News-Letter

Media Credit: Sithu Win A crowd gathers to celebrate Obama's victory.

Sixteen individuals, including four undergraduates, one graduate student and one professor from Hopkins, were taken into custody early Wednesday morning after Baltimore City Police intervened to break up a peaceful 500-person celebration of the election results at 33rd and St. Paul Streets.

According to witnesses at the scene, Jeffrey Levine, a Hopkins sophomore, was walking home from an election party at around 1 a.m. when he was pushed by police into the lobby of the Bradford apartments, and after confronting the police, he was Tasered.

"I definitely saw him being Tasered or shocked or whatever they did to him. At that point he kind of fell backwards and the police grabbed him away into the paddy wagon," said Galen Druke, a Hopkins freshman who witnessed blue sparks from the stun device.

"He said, 'Don't f--king hurt me,'" Josh Furor, a friend of Levine who was present, said. "I definitely heard a Taser gun. I am 100 percent sure I heard a Taser go off."

Druke was also arrested after saying to police, "My friend was arrested trying to get into his apartment. If it's illegal to try to get into your apartment, then I'm guilty as well, so arrest me."

Druke recounted that a police officer told him he would be spending the night in a cell with rapists.

Four additional Hopkins-affiliated individuals were also arrested.

Professor Aaron Goodfellow and a graduate student who wished to remain anonymous, both of the Anthropology Department at Hopkins, were apprehended when returning from an election night party.

"We were standing on the sidewalk, literally watching the crowd. We'd never seen anything like that at Hopkins. We wanted to see what was happening. I was speaking to a couple of students and I turned around and next thing I know there were 20 cops and I was pushed in a van," said the graduated student.

Goodfellow said he only tried to intervene when he saw the graduate student being "plucked out of the crowd."

"We were so excited to be a part of something so momentous, especially on the Hopkins campus where these things don't usually happen. It was exuberant, exciting, until [the graduate student] was grabbed, I tried to intervene and that was it for me - I was cuffed and thrown into the paddy wagon," he said.

Continued...

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