Emily Lepkowski doesn’t feel safe near Pioneer Cemetery.
The University student gets nervous when friends walk in the cemetery after basketball games at McArthur Court, and she won’t stray from the sidewalk onto cemetery grounds, even on the days when sunshine softens its shadowy corners.
“If you walk by the cemetery, anyone could reach out and grab you,” she said. “You don’t feel safe there after the stories you hear.”
The stories include official complaints to the Department of Public Safety and the Eugene Police Department of a man in the cemetery following women and making sexual comments Feb. 21, a rape attempt near the cemetery Jan. 30 and six assaults against young women near campus last spring.
A male student also saw a man masturbating in the cemetery bushes Feb. 21; the man attempted to attack the student, who was able to break away. Since 1996, DPS has received 45 calls for suspicious people or circumstances in the cemetery, and issued 27 citations for drug or alcohol law infractions and made 11 arrests there.
Lepkowski said that she would have felt safer if there had been a light at the northeast corner of the cemetery, which is directly across University Street from Mac Court.
“It would definitely help,” she said. “It would be more difficult for people to hide in there.”
Increased lighting near the cemetery might make students comfortable enough to walk near the cemetery at night. But some students, University staff and the cemetery’s management association think extra lights would only offer a perceived increase in safety.
Ruth Holmes, treasurer for the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association, which operates the cemetery, said lighting the cemetery property would attract “undesirables” while not actually adding to the area’s safety.
George Hecht, director of campus operations, said lighting along University Street or East 18th Avenue bordering the cemetery could fool students into thinking the area is safe enough to walk through, especially if the people are new to Eugene.
“The reality is that there a lot of dark corners and bushes where people could hide out there,” he said.
Hecht is part of a University group determining how to use the $150,000 ASUO has allocated to increase lighting on campus, along with Sheryl Eyster, an associate director for the Office of Student Life. The group, which does not have an official name, wants to add more “lighted corridors” across campus that could offer more protection to students through increased foot traffic. The University currently has five such corridors.
Only a lighted corridor would provide enough illumination to justify drawing students to the area, Eyster and Hecht said. Eyster said her group does not want to create pockets of light around campus “that may lead people to believe the area is safe when it’s not.”
Lepkowski agreed with Holmes and said she didn’t think extra lighting around the cemetery would be enough to make her feel safe walking around the tombstones and trees.
Two or three DPS patrols usually walk by the cemetery each night, but the area is private property and thus difficult to police. Oregon law only grants DPS policing authority while on University grounds. Holmes said the cemetery association has approached the University about patrolling on cemetery grounds, but patrols would do minimal good without authority, DPS associate director Tom Hicks said.
Eugene police patrol the cemetery and surrounding area, but officers keep patrol routes random, and thus EPD could not say how frequently officers patrol the area.
Hicks suggested that fencing the area around the cemetery could discourage people from staying in it.
Holmes, however, said fencing is “out of the question.”
“If you fence, you get more vandalism than you can shake a stick at,” she said. “People will resent the fence.”