“A Princeton University graduate student who authorities say may have cut locks of hairs while endangering and harassing dozens of Asian women, was arrested last week, police announced yesterday… The investigation that led to Lohman’s arrest began in early March when an Asian woman contacted university public safety officials to report that on March 11, while she was riding a university shuttle bus on Washington Road, ‘an unidentified male cut off a lock of her hair,’ police said. University Public Safety Investigator Charles Peters soon identified Lohman as a possible suspect, police said, adding that Peters believed there might be a connection between the hair cutting and other incidents on campus in which ‘a white male was seen pouring an unknown substance into the drinks of women, all of whom were Asian…’ Most of the alleged crimes took place in the graduate college dining hall. ‘The accused may have also squirted bodily fluids on unsuspecting Asian females as they rode on a university shuttle on many occasions,’ police said. Police yesterday declined to identify which bodily fluids Lohman allegedly spread. They also did not speculate on his motive.” —NJ.com (US)

(Thanks to hludens for the link.)

The perp in this case is a graduate student at Princeton’s Applied and Computational Mathematics program. While the police may not have wanted to speculate on his motive, some basic intelligence gathering with Google adds detail to his profile. A picture of him shows a regular guy in a white t-shirt. He has a home page on Princeton’s site that has nothing but a dead link to his favorite class, which is just an introductory computer science course. The class claims to “demystify computer systems by unpeeling levels of abstraction down to the simplest physical component, leaving no black boxes.” Maybe in the perp’s mind there was something analogous involved in absconding with the ebony locks of local Asian chicks. Maybe he thought he was “unpeeling levels of abstraction” in an effort to get down to something more fundamental and physical (baldness?). Or maybe he just had a rather common fetish, the practitioners of which Freud called coupeurs de nattes.

And in a certain respect, that’s the irony of this story. Hair, panties, exchange of body fluids — it’s pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, and if the perp had only chosen to pursue it in less illicit ways, he wouldn’t be in trouble at all. He could have gotten himself a job in a hair parlor. He could have gotten himself an Asian girlfriend. For less than the cost of a RAM chip, he could have picked up a Korean hooker and satisfied his exotic longings. And in that sense, if you really want to twist things around, the story could be made into an allegory about the pathetic stipends that usually force graduate students to live in squalid conditions. If Princeton were a little more generous with its graduate fellowships, this guy might have been able to take care of his urges in the local Asian massage parler. And thus you could make out his story as one more bit of evidence for the theory that most crime is at root economic in inspiration.

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