CAMBRIDGE (AP) – A college student upset about a failing grade followed his professor for more than 20 miles from campus to her Cambridge home, where he allegedly stabbed her, police said.
Mary Elizabeth Hooker, 54, an assistant professor of clinical lab
sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, was hospitalized Thursday night, Dec. 22, 2005, with a stab wound to her neck.
Nikhil Dhar, 22, of Lowell, pleaded innocent on Friday, Dec. 23, 2005 in Cambridge District Court to charges of armed assault with intent to murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. He was held without bail pending a hearing Wednesday.
Hooker told police that Dhar wanted to talk about “not obtaining a passing grade in her class,” Cambridge police officer Edward Frammartino wrote in his report.
Hooker offered to meet him at a coffee shop to talk, but Dhar “became very irate and abusive towards her,” Frammartino wrote. Dhar dragged her out of the house, hit her and slashed her neck, according to the police report.
Police recovered a knife at the scene.
Neighbors called police after they heard screaming and saw Hooker struggling with a man in her front yard. Neighbor Carlos Madden, 21, chased and caught Dhar nearby, cornering him until police arrived.
UMass-Lowell spokeswoman Patti McCafferty said Hooker was in intensive care at a Boston hospital. “The feeling from hospital officials was that she was going to pull through and be OK,” she said.
Dhar’s attorney, Stephen Hrones, said it’s a “complicated situation.”
“There’s two sides to every story,” he said.
Cambridge police officer Thomas Maldonado, who arrested Dhar, wrote in his report that Dhar told him that “he went to his professor’s house to talk with her about his grade.” Dhar allegedly said this was his “only chance” to talk because the semester was ending.
Dhar allegedly told the officer that he followed Hooker home, staying a few cars behind her so she wouldn’t notice, according to the report.
Dhar denied bringing a knife to the door.
“Mr. Dhar said she came out with a knife,” Maldonado wrote. “He said ‘She must have thought I was a burglar.”‘
Hrones said his client is from Calcutta, India, and is in the U.S. on a student visa. His mother is a middle school teacher in New York and his father is a research scientist in India, but he has relatives in Massachusetts, Hrones said.
“He’s a quiet kid who has lots of friends and absolutely no history of violence,” he said.
Robert Nicolosi, Hooker’s colleague in the Department of Clinical
Laboratory and Nutritional Sciences at UMass-Lowell described her as a dedicated teacher who would lend students money for lunch.
“She went the extra nine yards when it came to her students,” he said. “It’s just amazing to me that something like this could happen to someone like her.”
A Boston University graduate who earned her doctorate in biological sciences from Georgetown University, Hooker was a research associate at a U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory in Beltsville, Md., before she started teaching at UMass-Lowell in 1993.
She has written papers for scientific journals on a range of subjects, including parasitic wasps and Mexican bean beetles.
UMass-Lowell Chancellor William Hogan said the school was “shocked and saddened.”
-Associated Press
