Northeastern posts riot photos

Northeastern University asked its students yesterday to help identify classmates involved in Sunday night's Super Bowl riots, posting photographs of those involved in the pandemonium that left one man dead and caused extensive property damage.

The school has set up a website with 24 pictures, taken Sunday night after the Patriots' win, that show a number of clearly identifiable college-age men vandalizing cars and lighting fires. One photo depicts a group of about 10 men poised to lift a car on its side. Others show rioters taking crowbars and shovels to the windshields of cars and stomping on car roofs.

On the website, students are asked to contact the campus public safety department if they recognize the faces in the pictures. The site guarantees anonymity to students who respond.

At a campuswide meeting yesterday, school officials asked for witnesses to come forward.

"We have to police ourselves," Ed Klotzbier, the college's vice president for student affairs, told the 150 students assembled. "We have to, as a community, come together and have a sense of responsibility."

Over the last week, politicians have lashed out at Northeastern repeatedly for not keeping its students under control Sunday night, when a drunken throng of 1,500 people near Symphony Road turned a historic sports victory into a fatal tragedy. James Grabowski, the brother of a Northeastern freshman, was killed when a motorist drove his sport utility vehicle into the crowd.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino continued the drumbeat of criticism yesterday, accusing the school of failing to supervise students living in scores of leased, off-campus apartments in the Symphony and Fenway neighborhoods. Menino sent President Richard M. Freeland a letter yesterday saying that the city has met with the university to talk about similar problems in the past, but "I feel that our message is not being heard."

Northeastern officials said Freeland had not seen Menino's letter yet and could not comment. "Northeastern has been and will continue to work with city officials, including the mayor, in resolving this problem and preventing it from ever happening again," said spokeswoman Genevieve Haas.

The university continues to insist that it prepared for postgame unrest by doubling its campus police contingent and putting extra residential staffers on duty. Officials say they are also trying to send out a tough message -- no tolerance for hooliganism.

"If people who are inclined to do bad things get a very strong message from all of us, . . . that's going to have an effect," Freeland told the crowd yesterday.

Wary of possible rioting after the Super Bowl, officials had also planned in advance for the photo-identification site. Before the Super Bowl, they asked residential advisers to take pictures if trouble erupted, and some were even loaned cameras by the school for that purpose, said spokeswoman Christine Phelan. Many of the photos on the site, however, were donated by other students who wanted to help the university identify those responsible.

A similar approach was used last fall at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where officials used video taken by police and other students to identify some of the 23 students who were ultimately disciplined for participating in riots after the Red Sox playoffs. UMass-Amherst also increased the number of security cameras it uses on campus.

Even though young people are often loath to be seen as tattletales, student leaders at Northeastern said they thought their classmates would rise to the circumstances. "It goes beyond the matter of allegiances with friends," said Allyson Savin, executive vice president of the student government. "The term `innocent bystanders' doesn't apply."

Several Northeastern students were arrested Sunday night and face criminal charges as well as expulsion or suspension, Klotzbier said. The university acknowledges its responsibility to watch over students in its off-campus apartments, and its code of conduct calls for off-campus behavior not to "adversely affect" the school's relationship with its neighbors.

In his letter to the university, Menino asked detailed questions about the number of residential advisers in off-campus housing, and how many were on hand for the Super Bowl celebrations. The city said 430 students live in 188 apartments on or near Symphony Road, where Grabowski was killed Sunday night and a Northeastern third-year student, Jason Stackiewicz, was seriously injured.

Officials cited the shooting death of a Northeastern student last May as a graphic example of a campus out of control. Four friends were tied up by gunmen who shot 21-year-old James H. Cassidy in his Hemenway Street apartment, in an attack that appeared to be drug-related. Some neighbors have also complained of frequent vandalism.

Last fall, the city charged Northeastern with a variety of health and safety violations in more than a dozen apartment buildings, from rodents to inadequate fire alarms to bars on windows. One of the buildings was briefly condemned.

"The university is placing these students in the neighborhood without supervision or accountability," said Lisa Timberlake, spokeswoman for the Inspectional Services Department. "When our inspectors respond to a building, there's a party throughout, people are hanging over the bannister with a beer in their hand, and there is a keg in every other room."

But most buildings occupied by Northeastern students have resident advisers, Phelan said.

Northeastern also will take a new look at its guest policy, after Menino blamed non-students visiting campus for some of the problems, the director of residential life, M.L. Langlie, said at yesterday's meeting with students.

In addition to the photographs posted at www.publicsafety.neu.edu, the school is also reviewing videos, officials said.

Yesterday's meeting at Northeastern was scheduled by student government as an opportunity for students to learn about the university's response to the rioting and to vent frustrations. An oft-repeated mantra is that the destruction was the work of just a few "knuckleheads" -- Menino's term.

Savin said she worried the school's reputation would be seriously damaged, hurting students who are trying to get hired by local companies as paid "co-ops," a major part of the Northeastern curriculum. "We expect these people in local businesses to be hiring our students, but then we're rioting in the streets after the Super Bowl," she said.

Another concern students expressed: that the riot will make it harder for them to get city permits for an upcoming hip-hop concert for the artist Ludacris, who is getting paid about $130,000 for his appearance, Phelan said.

Andrea Estes of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.