Princeton Pupil Faked Beating, Death Threats

A Princeton University student who claimed he was beaten unconscious by two assailants after receiving death threats for his morally conservative views admitted yesterday to fabricating the attack and sending the e-mail death threats to himself, other students, and a prominent conservative professor, police officials said.No charges have been filed against the student, Francisco Nava, pending further investigation, but Mr. Nava could face a misdemeanor charge and jail time, a fine, or community service, police officials said.“During the course of the investigation, there were some inconsistencies, which we presented to him and he admitted,” Sergeant Ernie Silagyi said. “He was upset.”Mr. Nava, 23, is a politics major and a junior at Princeton who this semester has become an outspoken member of the Anscombe Society, a morally conservative student group that speaks out against same-sex marriage and pre-marital sex. Mr. Nava claimed that he has been receiving death threats since October after penning a column in the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, criticizing the university’s campaign to distribute free condoms on campus as “tacit sponsorship of hookup sex.” On Friday, he claimed he was attacked by two black-clad assailants and rendered unconscious after they repeatedly hit his head against a brick wall.Over the weekend, Mr. Nava was recovering in the McCosh Health Center on campus. Visitors said his jaw was badly swollen, his face was covered with cuts and abrasions, and the inside of his mouth was bleeding. The severity of the wounds on Mr. Nava’s face were one of the reasons that students and faculty members said they doubted that the injuries could have been self-inflicted.But friends said yesterday that doubts about the veracity of e-mail death threats and the physical assault began to surface after it came out that as a high school student at the Groton School, Mr. Nava had sent himself and his roommate a false e-mail death threat using an anti-homosexual slur. The Web site Firstthings.com reported that incident yesterday. Mr. Nava’s roommate at Groton was a founder of the Gay-Straight Alliance, according to the Web site.The conservative professor, the McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, Robert George, in an interview yesterday said he knew about the Groton incident over the weekend, but did not want to talk to reporters about the details of a pending investigation. He said that he had asked Mr. Nava if he had inflicted the injuries on himself, or sent the e-mails, and Mr. Nava denied both. Mr. Nava stuck with his story that he was assaulted on the way to meet with a boy he mentors.“I’m stunned, I’m disappointed, and I’m deeply concerned about Francisco and what this means about him,” a Princeton senior who is a Rhodes Scholar and one of the students who received the e-mail death threats, Sherif Girgis, said in an interview.Members of the Anscombe Society said they had canceled a candlelight vigil and any plans for a weekend solidarity event because they didn’t want to jump to any conclusions about the incident.“Princeton is not Duke is the bottom line,” Mr. Girgis said, referring to the 2006 Duke scandal, when a stripper falsely accused three white members of the men’s lacrosse team of rape.Several other campuses have seen evidence of what are being called “self-inflicted hate crimes.”In November, a student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. reportedly admitted to drawing three of several swastikas on her own dorm room door after police disclosed hidden video footage.At Boise State University in Idaho, a gay student who had said he was the victim of a hate crime that knocked him unconscious later told police he had beaten himself with a stick, press reports said.“He’s more or less just ruined his life in many respects,” a 2004 Princeton alum and the assistant editor of First Things, a journal of religion, culture, and public life, Ryan Anderson, said. “He was selected to be a residential counselor, and he was selected to be on the religious life counsel. In many senses, his character was sound.” For both positions, Mr. Anderson said, the administration considers a student’s academic standing as well as his level of personal integrity. “He passed all of their tests, so he must have been doing something right at Princeton,” Mr. Anderson said.Reached at her home in Bedford, Texas, Mr. Nava’s mother, Kate Nava, said she did not want to comment on the situation. Acquaintances described Mr. Nava, 23, as a large man, about 200 pounds and over six feet tall.According to friends, Mr. Nava grew up as a devout Roman Catholic and converted to Mormonism. He served on a two-year mission trip to Russia with the Mormon Church. When he returned, he became a vocal member of the Anscombe Society. His girlfriend is a Princeton student, but not a member of the society.Mr. Anderson said that in conversations with other members of the Anscombe Society, the members said they were “shocked” and “hurt,” but mostly “wondering what sort of demons he must be fighting if he would do something like this.”Mr. Nava’s father, an owner of a Latin American import company Que Alegre!, based in Fort Worth, Texas, died in 1999 at the age of 41, according to an obituary in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.Princeton University knew about the Groton incident when it admitted Mr. Nava in 2005. The school required Mr. Nava to take a year off and get counseling, according to Firstthings.com. “Disciplinary action is pending,” a spokeswoman for Princeton, Lauren Robinson Brown, said of the incident. That action could be as severe as expulsion or as light as a warning, she said. Mr. Nava will have to go through a hearing and appeal process.In a book published in 2004 by a Princeton dean, Paul Raushenbush, “Teen Spirit: One World, Many Paths,” Mr. Nava writes about his conversion to Mormonism.“I had been a very devout and confirmed Roman Catholic,” Mr. Nava writes. “My family would most certainly be offended if I left the religion of my upbringing and of my ancestors.” He writes that after his conversion, his family still loved and respected him for his conversion.“They all agree that my words are cleaner, my disposition is calmer, and that my love for God is greater,” he wrote.

Princeton Pupil Faked Beating, Death Threats

Princeton Pupil Faked Beating, Death Threats

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