JW arrived on campus for his second year at Norwich University on Aug. 27, 2016. Within a week, he was back on a plane headed home to the West Coast. His eyes were bloodshot and badly swollen. One side of his nose was collapsed — he would later undergo surgery to fix it — and he still had splitting headaches from a concussion that left a gap in his memory of the assault.
JW, who is African American, believed his race motivated the assault at the hands of at least one football lineman, and possibly others, on the night of his first day back on campus. His suspicion was reinforced by another student running around campus with a Confederate flag on his back the day after the incident, and then a text from a friend saying athletes were using racial epithets when referring to him after his departure.
But mostly, he thought, the beating was so bad only hate could explain it. “I don’t think that would have happened to a white person, for whatever reason they got into a fight,” he said in an interview last month. (JW asked that only his initials be used in this story, for fear that using his full name would complicate his future career prospects in the military.)
Norwich’s administration had tried to persuade JW and his father, JW Sr., to keep him at the school after the beating. JW was a high-achieving student, attending Norwich on a scholarship through the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, with plans of becoming a pilot. Col. Andrew Hird, commander of Norwich’s AFROTC Detachment 867, wrote a letter to JW as he was considering leaving the university.
“Cadet W—, you are a talented man with an uncommonly calm leadership trait. I have no doubt you will commission from any AFROTC and do very well in the Air Force,” Hird wrote, adding the “adversity you and others face here isn’t fair.” But, he added, JW’s life would inevitably hit setbacks and adversity, “Especially as a leader, officer and future commander.”
However, JW, who shared Hird’s vision for his future, said he just didn’t feel safe at Norwich. As he and his father were weighing his next move, his assailant was still on campus and playing out his senior season on the football team. “What’s gonna stop him from attacking me again?” JW remembers thinking at the time.
JW had told police about the beating the day after it happened, leading to aggravated assault charges against the football player, Peter “Riley” Kinahan. The school also hired an independent investigator to determine whether race was a motivating factor in the assault.
Norwich’s president, Richard Schneider, said in an email the university would pursue a separate investigation into JW’s claim that his wrestling coach, Alex Whitney, visited him in the infirmary while the other investigations were happening and pressured him to change his story. Whitney remains the coach at Norwich, and Schneider, who is still president, never told JW or his father what came of that inquest, they said.
For months, JW Sr. tried to keep the pressure on Northfield law enforcement officials and the Norwich administration to hold to account those involved in his son’s beating, and those who allegedly tried to change his son’s recollection of the night. He flew east and drove to Norwich for a 50-minute meeting with university leaders and others involved in the investigation, gathering what information he could and pressing those assembled to find out more.
But after returning home to Fremont, a suburb of San Jose, JW Sr. said he stopped hearing back from almost everyone who had been involved in initial efforts to deliver some sort of justice: Schneider, Equal Opportunity Coordinator Stephanie Drew, Vice President of Students Frank Vanacek and Northfield Police Chief Bill Jennings.
Back in California, JW Jr. set his mind to moving on with his life, as angry as he was at his former coach, his assailants, university leaders and even his teammates, who he felt had abandoned him when he needed their help. “It was embarrassing, of course I wanted to get it behind me,” he said. “It was a traumatic experience. I mean, it was my first experience with being a normal college student.”
JW also wanted to salvage his Air Force ROTC scholarship and wrestling career, and worried that speaking out would make that harder to do. “Just try to ignore this and focus on my future,” was his mentality upon returning home, he said.
He enrolled at Arizona State and planned to try out for the wrestling team. But after his first semester at the school, he lost his ROTC scholarship due to violating the three strikes rule — the off-campus drinking at Norwich was strike one, falling off track with his physical training due to the injuries was strike two, and a D grade in one class was strike three. When he lost the scholarship, he could no longer afford tuition, so he dropped out and moved back in with his dad.
He eventually got an internship doing cybersecurity work for a tech company in California. When that finished, he took a job with DoorDash delivering takeout food to people’s houses. He recently applied to rejoin the Air Force, and though his dreams of becoming a pilot have faded, he sees a new future in military cybersecurity work.
When JW saw a news article in September about a group of football players who allegedly beat up three students in their dorm room at Norwich, he decided it was time to tell his story.
