The Designated Driver Shuttle will no longer take pickup requests from the campus safety department after officers insisted the shuttle give a helplessly drunk student a ride home and later refused to help when he couldn’t find his home, the shuttle’s co-director said.
The student was so drunk that during the two-hour ordeal Thursday night that he threw up inside the van, started sprinting and running into trees, began eating grass and started masturbating, two employees said.
DDS is a student-fee-funded shuttle that gives drunk students rides home from parties.
The DDS co-director and a shuttle driver said they were forced to violate their own rules Thursday by picking up a passed-out student at the insistence of the Department of Public Safety. They also said DPS refused to help the shuttle deal with the student when they spent two hours trying to find out where he lived.
The public safety director said his department tried to get the fully conscious student a safe ride home but was forced to call DDS when two other local services for drunk people couldn’t help. DPS couldn’t give the student a ride home because the student lived outside the department’s legally designated operating area. It’s common for DPS to call the shuttle for help in transporting students, DDS co-Director David Goward said, and sometimes the city’s police department calls DDS for help.
Goward sent an e-mail to Tom Hicks, the public safety director, informing him of the incident and chastising the safety department for having the shuttle pick up an unconscious student and for not helping later.
“I feel that if DPS puts someone in our van, they should take some responsibility for them and know that if our staff is uncomfortable transporting the passenger to assist in any way possible,” Goward wrote to Hicks.
Hicks said he contacted the Buckley Detox Center and Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, but they were full and couldn’t help. At that point, the most important thing was to get the student home safely, Hicks said, and DDS was the next best option.
“Once he’s off campus we don’t really have the jurisdiction or the legal authority to respond to a situation like that,” he said.
Hicks said the student was conscious and able to climb into the DDS van.
Alex Gilbert, the driver of the van, said the student was “assed out” on the pavement when DDS arrived.
DDS policies state that drivers cannot allow unconscious students into a van, and that DDS employees should call 9-1-1 and wait for an ambulance if a student is unconscious when they arrive.
Gilbert said he tried calling Eugene police and 9-1-1 emergency dispatchers but couldn’t get help for the student.
The DDS policy also instructs employees to stop the van “as fast as possible” if, at any time, a patron falls unconscious, as the man did. Employees are instructed to wait for DPS or emergency personnel to arrive.
Gilbert said the student kept saying his own name and telling DDS employees that he lived at Chase Village apartments, but he was unable to say anything else. He vomited in the van several times, Gilbert said.
“It was a lot, too. I was amazed. And he wasn’t a big guy,” he said.
When they arrived at the apartment complex, the man jumped out and started sprinting, running into trees, Gilbert said. He then sat down and began eating grass and masturbating, Gilbert said.
Gilbert said he told the man to zip up his pants, at which point the man told Gilbert that he loved him.
A night manager at the apartments had to provide the man’s apartment number.
Goward said he will not be taking calls for pickups from DPS until he feels comfortable and until DDS and DPS are on the same page, he said.
“If there’s a need for us to meet with DDS and explain procedure,” Hicks said, ” … then I’m working with David Goward to try and do that.
“I think both of us want to try to avoid this confusion in the future, but at the same time some responsibility goes back on the individual who creates this situation.”