Dean of Students Lloyd M. Howe first heard on local news radio that Ed Bordas, a Binghamton University heavyweight wrestler, had been arrested early Friday morning, Nov. 18 — accused of punching a woman in the mouth at a downtown Binghamton bar, then resisting police and damaging a holding cell.
Less than 12 hours later, on BU’s campus in Vestal, Dean Howe temporarily suspended the 215-pound wrestler from school.
While the incident occurred five miles off campus and involved no BU students except Bordas, the University involved the campus disciplinary system, highlighting a rarely used provision of the conduct rules: students can face consequences at the University for their behavior off campus.
Bordas faces a trio of misdemeanors in Binghamton city court: resisting arrest, criminal mischief and assault. In addition, he has been suspended from the wrestling team, his coach said.
The option to discipline students for off-campus behavior was enacted in 2002 by David Anderson, Howe’s predecessor as dean of students, in reaction to an incident off campus in which $4,000 in damage occurred to a student residence off campus.
Dozens of students are arrested every year for behavior off campus, but the incidents usually don’t have disciplinary ramifications on campus. But, citing Page 44 of the Student Handbook, Howe brought the case to campus.
The rules explain: “(I)n those exceptional cases that endanger the personal safety or property of members of the University community or others,” especially, the handbook states, when “the incident involves endangering behavior…defined as violent assault…”
The provision has been invoked only a handful of times in the past year.
“It’s primarily for the protection of others,” Dean Howe said, “in those cases where a student is deemed to be a clear and present danger.”
After reading accounts from the city police, Howe decided that Bordas’s case should be one of the few in which the University gets involved because of what police say he did.
“The way this report read, it didn’t come across as a bar fight. It came across like an attack,” Howe said.
Generally, the University gets involved when “there is a concern about having that individual on campus,” Howe said.
According to police reports, Bordas, who police say was intoxicated, crying and spitting, resisted arrest from the time officers first tried to detain him to the time they processed him at the police station and released him with a court summons:
– He wouldn’t put his hands behind his back when ordered as officers tried to detain him — “(h)e became combative,” the report said — so they twisted his arm and bent his thumb to maneuver him into handcuffs. Several officers struggled to arrest him.
– “Shortly after arriving” at the police station, “Bordas began to violently bang his handcuffs against the bar. I advised him against this, warning him that he would probably break his wrists long before he broke the handcuffs,” an officer wrote. At one point, the police report states, Bordas grew so uncontrollable that they subdued him with pepper spray.
– In a holding area, Bordas kicked and dented the wall and the plaster, leaving a shoe imprint, which prompted the police to slap him with an additional charge of criminal mischief.
The victim, Angelica C. White, 21, of Johnson City, said that the incident began earlier that night when Bordas tried to dance with her at The Rathskeller. She rebuffed him, she said, and told him that she had a boyfriend.
“My boyfriend wasn’t there. I was just saying that because I didn’t want to dance with him,” she said.
White, a student at the Elmira Business Institute who works as a restorative nursing assistant, began dancing with her friend’s brother in an attempt to dissuade Bordas. Shortly afterwards, she said, the friend’s brother and Bordas got into an altercation.
Later on, White went to leave The Rat. With the friend’s brother apparently at her side, “Ed turned around and hit me, and I fell to the ground,” White said. “I was a little tipsy. It happened so fast… Next thing I know, I’m on the ground. I blacked out.”
Although the police report states that White was bleeding profusely from being punched, she said she wasn’t seriously injured, recalling some numbness in her teeth and pain in her nose. White surmises that Bordas may have been aiming for her friend’s brother, with whom Bordas had exchanged heated works earlier.
White said Monday afternoon that she’s doing better now.
“Like I said, it was minor bruises, whatever, that I had,” White said.
So when told that Bordas had been summarily suspended, she said she doesn’t want the incident to affect his college education.
“I think they should let him back in school,” White said. “People get drunk and do stupid things.”