Willis-Starbuck '07 Killed in Berkeley

By Kale S. Bongers | Friday, August 26, 2005

Losing a young life is invariably tragic—tragedy at a life lost, to be sure, but also the loss of potential, and the loss of so many years of productive life, tend to weigh heavily on the minds of those left among the living. If every such death is heartrending, the death of Meleia Willis-Starbuck '07, gunned down on the streets of Berkeley, California on July 17, is particularly so—not only was life needlessly lost, but also for the fact that Willis-Starbuck may have inadvertently been responsible for her own death in the tragic accident.

On campus, Willis-Starbuck was, by all accounts, an active young woman, heavily involved in all manner of leftist "social justice" activities, from the Dartmouth College Greens, to the Afro-American Society and Dartmouth Alliance for Children of Color (DACC). While most of her classmates were on campus for their sophomore summer term, she was working at the Berkeley Women's Daytime Drop-in Center, providing social and legal support, as well as food, to homeless women and children in the Berkeley area. She was working there with a grant from the Tucker Foundation's Dartmouth Partners in Community Service Internship Program. Willis-Starbuck knew Berkeley and its environs very well: she had grown up in Berkeley and graduated from high school there, though her family had since moved.

The events of that fateful July 17 morning, once understood only in the haziest of terms, have in the past few weeks become clearer. Willis-Starbuck and several friends were outside her apartment building in the student area of Berkeley, where she was staying for the summer. Outside her apartment, Willis-Starbuck's group of friends and another group of youths, male students at the University of California (some news reports have suggested the group was comprised of Cal football players), erupted into argument, though some witnesses, friends of Willis-Starbuck, would later say the brouhaha "didn't escalate at all." Members of the other group, being rebuffed in flirting with the group of women, began referring to Willis-Starbuck and her friends as "b*tches"; Willis-Starbuck proceeded to ask the youths if they would say such words to their mothers' faces. An argument began between the two groups. At some point during the argument, Willis-Starbuck called her friend Christopher Hollis and asked him to "bring the heat," meaning a gun. Presumably, Willis-Starbuck intended to threaten, or at least scare off, the opposing group of young men.

The argument had effectively ended and the groups had begun to separate (indeed, Willis-Starbuck continued the argument while most of her friends had retreated to a waiting car) when, at approximately 1:45 am, a lone male, believed by police to be Hollis, acting on what he apparently believed was Willis-Starbuck's instructions, exited a car close by and fired several shots into the dispersing crowd. Willis-Starbuck was hit in the chest; no one else was injured. The car then fled the scene. Though the victim's friends quickly summoned emergency personnel, it was to no avail—Willis-Starbuck was pronounced dead at the scene by Berkeley firefighters at 2:00 am.

If the shooting was sensational and tragic, the announcement of the suspects by police was even more so; gasps of astonishment permeated the crowd as two of Willis-Starbuck's close friends, Hollis and Christopher Wilson, were named as the conjectured killers. Some of Willis-Starbuck's friends, upon hearing the news, broke down in disbelief.

Over the past several weeks, police have made much progress in the case; however, thus far, only one arrest has been made: Wilson, a passenger in the alleged shooter's car, turned himself in shortly after the shooting. He was released on bail when a friend's parents put up their house as collateral on his $326,000 bail, believing that Wilson was incapable of perpetrating such an act; his attorney maintains that Wilson did not know that Hollis had a gun. Hollis, often referred to by Willis-Starbuck as her "brother," though the two were not related, has evaded capture thus far, though he has made calls to both his attorney and his high school basketball coach; his mother has called for Hollis to turn himself in. He has a previous criminal record, having been arrested once for marijuana possession and several times for resisting arrest. A third passenger in the car, who was not named as a suspect, has fled the country and gone to Panama. An unconfirmed fourth passenger, a young woman who was not identified, reportedly left the car shortly before the shooting after learning that a gun was in the car.

The shooting has devastated the Berkeley community, the College, and the nation. Over one thousand people attended a memorial service at Berkeley High School, from which Willis-Starbuck had graduated before matriculating at the College. Approximately two hundred, including College President James Wright, attended a candlelight vigil service held at Dartmouth; College Chaplain Richard Crocker and Dick's House Infirmary prepared for grief counseling sessions. The story was picked up by the Associated Press wire services and published in dozens of papers, large and small, across the country.

Amid the grief grew a debate about Willis-Starbuck's role in the incident, particularly on the Calstuff blog, a Berkeley-oriented commentary on crime, the city of Berkeley, and student life, which quickly became the nexus for the latest information on the case. Some commenters accused Willis-Starbuck of being a "hypocritical" leftist and an "attempted murderer" who "got hers," or the "one that escalated the confrontation into the use of gunplay"; another poster noted, "I guess she wasn't that liberal on gun control."

A more sympathetic poster rebutted, "I just find it odd that some lefty Green Party member who worked at a battered women's shelter would somehow turn to macho gunplay as the first solution to a problem"; another called the death "the tragic loss of an obviously kind woman"; still another bewailed "It seems to me that Meleia had the verbal and social skills to settle this minor dispute without having to resort to having gun toting 'homies' to come and protect her." In either scenario, for good or for evil, the truth of Willis-Starbuck's final intentions may forever be clouded in uncertainty, any chance of surety lost on a dark Berkeley street corner at 1:45 am on July 17.

The cruelly ironic murder of Meleia Willis-Starbuck was indeed a tragedy, but not a necessary one. Looking back on her final morning, one is struck by the numerous things that went wrong: the escalation of the argument, the call for the gun, and, of course, the ill-fated shots themselves. Yet even such hindsight cannot distract from the central issue: a young life was needlessly lost that night. And for that, even despite the rather inadvertent nature of the death, we should grieve. R.I.P.

Willis-Starbuck '07 Killed in Berkeley

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