March 7,1989

State Journal Lansing, Michigan

Dear Editor:

I am outraged to learn, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request with MSU Department of Public Safety that the two frat brats who murdered the lamb will not be prosecuted and that Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity [FIJI], the fraternity they had spent time with and were known to be pledging for will also be protected.

How dare the university and criminal justice system adapt this parental mode, abetting with protective anonymity, even the fraternity system that is really to blame here? According to the police report "it has been a past practice from members of Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity [FIJI] to steal sheep and bring them to the Sigma Chi House." Where are the investigative journalists that will help hold these boys accountable for their malicious deeds, if not in the courts, then by their friends, classmates and peers?

But, what ever happened to the good values that fraternities are supposed to stand for? "Good values"? Prove it. Maybe some fraternities do, but many represent the worst of male bonding, drunken brawls and gang rapes. In other words: Sisters, there but for the grace of god (sic) go we.

True, it was not premeditated, but it was murder. Not unlike a drunk driver, motivated by alcohol induced stupidity, accidentally and remorsefully killing a pedestrian because of a foolish left turn. But, if, as the penal code dictates, taking a living creature from its mother, leashed with a slip knot, alone, terrified, freezing cold in the night is not cruelty and torture, then I am at a loss for knowing what is.

Only fools (and insurance companies) place a monetary value on life; only a society with a misplaced sense of value defines a murder as a "crime against property." This lamb was worth far more than $300.00 and the real victim was not "the university that lost the property (sic)" as the media reported. The real victims in this case were the lamb and her mother.

But we, too, are the victims--all of us. Because a small part of us--our hopes, our dreams, our so-called humanity, our desires for security and a less violent, more loving kind of world in which to live--died also on the porch of Sigma Chi fraternity on January 18, 1989 with the death of one 90 pound Rambouillet lamb. And I for one am sickeningly saddened by it.

Nikki Craft
East Lansing, Michigan

[This letter was (as most of my letters to the editor [pre-internet] have been) banned from publication by the State Journal to protect the fraternity.]

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