Suspect
The search continues for the 23-year-old man suspected of assaulting two students in a University residence hall April 24 and returning hours later with a gun.
Eugene police believe Carlos Alberto Valencia-Torres fled to California early last week, Department of Public of Safety Lieutenant Herb Horner said.
Horner said Valencia-Torres contacted Eugene police officer Larry Crompton during the week following the incident wanting to tell his side of the story. Horner said Crompton told the suspect he needed to come into the police station and “he said ‘I don’t think so’ and hung up.”
Eugene police traced the call to an out-of-area number and called back, but a man
answered and told him he was fairly certain Valencia-Torres had left for California.
Crompton was unavailable for comment Monday.
DPS and the Eugene Police Department increased patrol in the campus area during the days following the incident. Horner said while the sense of urgency has
decreased, a heightened sense of
awareness is still evident.
“We don’t believe he’s in the state, but we are doing increased patrols,” Horner said. “Guys are on bikes on a more regular basis.”
Mike Eyster, assistant vice president for student affairs and director of housing, said Bean Complex Director Heather Dumas-Dyer met with students in Bean Complex’s Willcox Hall, the hall where the alleged assault took place, to talk about safety issues and to hear any concerns from students in case some felt threatened or uneasy after the incident.
“From the interactions that Heather’s had, it doesn’t appear that students are feeling like that,” Eyster said.
Eyster said he has received two
e-mails from parents regarding the incident, and both focused on
concerns about students in the High School Equivalency Program living in the residence halls with
University students.
Valencia-Torres is a graduate of the University’s High School Equivalency Program and the students he allegedly assaulted are currently enrolled in the program.
The students did not know Valencia-Torres, but they were living in the room where he lived while he was a student. This was a connection that police say Valencia-Torres tried to use to strike up a conversation with the students and “more or less hang out with them,” Crompton said in an April 28 Emerald article. The incident occurred around
6 a.m., police said.
Eyster said the parents who wrote the e-mails seemed concerned about the age difference between students in the program and University students in the residence halls and the steps taken to integrate them.
Eyster said the age of the students is not something that should be of concern. However, the incident and student and parent responses have shown housing officials that more needs to be done to help integrate students from the program with University students in the residence halls, Eyster said.
“We’re definitely going to be there to orient both groups to each other next year,” Eyster said. “That is a certainty.”
Eyster said he and High School Equivalency Program Director Emilio Hernandez will be working with housing officials during the summer to plan a better orientation program for HEP students. He said they will try to come up with more integration activities.
Conversations also centered on security procedures and the need for students to refrain from letting strangers into the residence halls. It is not known how Valencia-Torres entered the locked residence hall twice, but housing officials said they suspect another student let him in or that he came in behind someone.
Hernandez said most of the complaints he receives about the High School Equivalency Program center on the race or ethnicity of the
students involved.
“It all starts with the fact that they’re Latino students,” Hernandez said. “It turns into this racial thing of ‘why are they here?’”
Hernandez said he is committed to doing whatever it takes to
improve the tarnished image that the Valencia-Torres incident has
given the program. He said the bias that exists in society means he must hold his students to a higher
standard in hopes of breaking
such stereotypes.
“I have to really be a hard hand on it because those daily stereotypes will destroy a program like that,” Hernandez said.
Because the housing department is not directly involved with the search for Valencia-Torres, housing officials reported that questions about the nature of the HEP program were the biggest issues they had to address, besides typical concerns about security and safety.
