We know him all too well. We see him in class, on the field, at the bar, and in our living rooms. He’s the “stupid drunk.”
Recently Francis McQ. Lawrence, a defense lawyer, used those words to describe his client George Huguely V, a former student at the University of Virginia. Last week a jury convicted Mr. Huguely of second-degree murder, and sentenced him to 26 years in prison for the death of Yeardley Love, his onetime girlfriend, in 2010, days before both were to graduate.
The verdict followed a two-week trial in which alcohol played a significant role. Mr. Huguely’s story reveals the awful paradox of heavy drinking: Even as it unleashes terrible behavior in one man, it so often turns his friends into bystanders, unwilling or unable to help, assuming that they even see a problem at all.
On May 2, 2010, Mr. Huguely drank—a lot—in the company of others, according to trial testimony. He started drinking in the morning and then went golfing with some teammates and their fathers. He continued drinking on a golf course, where he became incoherent. He drank more at dinner with his father and his teammates. He drank more with his friends back at his apartment.
After kicking his way through Ms. Love’s door later that night, Mr. Huguely told police that he had grabbed her neck, shaken her, and wrestled her to the floor. She hit her head against a wall, he said. She was bleeding, but alive, he said, when he left her apartment. Prosecutors argued that Mr. Huguely intended to kill Ms. Love; the defense countered that he had “contributed” to her death, but that he had neither killed her nor intended to do so.
In Ms. Love’s bedroom, investigators found a letter Mr. Huguely had sent to Ms. Love following an earlier incident in which he put her in a chokehold. “Alcohol is ruining my life,” it said. “I’m scared to know that I can get that drunk to the point where I cannot control how I act.”
Mr. Lawrence painted Mr. Huguely as the lesser of two monsters—a big-time boozer, a rock-head who played lacrosse, but not a calculating killer. This was a desperate tactic, but not a surprising one. Prosecutors had sought a first-degree murder conviction, and in Virginia intoxication can be used as a defense against premeditated murder. In the end, alcohol did not absolve Mr. Huguely, but it almost certainly limited his punishment.
Throughout the trial, the defense sought to put Mr. Huguely’s behavior into some kind of context, to render the world he inhabited as a booze-soaked barrel of misbehavior. During the trial, Mr. Lawrence described the neighborhood where Mr. Huguely and Ms. Love resided as a “twenty-something ghetto” and a “lacrosse ghetto,” and a “student ghetto.” The G-word, loaded like few others in the vernacular, played on a widespread perception of colleges.
“The lawyers correctly intuited that jurors around the country are looking at college culture and saying it’s a sleaze pit,” says Peter F. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University. “The idea that people get influenced by their environment, or that the environment accelerates the crime, if you get that into their heads, it can influence their thinking. It suggests to them that he’s a victim of the culture he was in.”
Booze and Bystanders
In the end, nobody called Mr. Huguely a victim. One juror told The Washington Post that he found the defense’s closing argument (which included the “stupid drunk” phrase) offensive: The lawyer “was basically saying boys will be boys. I don’t think that’s an excuse.”
As unpalatable as this narrative might seem, however, it reminds us that Mr. Huguely had an audience when he held a bottle. His drinking and his recklessness were no mystery to those around him. During the trial, friends and teammates testified that they had noticed Mr. Huguely’s drinking become more and more intense during his senior year, and that he was getting wasted several times a week. Some friends and teammates said that just before Ms. Love’s death, they had discussed holding an intervention for Mr. Huguely.
Like many colleges, Virginia has embraced “bystander intervention” programs, which train students how to recognize signs of problems in their peers, and how to handle difficult conversations that often follow a confrontation. “It’s easy to judge college students, but even when they’re seeing something, it’s hard to act,” says Susan Bruce, director of substance-abuse prevention at Virginia.
Moreover, students who drink heavily might hesitate to say something about a friend’s drinking for fear that they will sound like hypocrites. Students often regret not acting, but some who have acted are stung by the memory of doing so. “We have college students who say, We don’t speak up anymore because they lost a good friend in high school” after confronting them, Ms. Bruce says. “They may lack the skills that come with an understanding of the psychology” of drinking.
To give students those skills, Virginia adopted the Step UP! program several years ago. The program was designed to help students talk effectively to someone who’s struggling, with alcohol or anything else, and learn how to best express their concern and their commitment to help. Previously, only athletes received this intervention training, which was developed at the University of Arizona. Following Ms. Love’s death, a student-led group has helped expand the program to nonathletes.
Ms. Bruce believes the program has great promise, but she describes bystander intervention as a delicate issue. “We don’t want students to feel that they are or have to be responsible for others’ behaviors,” she says. “These are very difficult things to ask of anyone. We focus a lot on bystanders, but we don’t want to blame the bystander either. We really walk a line.”
That line can be hard to see. As an undergraduate student at Virginia, I once helped carry a friend, half-conscious and full of bourbon, up to his room after a party. Eventually, this scene became routine. A small group of us would take off our friend’s shoes and tuck him into bed, rolling him on to his side so he would not choke on his vomit. He lost control of his Fridays and Saturdays, and, ultimately, everything else. He started throwing drunken punches at strangers. Sometimes, in his stupor, he peed his pants.
We worried about him, we lectured him, but we did little else. Not because we didn’t care about him, but because we didn’t know what to do. Also, we were scared. Not so much of getting him in trouble as of alienating him to the point that he would push away those of us who, in our own limited way, looked after him when the music stopped and the bars shut down. He was one of the smartest guys I ever met; he was also a stupid drunk just like Mr. Huguely.
Make no mistake. Last week’s verdict was about a young woman who died and a young man who, even if he did not intend to snuff out her life, behaved violently, shamefully, and, perhaps, unforgivably. That’s why he will most likely stay behind bars for the next two decades.
But what of the “stupid drunk” who’s still out there, walking the campus, walking the town? Wherever he goes, we can bet there are friends and roommates, girlfriends and boyfriends, parents and teammates, orbiting him closely, day after day, week after week, almost saying something, almost doing something, or almost thinking something’s wrong. What do we call them?
