WUPD File PhotoDear Reader: This article appears as part of Student Life’s annual April Fool’s issue. Please don’t think anything in it is true. It’s all made up.
Since he hit his first doobie in high school, sophomore Joe Francis has been hooked on weed. Friends and roommates say he has been known to roll a fat joint an average of three times a day.
“I’ve always felt safe toking up on campus,” said Francis in a recent interview. “The RA’s [resident advisers] don’t care. The other kids on my floor aren’t narcs. Sometimes they would even ask me to buy some grass.”
But on the evening of Sept. 12, 2005, those feelings of security faded with the sunset. After believing he bombed an organic chemistry test, Francis decided to take some bong hits in the baseball team’s dugout.
“I told him not to do it alone,” said a friend, who wished to remain anonymous out of concern for his safety. “I’m not a religious man, but there are two commandments I follow: Never sneak up behind a deaf midget and never, ever smoke alone.”
Had Francis headed his friend’s advice, he may never have been imprisoned, tortured and mentally scarred.
But he didn’t, and he was.
His imprisonment has revealed a dark side of the Washington University Police Department – an underbelly of crime, corruption and secrecy.
Through dozens of interviews and analysis of several hundred documents, Student Libel has uncovered a secret prison, run and sanctioned by WUPD. Sources say it is located in a shed behind the department.
“Why are you electrocuting my balls?”
According to confidential documents obtained by Student Libel, a WUPD officer spotted smoke rising from the dugout at about 8:30 p.m. He decided to check out the situation.
When he arrived, he saw Francis smoking marijuana and using illegal paraphernalia to do so. Francis was apparently so blazed he didn’t know the officer was present, an arrest report said.
Even though Francis was passive and showed no signs of aggression, the officer elected to club Francis unconscious with his nightstick.
When Francis woke up, he was seated in an elevated chair, like the one you sit in at the dentist’s office. Francis’ eyesight was still hazy, but he was able to see electrodes pasted on his exposed testicles.
The shaft remained in his pants.
According to a police log of the incident provided to Student Life by a senior administrator inside WUPD, Chief Don Strom – foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog – held the lever of the electrocution device.
“What recipe should we make today?” asked Strom, according to the log. “Fried testes, nuts on a skewer, or scrambled scrotum sticks?”
The other officers in the room decided on the scrambled scrotum sticks.
“Okay, here goes,” Strom said, pulling the lever.
The electric shock pulsed through the wires and overwhelmed Francis’s jizz producers.
“I love it when smoke comes off a dude’s balls,” another officer purportedly said.
Strom, along with Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and Dean of Students James McLeod, refused comment for this article.
The shock treatment lasted off and on for 20 minutes. Francis seeped in and out of consciousness.
In between grunts of pain, he managed to ask one simple question: “Why are you electrocuting my balls?”
A trail of torture
Francis was not the first to get his nut-sack fried. In fact, according to a Student Life analysis of WUPD documents, officers have been torturing students for two years.
“Basically, we all love to watch ’60 Minutes,'” said an officer. “So we saw the report on the whole Abu Ghraib, we thought, ‘We should do that, it looks like fun.”
In the two years since the torture program began, some 25 undergraduate students have been taken into custody. All but one was a male. Most of them have been arrested for possession of weed, but a few have been taken into custody for lewd acts.
On the night of May 1, 2005, around midnight, 19-year-old Michele Moser was caught performing oral sex on Mike Jones in a hammock in front of Shepley.
“She really liked him,” said Jaclyn Smith, Moser’s freshman roommate. “He was caring, considerate, good at muff diving, everything you’d want from a guy.”
But it became difficult for them to schedule liaisons. Both Jones and Moser lived in triples, making the practice of sexiling, wherein two partners remove roommates from their room so they can bone righteous in private, practically impossible.
“I had class early, I was single. Our other roommate lived on a completely different schedule. And as nice as Mike was, we just didn’t want to watch,” said Smith.
So they hooked up in public places including the bathrooms at The Vault, the clocktower in Brookings and the hammocks.
“Look, Michele is not a nympho. She’s not an exhibitionist,” said Smith. “She just wanted to get with this guy because he could get her off so easy.”
A WUPD officer waited for her to finish the act before apprehending the couple. In his report, he said he found used tissues and an empty tube of Neosporin at the scene. But an analysis conducted in a WUPD investigation found only the officer’s DNA on the two items.
After disappearing for six months, Jones was found lying naked on the South 40 clocktower. He had fake breasts and a vagina pasted on his body. There was scarring around his anus.
Since then, Jones has been placed under psychiatric care at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He refuses to speak, and his family also declined to speak to Student Life.
Meantime, Moser’s whereabouts remain unknown.
“I want those fuckers to fry”
After four months of torture, Francis, the pot smoker, was found in a similar condition to that of Jones. According to documents, most students were deposited under the clock tower with vaginas and breasts glued to their bodies.
“Sometimes, the officers like to paste black breasts on a white dude’s body,” a former officer said. “They think it’s a funny juxtaposition.”
He added, “I would’ve never known what juxtaposition meant had I not worked at Wash. Jew. Those Hebes may be cheap, but they’re sure smart.”
Francis would like to seek psychological help, but Student Health and Counseling Services has repeatedly said it’s booked forever.
“And even if it weren’t.” a SHCS spokesman said, “we don’t think his trauma his serious enough to be worthy of our attention.”
Francis also sued the University and WUPD, but the suit was dropped. “This is the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard,” said St. Louis County judge at the hearing. “WUPD is great. They are the most by-the-book police force around.” The Missouri Attorney General’s Office has refused to even acknowledge Francis’s allegations.
“I wish they would believe me,” Francis said. “But I’m a 21- year-old stoner. I have no credibility. But I know what happened to me was real.”
Why would WUPD engage in such activities? A former officer says it has to do with envy.
“Look at it this way. The officers are underpaid and overworked. Their IQ scores are below average,” he said “They deal with a bunch of snobby, rich kids who are smarter than them and will have better jobs than them when they graduate. They’re pissed off. And they’re especially pissed off at the dope-smokers, who can afford the quality grass they can’t get.”
That may be an explanation, but it is not justice for Francis.
“I will hold them accountable for what they did to me,” he said. “A university is supposed to be a place that breeds intellectual freedom, not terror.”