INDEPENDENT SINCE 1880
The Corne¬ Daily Sun Vol. 136, No. 58
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2020
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16 Pages – Free
ITHACA, NEW YORK
News
Arts
Sports
Weather
Gimme!
Entertainment
Wrestling
Cloudy
A months long arbitration resulted in Rebecca Lespier's reinstatement and back pay.
The Wonder Years' Burst and Decay II is a gift to its fans.
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After a jam-packed weekend, the wrestling team fell to North Carolina.
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HIGH: 43º LOW: 33º
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Frosh Student Achieves TikTok Fame at Cornell
Eggs-celent | Six Egg-Vengers take on the duty to repurpose eggs set for compost in order to fight the new emerging evil –– food insecurity.
Records college life, love for marine biology By ALEC GIUFURTA and ALEK MEHTA Sun Staff Writer and Sun Contributor
He can’t “Renegade”, but with 1.1 million followers and counting, one Cornell freshman is starting NANDITA MOHAN / SUN STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Film it | John Dombrowski ’23 has amassed about 1.1 million TikTok followers.
to feel the fame –– TikTok fame that is. John Dombrowski ’23 has amassed a cult following on the popular app and it shows no signs of slowing down. With TikTok’s presence growing rapidly worldwide, Dombrowski is riding the platform’s popularity wave into campus –– if not wider –– stardom. From his first video posted in September 2019, Dombrowski hit it off, garnering a total 1.2 million views. A scroll through his page currently reveals over 300 videos, with many having equally impressive view counts. His videos –– most shot in his Court-Kay-Bauer Hall dorm room –– are takes on life, features on marine biology or looks into life as a Cornell student. That first video, a jab at his North Atlanta suburb’s public high school, transformed into a following. “Definitely [talking about] college was how I grew my channel,” Dombrowski said. The topics of his TikToks have included the college the first-year applied to and how he chose his major — marine biology — at Cornell. See TIKTOK page 5
ALICIA WANG / SUN GRAPHICS EDITOR
Egg-Vengers Battle Food Insecurity 1,000 eggs redirected from compost bins to food banks weekly By MEGHANA SRIVASTAVA Sun Staff Writer
Six students calling themselves the “EggVengers” rescue 1,000 eggs weekly from being thrown away, donating eggs destined for compost bins to local food banks instead. In November of last year, Kasey Schalich grad pitched the idea for the club to a group of animal sciences students during a compost program, which she had been running for two years. After hearing her pitch, four undergraduate students, Colin Detrick ’23, Regina Martinez ’22, Brianna Green ’23 and Sunny Levitis ’22, stepped up as leaders for the nascent campus organization. Schalich first learned about these discarded eggs by speaking with a manager at the Cornell poultry farm, which led her to
notice that only about 20 dozen eggs are actually sold by the animal sciences department, even though the farm has over 1,000 chickens. “It seemed like a good opportunity to take … a good food that's going towards waste and using it to solve a problem that we talk about –– food insecurity,” Shalich said. After Schalich identified the issue and formulated a proposed solution, her and Prof. Thomas Overton, animal sciences, had to get clearance by the department to avoid food safety concerns, a barrier that had previously prevented eggs from being donated in the past. Overton said that the department's role was mainly to get it cleared by risk management. The animal sciences department See EGGS page 4
‘Exonerated Five’ Member Slams Criminal Justice System Wrongly jailed for 6 years,Yusef Salaam calls prison system modern version of slavery
By LUCAS REYES and ANIKA POTLURI Sun Staff Writer and Sun Contributor
To a packed audience in Sage Chapel, Yusef Salaam — a member of the falsely imprisoned “Exonerated Five” — spoke about his experiences with incarceration, faith and criminal justice reform. “I want[ed] people to know that when you find yourself in so-called dark places, there's always a light somewhere in the darkness,” Salaam said, who was wrongfully convicted over two decades ago. In 1989, five young black and Latino men, aged 14 to 16 years old, were jailed for the assault and rape of 28-year-old Trisha Meili. The group, then known as “The Central Park Five,” included then-15-yearold Salaam.
MICHELLE YANG / SUN STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Salaam's story | Yusef Salaam (right) speaks to students in Sage Chapel, describing his experiences with wrongful incarceration.
The prolonged police interrogation after their arrest yielded false confessions that comprised much of the prosecution’s case in the ensuing trials, which led to all five teenagers being found guilty.
Following his conviction, Salaam spent over six years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. He, along with Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise, were exon-
erated in 2002, when DNA evidence instead linked the crime to Matias Reyes, who confessed that he acted alone in the act. Salaam spoke to the audience about the difficulties of
his six-year incarceration, first at a youth facility, and then, beginning at the age of 21, in upstate New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility, where he said he “got a college degree in one of the most damned places in the world.” Becoming a public figure after his release from prison presented challenges for Salaam. The nominal shift from “Central Park Five” to “Exonerated Five” was more than a simple legality. It involved years of struggle against the role of media in amplifying the case’s faulty conclusion. “When we were guilty, over 400 media reports came up within the first few weeks,” Salaam said. “When we were found to be innocent, it was See SALAAM page 5