“I was shocked, obviously,” JW said of the news of the assault this fall, in which one student was left with stitches around his eye allegedly over a $5 debt. All four of the alleged assailants were charged and eventually suspended from Norwich, but only after statewide media coverage of the incident.
“It’s time to talk about it because obviously they didn’t take corrective measures when it happened to me and now it’s happening to other people — and you know it’s just wrong, flat-out wrong,” JW said. “I know how hard that was to get through, no one else really knows beside the victim and, you know, it’s disgusting to see.”
Jungle juice and a bloody beating
JW had a light dinner with his team on his first day back on Norwich’s campus, then made up for it with a bacon cheeseburger at a nearby restaurant later in the evening. After a year restricted to campus with other freshmen, he was happy to accept an invitation to attend an off-campus party that night at a house rented by a wrestling team captain and his friend.
After going out for burgers with the only other black student on the wrestling team, JW headed back to his dorm room. He changed from a denim shirt and wide jeans to a fancier outfit: a white button-down shirt, white jeans and white shoes.
JW arrived at the party, grabbed a beer and started chatting with friends. He noticed football players casting what he thought were dirty looks in his direction, but gave it little thought. Before long, JW recalls, a junior on the wrestling team came up to him with a chalice filled with “jungle juice,” a mix of Monster energy drinks, vodka and Gatorade powder.
“It was either chug or spill on my outfit,” JW remembered. Then the junior did it again. “I was drunk, but I wasn’t too drunk” JW grabbed another beer with a teammate, who suggested they shotgun it. They chugged the beers, then JW immediately threw up.
What happened after that is a matter of significant disagreement among those present. During both the police investigation and the university’s discrimination probe, Kinahan and other football players described JW as the aggressor, saying that he became belligerent after being told to leave the party.
“Kinahan told me W— began getting physical and angry at him,” Officer Christopher Hoar, who investigated the incident, wrote in the affidavit charging Kinahan, noting that Kinahan was 6 feet tall and 265 pounds, while JW was 5’10” and 174 pounds. “Kinahan told me he pushed W— back, and then W— took a swing at him. Kinahan told me he swung back hitting W— twice and W— dropped.”
Kinahan told a similar story to Tamara Chase, the investigator hired by Norwich to determine whether the assault was racially motivated. Kinahan said he told JW “Don’t touch me,” and then when JW cocked back to punch him he thought “I’m going to have to hit this kid. Because, otherwise he’s a collegiate wrestler, like if we go to the ground this isn’t going to end well for me. “
Chase described in her report two narratives: one being told by three football players and their close friend, a rugby player, and another by JW and two other students who happened to be on the scene. (Chase declined to discuss her work for this article. However, her report — along with the transcripts of her interviews — was made available to JW Jr. for five days upon its completion. JW Sr. provided a copy of the report and transcripts to VTDigger.)
Chase wrote that the credibility of the football players “is diminished by the fact that they have motivation to be less than completely honest on behalf of their friend,” referring to Kinahan, adding that their stories “appeared to be rehearsed, as though there had been an advance discussion about what would be reported.”
She said the other two witnesses, Christopher Reardon and John McDermott, who were near the scene after JW vomited, seemed more credible.
“Reardon has no apparent motivation to mischaracterize what happened. McDermott, if anything, would have allegiance to Riley,” she wrote in her report, using Kinahan’s nickname. Both Reardon and McDermott dismissed the notion that JW started the fight.
Reardon said he was walking by JW just as he threw up, and caught much of the vomit on his side. JW immediately apologized, and Reardon ushered him outside into the small backyard to clean off. Then, he told Chase, a “big dude” in a tank top ran up to them, shouted “What the f—?” and pulled JW outside.
Reardon said he tried to follow them. “And as I was entering the doorway, four or five other guys rushed up behind me and followed them down,” he said. Another guy stepped in front of the doorway and prevented anyone else from going outside.
McDermott, who lived at the house where the party was taking place, identified the man in the tank top as William Palanza, a 225-pound linebacker on the Norwich football team. McDermott said JW was “getting a little rowdy, getting a little loud and he got sick and vomited on my floor and also I think like five or six people.”
