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11pm Update: WISN either added to their story or I missed this while copying/pasting (more likely the former):

Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn, speaking tonight about his crime fighting plans in the city, said the area around Marquette is generally safe.

But he reminds students to always be on their guard.

“By all accounts the area has improved. And it’s obvious they have a first class public safety operation that is very well equipped and very well trained,” Flynn said. “We’ve got a lot of folks from different communities … perhaps not used to looking over the shoulder a little bit. This is the big city.”

The students are a bit shaken up, with minor injuries.

Flynn praised city and university police for their work in the case and reiterated that keeping students safe is a top priority.

Come on, Flynn, it has nothing to do with “looking over their shoulder”! These students were TARGETED by a couple teenage thugs, just as in our previous post two Marquette girls were targeted because the suspect told them he was looking for “rich white Marquette girls.” (And MU already had a blue light phone nearby). This isn’t some randomized event.

I’ll give Flynn a bit of a pass because he’s new, but the problem isn’t that DPS wasn’t on the ball (though I’m all for increasing their numbers by any means possible) or that students are blissfully unaware of their surroundings, it’s that thugs like the suspects involved know this is an area ripe for crime, with little response from the Milwaukee Police Department! Hello!

Also: Does “a bit shaken up” sound like an accurate description of the story’s earlier story of the victim as “bloody, hysterical” who “couldn’t get his story out” and had to go “to Froedtert to care for wounds”?

######

From tonight’s on-campus report.

MILWAUKEE — Two Marquette University students said they were abducted early Saturday morning by two men who drove them around to several ATMs attempting to get cash.

Police announced Monday that one of the suspects is in custody since the incident, but said they continue to look for a second.

The engineering students said they were walking home near 18th and Wells streets just after midnight when they spotted the suspicious white van and headed for a campus police phone. That’s when, they said, the two men jumped out with guns pointed and told not to touch the phone or they’d be shot.

An hour later, it was Kay Moffett who was walking her dog when she said a bloody, hysterical young man, one of the students, approached her.

“I see this guy coming across the street and he’s saying, ‘Help me. Help me,” Moffett recalled.

She took him inside her home and tried to comfort him, but said the student couldn’t get his story out because he was crying.

“I hugged him. I continued to hug him to calm him down,” she said.

The student eventually was able to describe how he and his friend were driven around.

“They had been driving him around in a white van and every time he’d lift his head up, they would kick him, punch him (and) beat him,” Moffett said.

She said the student told her that he got really scared when the robbers weren’t able to get money with his ATM card.

“When they realized they couldn’t get any money off of him, they kept saying, ‘Let’s go to the parent’s house and rob the house,’ and he said one of the guys said, ‘Let’s just kill him,’” Moffett said.

The student told Moffett that the robbers let his friend out of the van and set him free a few minutes later.

Moffett said the young man’s parents came back the next day with a gift of thanks for her: a string of pearls.

The student told Moffett that 15-20 people had passed him and Moffett was the only one to open the door for him. He later went to Froedtert to care for wounds to his face and for broken teeth. His friend hid in a gas station restroom for hours until he was sure the robbers were gone.

Both students met with their dean on Monday afternoon.

Wow. Will Marquette bureaucrats now treat this seriously enough to call it a kidnapping? And a host of other violent crimes that we’ve just listed? This is pretty extraordinarily bad. It’s time for Marquette to start demanding that the Milwaukee Police Department give more serious police attention to the Marquette campus.

And hey, Barrett, still “no crisis”, is there?

Minor Update: By the way, Marquette sent the academic Dean of these students to deal with them? It’s pretty shocking how unserious even Marquette can be to these incidents. If Fr. Wild knew what he was doing, he’d be on the phone profusely apologizing to the parents, I hope to God he does something of that nature after these events.

• Simon Harak's September 2003 Speech at Marquette -- And My Official Introduction to Jesuits - June 12th, 2008
• "How Al Gore is Getting Fat off of a Starving World" - June 1st, 2008
• Best column I've read so far on Scott McClellan - May 31st, 2008
• So in other words, you have no leads or suspects at this time? - May 30th, 2008
• RITA GAHAGAN - May 24th, 2008