The Pitt News
The independent student newspaper of the University of Pittsburgh | PIttnews.com | September 12, 2017 | Volume 108 | Issue 22
Local leaders address sexual assault STUDENTS WATCH IRMA FROM AFAR Rachel Glasser News Editor
Attendees of the Southwest PA Says NO MORE event give Maggie Kennedy a standing ovation after her speech. Sarah Cutshall STAFF PHOTOGRAHER
Luke Stambaugh Staff Writer When Alexandra Hope Erickson took her own life during her senior year of high school, her friend Maggie Kennedy couldn’t comprehend it. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Numb and empty, I shook and I wept and I clung to my family and friends,” Kennedy said. “How could she be
gone?” Erickson had been sexually assaulted by her ex-boyfriend before her suicide, Kennedy said. “Alex was so afraid that he was going to kill her, so she didn’t let him,” Kennedy said. Kennedy, a junior political science and communication major and Pitt’s representative for It’s On Us — an organization that has tasked itself with changing the way sexual assault is discussed
— was the only student to speak at the Southwest PA Says NO MORE event Monday night. But she received a standing ovation for her testimony on the prevalence and consequences of sexual assault. Also attending the event — held at Pitt’s University Club — were more than 80 community leaders, university presidents and elected See Sexual Assault on page 3
Catalina Acebal remembers when Hurricane Wilma blasted the doors of her grandparent’s home open in 2005. Her father and her grandpa rushed to push the family’s piano against the doors, stacking a few tables on top and taping the doors shut. “For me it was like, I had no school, I was like coloring, you know,” Acebal said. “Growing up I didn’t really realize how bad [the hurricanes] can get.” Acebal, a native Floridian and University of Southern California student, is currently studying abroad in Dublin. She has family in Key Biscayne — a barrier island of Miami — and Puerto Rico. She, like other students far from home, is anxiously tracking Irma and its destruction from afar. Acebal called her parents yesterday and said her family traveled to a hotel farther inland in response to a mandatory evacuation. During the height of the storm, they left their room because debris was flying around outside the windows. “They were all in lobby with my cat, my birds and my sister, and the hotel was pretty full,” Acebal said. Malik Henderson, a junior administration of justice major, is from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His family, who still lives there, decided to See Irma on page 3