A simple way to take the pulse of the Mutiny is to pay attention to tip volume and composition. When the same story is sent in (and for a period is the ONLY story submitted to the tip line), it’s a powerful indicator of what you want to talk about…today, it’s tragedy at a major American public university:

Two students were found shot to death in a home invasion at a Louisiana State University apartment, and officials decided to keep the campus open Friday while police searched for three suspects.

The victims, Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allam, both Ph.D. students from India, were found inside an apartment at the Edward Gay complex late Thursday night after authorities received an emergency call. [yahoo]

That emergency call came from Allam’s pregnant wife, who discovered the murder scene at her apartment.

The 911 call was made by Allam’s pregnant wife, who returned home and found the men dead. Authorities said both men had been shot in the head once in what is described as an area with one of the highest crime rates in the city.

Komma, who was studying biochemistry, was found bound with a computer cable, while Allam, who was in the chemistry programme, was near the front door. Initial reports said nothing appears to have been stolen from the house. [TOI]

The apartments are a vulnerable, easy target:

The apartment building where the shootings took place is designated for married and graduate students, and is near a field on the 2,000-acre campus where the university’s band practices. A cluster of pale yellow cinderblock, three-story buildings, it sits on the edge of the campus…

The complex has a tall fence separating it from the off-campus neighborhood, but the apartments have no gates or surveillance cameras…attempted break-ins and holdups are common at the complex. [yahoo]

Logically, TOI zeroed in on the anxiety most of you conveyed in your emails:

Phani Mylavarpu, a 26-year-old Indian student pursuing a mechanical engineering Ph.D., told the local Times-Picayune that he was an acquaintance of both victims, having met them at social events of the Indian Student Association, which brings together Indian students on the campus.

Mylavarpu, a former president of the group, said Indian students have spent much of the day talking with each other talking with each other about the crimes and fielding telephone calls from concerned relatives and friends from India.

The homicides appear to be ”a random, unfortunate act” not targeting the victims because of their nationality, Mylavarpu said, echoing the local authorities.

But he said international students, who often congregate together and comprise a considerable portion of the residences in select housing units, want to be assured that their safety is a priority for campus police.

”I’m not blaming the safety system,” he said, ”but things like this are still happening, and it leaves us concerned on behalf of the international student community.” [TOI]

Many of you who sent this story in noted that you were especially affected by it because you are DBDs who are currently in grad school, just like Komma and Allam were. Just last week, one of our readers in Bangalore asked me if America was “so violent”; he was thinking about pursuing a degree in this country but he was worried about “racism and crime”. My insouciant “it’s not so bad here” seems really lame, right now.

My thoughts and prayers are with their families, especially Allam’s wife and the unborn child she will have to explain this senseless loss to, one day.

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On an uglier note– Shame on LSU. I couldn’t believe one of the links I read (now altered, natch) which quoted a school official as stating that this was an opportunity to test out the emergency text messaging alert system which many Universities implemented after the Virginia Tech tragedy. Thank goodness the Telegraph hasn’t been “cleansed” and thank goodness they’re calling LSU out. Read the shitty, callous message for yourself, below.

“The tragic homicides that took place on campus on Thursday evening provided an opportunity for the university to test its new emergency text-message system. Thanks to feedback from members of the LSU community, university officials learned that not everyone who had registered their cellphones with the system received a message.

“The university is now investigating the problem with clearTXT, which is the text-message service provider, and is working to fix this problem rapidly. LSU will provide moreinformation when the problem is resolved.”

Investigate where your tact and decency went, while you’re at it.

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UPDATE #1– The bloggers (who, like the victims, came here for grad school as well) at UberDesi have their gumshoes on– they’re on the trail of the “missing quote”, you know, the one about how this was an opportunity?

…the student newspaper of LSU has been inundated with complaints. The particular story is no longer on the front page of the student news paper and digging for half an hour, proved useless. All we managed to unearth from our history was the story with partial comments.

Hoping that I could get the LSU Reville to cough up more information on why they had “broken” their commenting system on one particular news story I called the Editor In Chief Mr. Justin Fritscher, only for someone else to answer the phone. “Yes our system is broken and we are trying to fix it, we are not sure about when and if the comments will be back” (paraphrased) was the answer. [UD]

UPDATE #2–

sreechettan over at SAJAForum points us here, where

we discover that it might not have been random:

LSU Chancellor Sean O’Keefe said…the men “appeared to be targeted for reasons unknown.”

“This does not appear to be a random event,” O’Keefe said. [2advocate]

Developing… 🙁