The next thing McDermott saw was “William Palanza, he like brings him outside, puts him in a headlock and like wrestles him to the ground. And, this other person, Riley Kinahan, like pulled him down, like punches him in the face twice, like pretty hard.”
JW wasn’t able to identify his attackers, and says he lost consciousness shortly after being jumped. “Somebody hit me, and then we were tussling then someone else got on top and started choking me from the back,” he recalled during an interview last month.
When JW came to, blood was pouring out of cuts on his face and covering his shirt, which came off in the brawl. Both sides of his nose had been broken. His eyes would soon become so swollen that nurses at the hospital had to pry them open. He was later diagnosed with a concussion.
JW got to his feet and demanded to know who had assaulted him. Reardon had returned to the scene and, along with others at the party, helped convince JW to head home and figure it out later. JW walked back to his dorm room and briefly laid down in his bed, but started to feel lightheaded and decided to get a ride to Central Vermont Medical Center. Nurses there glued his cuts shut, sent him to get an X-ray and CAT scan and released him before the sun came up.
The assault was reported to police on Aug. 28, 2016, the day after the party. JW still couldn’t get people who were at the party, including many fellow wrestlers, to tell him who had jumped him. He eventually learned that police had identified Kinahan as the primary assailant. No charges were filed against Palanza.
The private investigator ultimately determined that there was no evidence that discrimination played a part in the assault. “Mere supposition or belief is not enough to establish a violation,” Chase wrote. “The evidence is insufficient to establish racial motivation.”
“I mean I’m a wrestler,” he said, “I’m trained in fighting. I’ve taken punches to the face before.”
Two wrestlers who interacted with JW after the assault also said in interviews this month that the claim that JW’s injuries were caused by two punches was absurd. (Both declined to be named out of concern for their relationships with former teammates, coaches and classmates.)
JW is convinced that Kinahan’s story is a lie, that he took the fall to protect his friends and teammates. He believes three or more football players were involved in the assault. Apart from other witness accounts about a group of guys rushing outside, and another blocking the door, JW says it’s simply not possible that Kinahan did all that damage to his face with two blows.
“If he only got hit twice in the face, then Mike Tyson hit him,” said one of the wrestlers. “I mean his nose was broken, half his face was swollen, his eye was double the size — it looked like he was hit multiple times.”
“They beat the shit out of him, he easily could have been killed,” said another former wrestler. “Even somebody physically built like a football player could not do that damage in two punches.”
Hoar recommended charging Kinahan with aggravated assault and enabling consumption by minors, after he admitted to purchasing the jungle juice ingredients served at the party, according to the affidavit he filed in the case.
“I have probable cause to believe Peter Riley Kinahan DOB: 03/10/1995, committed the offense of Aggravated Assault when he punched (JW) Jr. DOB: 02-23-1997 in the face multiple times rendering (JW) unconscious and causing serious bodily injury and disfigurement in the form of facial lacerations and nasal fractures,” Hoar wrote.
Playing through the legal process
JW Sr. hired a lawyer to help him and his son navigate the legal process after the assault. But he said it only made him feel more distant from the situation, as university and court officials began communicating through his attorney. Time went by, but nothing seemed to be happening.
About three months after the assault, Kinahan’s case was diverted, according to court records, allowing him to avoid the criminal process entirely. The charges were eventually reduced to simple assault, and Kinahan completed diversion in 2018, meaning he now has a clean criminal record.
Kinahan never stopped playing football during his senior year, according to team stats from the season, despite facing felony criminal charges. Two months after the assault, Kinahan appeared in an Instagram post promoting a game against Gallaudet, flexing his beefy arms alongside fellow senior Kurtis Leonard. His player bio page on Norwich’s website boasts that he blocked for a football team that ran for 200 yards per game in the 2016 season.
JW Sr. said school officials told him after his son was assaulted that they could not take any administrative action against Kinahan until the legal process played out. However, that appears to contradict the university’s handling of the assault that occurred on campus this year.
At least one of the defendants, football captain Owen McKenna, was allowed to play on homecoming weekend in September — just weeks after being charged with assault and felony burglary. But he was suspended after VTDigger and television stations reported on the situation, and while his case was still playing out in Washington County criminal court.
