... surprise, my weekend f**kin rocked. To tend to the title, I'll start off with the 'fighting' portion of the weekend. You probably know me pretty well if you're reading this and the word fight is most likely a shock to you coming from my weekend story but.... it has happened. So what happened was one of my fraternity brothers was being disrespected by a yoked 220 lb. mother f**ker and he got kicked out of the house but he decided to wait outside for at least 15 minutes, which is f**kin stupid when there are at least 25 bro's in the house that will f**k him up ..."
Now, are you going to write about this angle, or ignore it because he's an esteemed UC Berkeley student?
