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Robert Wells was pronounced dead at the scene. |
A senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently fell to his death early yesterday from the fifth floor of his fraternity house in the Back Bay, police said.
Robert M. Wells, 22, of Ballston Spa, N.Y., was pronounced dead at the scene by emergency medical personnel who responded to a call for help about 5:45 a.m. to the Technology Chapter of Delta Upsilon Fraternity House on Beacon Street, police said.
"He was found on the ground," Officer Eddy Chrispin, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department, said last night. "He apparently fell from a fifth-floor window."
Boston police and MIT campus police are investigating the death. The state medical examiner's office is conducting an autopsy, Chrispin said.
Chrispin said he did not know the circumstances of the death, the fourth fatal fall at local college campuses in the past 18 months.
The Delta Upsilon house is one of three fraternities in a row of brownstones, from 526-530 Beacon St. Students entering and leaving the houses declined to comment last night.
Wells was a senior majoring in brain and cognitive sciences, Pamela Dumas Serfes, an MIT spokeswoman, said in a statement. "This is a tragedy for his family, friends, and the entire MIT community," Serfes said. "Our hearts go out to all of them at this difficult time."
Wells is listed as playing quarterback on the MIT football team as a junior, and on the school's water polo team as a sophomore, according to the school's website.
Wells was remembered fondly by two Boston University students who met him at Delta Upsilon fraternity parties. "He was definitely the life of the party. He was loud and funny," said Jackie Gajda, 20, a junior from Maywood, N.J. "He was so friendly."
Gajda said that whenever she visited the house, Wells always seemed happy. "He was always dancing and listening to music and everything," she added.
"From talking to him, he seemed pretty . . . outgoing," Genevieve Housman, 19, a freshman from Elkhart, Ind., said by phone last night. "He was very social with people."
A bartender at Crossroads, a Beacon Street pub popular with students in fraternities, gasped when he learned of Wells's death. The man, who declined to give his name, said Wells frequently ate at the pub.
Serfes, the MIT spokeswoman, said campus police advise students to be safe, whether they live on or off campus. "The safety of our students is of the utmost importance," she said.
Other area campuses have seen similar tragedies in recent months.
Michael Robertson, a 20-year-old BU student from New Jersey, apparently fell to his death in January 2007 from the window of his fourth-floor room on Mountfort Street.
On Sept. 24, 2006, a 21-year-old Northeastern University student died after falling from the roof of his off-campus apartment building in Roxbury. Brian Evans, a second-year political science major from San Mateo, Calif., had returned to a party when he climbed out a window and up to the roof from his third-floor loft-style bedroom on Northampton Street when he fell, his father told the Globe.
On Nov. 17, Shawn Dow of Peabody, a 21-year-old photography major at Art Institute of Boston, fell off the roof of a building on Glenville Avenue in Allston. Friends suggested he had been killed in a brawl, but authorities said Dow apparently, and accidentally, fell off the building's blacktop roof, landing in an alley behind the sprawling red-brick complex.
Globe correspondent Jillian Jorgensen contributed to this report. Kathy McCabe can be reached at kmccabe@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