JW Sr. said he suspected public pressure made the difference. “I really think that Norwich has been getting away with doing things however they want for so long that they just don’t care,” he said. “Whatever they think will mute people the quickest is the way they try to handle it. They knew I was gonna fly back to California, so they thought ‘We won’t see him again.’”
Norwich wouldn’t say whether Kinahan faced any internal punishment — or make any comment on the case. Daphne Larkin, the school’s spokesperson, confirmed that Kinahan graduated in May 2018, a year after his classmates.
Kinahan’s mother said in a Facebook message in October that he would soon enter the Marines. She did not respond to a request from a reporter to speak with Kinahan about his assault case. Calls to a phone numbers listed for Kinahan and Pallanza, and their families were not returned. Two other witnesses who corroborated Kinahan’s account to investigators — Tyler Simmons, a football player, and Curtis Spalt, a rugby player — did not respond to requests for comment sent to their Facebook accounts.
Kinahan’s lawyer during the 2016 case, Jon Valsangiacomo, said details emerged during the legal process that caused the case to be “dismissed,” but that he didn’t recall specifics — and likely wouldn’t be able to speak about them anyway because proceedings become confidential when a case is diverted.
Rory Thibault, the current Washington County state’s attorney, said the case was handled by his predecessor, Scott Williams, who resigned in early 2018 amid odd circumstances that Williams attributed to post-traumatic stress following a grisly murder of a social worker in 2015.
Thibault said Kinahan’s diversion was completed on Feb. 15, 2018, and that his record was sealed. Clerks at the court briefly allowed a reporter to view the files, before realizing they were supposed to remain private.
The decision to reduce the charge against Kinahan from aggravated assault to simple assault made diversion more likely. Even as Vermont has encouraged restorative justice practices, particularly for young people, serious violent crimes are usually where prosecutors draw the line when it comes to moving cases out of criminal courts.
Aggravated assault is defined under Vermont law as a “bodily injury that creates any of the following: (i) a substantial risk of death; (ii) a substantial loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ; (iii) a substantial impairment of health; or (iv) substantial disfigurement.”
JW said nobody told him why his injuries didn’t meet the threshold for aggravated assault, or even that the charge had been reduced. JW Jr. and JW Sr. both said they were frustrated to hear that Kinahan’s case was diverted. “I would never have agreed to that, my son would never have agreed to that, and our lawyer would never have agreed to that,” JW Sr. said.
JW Jr. said a victim’s advocate for the court asked him to fill out an impact statement and send in his medical bills, amounting to $2,961.04, which Kinahan reimbursed as part of his diversion agreement. “Eventually they made him do some letter of apology or something,” JW Jr. recalls. He isn’t sure he ever got the letter, and didn’t hold onto it if he did.
‘Ignorance is bliss’
Alex Whitney was hired in 2012 to turn around Norwich’s struggling wrestling program. An article in the Norwich student newspaper, the Guidon, in 2014, said Whitney, who graduated from the university in 2008, had quickly turned around a program that was on the brink of being canceled just years earlier.
“Over the past two seasons, there has been a noticeable increase in participation, exposure, and all-around success,” the article said. “I just wanted to get the program back on the right track — the Cadet Way,” Whitney is quoted as saying. “That means excelling and trying your hardest in all phases of life, and wrestling as a whole is great for that.”
JW only wrestled in one scoring collegiate bout his freshman year, falling to Spencer Kiehm of Harvard in the 174-pound weight class. Younger wrestlers generally travel with the team, taking part in exhibition matches before the top wrestlers on the main card begin the scoring matches, which determine which team wins.
JW was anticipating more main card action, and better results, in his second year at Norwich. “I was expecting to do well academically, expecting to have a chance to fight my way to the starting lineup,” he said. “So when I got back to compete for the starting spot, I think I would have had a good shot, honestly, but what happened happened.”
In the days after JW was assaulted, he started getting splitting headaches. The pain became so intense that he checked himself into the university infirmary. While laid up in an infirmary bed, he says, wrestling coach Alex Whitney paid him a visit — not to console him but to get him to change his story.
JW says his coach tried to convince him that his memory of events before and after the assault was unclear, and then accused him of threatening to get a gun and shoot the football players — a detail that did not appear to come up in other investigations of the night.
“He insisted I said I was gonna get a gun and go shoot them, and I was like, no I never said that. And he just really tried to force it down my throat that I said that. And then he said ‘ignorance is bliss’; and started saying he was playing the devil’s advocate,” JW said last month.
“I understood that as he wanted me to act like I didn’t know the details of what happened and he wanted me to basically not name any of his wrestlers as being a part of it,” he said.
Norwich has strict policies on students drinking, with only one offense potentially resulting in a suspension, or “marching tours” for cadets — a punishment that involves marching back and forth for hours in the middle of campus. Though wrestlers were not involved in JW’s assault, a number of them were at the party — including Dave Rodgers, the team captain who lived at the house.
JW Sr. believes that Whitney’s efforts to get his son to stop pressing the issue of who was responsible for the assault, and who knew about it, was to protect other wrestlers from the consequences of increased scrutiny of that night. JW Sr. said he asked Norwich administrators to offer amnesty from alcohol violations to students who could offer information about that night, but was denied. “There’s this code of silence at Norwich University that’s really hard to break,” he said.
Whitney’s visit to the infirmary was the last straw for JW and his father. JW Sr. wrote to Schneider, Norwich’s president, about Whitney’s visit. He wrote that some of the wrestlers had also told JW to leave them out of his reports to police and investigators on the assault, which JW Jr. corroborated during his interview last month.
“This is intimidating a witness and we will be reporting this to the Police,” JW Sr. said of Whitney’s visit in the letter to Schneider, which he provided to VTDigger. “This is the reason why I want my son removed from the campus as soon as possible.”
Schneider wrote back to JW Sr. saying he would look into the complaint immediately. “If Coach did as you have reported it would not be right, and would be against our policies. It may be criminal as you suggest also. We will check it out right away. We are working with Northfield PD and Stephanie Drew our title IX coordinator has reached out to you son (sic). We are working to get to the bottom of this with the police. Thanks so much for letting us know,” he wrote, according to a copy of the email provided by JW Sr. (Larkin, the Norwich spokesperson, declined to comment on the email.)
JW Sr. says he never heard back from Norwich on the result of that investigation. Whitney is still coaching Norwich’s wrestling team.
Whitney said in a phone call with a VTDigger reporter that he would have to check with the Norwich administration before answering questions about JW. He texted back later referring all questions to Larkin and did not respond to a follow-up text asking specifically if he had tried to convince JW to change his story.
In an interview with Chase, the private investigator, Whitney denied explicitly trying to get JW to change his story, but does say that he challenged his recollection of the night.
“I attempted to calm W— down and kind of explained to him like, right now your health needs to be first. You can’t be a detective,” Whitney recalled saying.
“One of the things I was talking to W— about in the conversation I had in the infirmary was like that it takes two to tango,” he added. Whitney said he and JW argued about how drunk he was that night, with JW insisting that he wasn’t particularly intoxicated, and had a clear memory of the night apart from the brief stretch when he was unconscious.
“I was like, I don’t really believe that,” Whitney said. “From my perspective I believe the escalation story that the football players told, and I think the crime was how far it went, how far the injuries went. I think that when you have drunk boys around, especially at a school like ours where there’s a lot of testosterone, things tend to lead to these places.”
Whitney also said he pressed JW for evidence that the assault was racially motivated, and was unconvinced by his answer that it was evident in the brutality of his attackers. “From everything I’ve gathered, I don’t think that race was the catalyst here for the altercation, but I could be wrong,” he told the investigator.
The coach described JW as “a great kid,” with “awesome” grades, but added that he “needs help,” and said his life history — his mother struggled with drug addiction and hadn’t been part of his life since he was young — helped explain his angry response to the situation. “I think also the expectation of immediate retaliation was also where he was brought up in a little rougher of an area,” he said.
Asked about that theory, JW said: “I wasn’t in a frail psychological state, I was just looking at the facts of the situation.” JW Sr. noted that the family lives in an upscale part of Fremont where the average income is household income is over $100,000. In Northfield, by comparison, the average household income is just north of $60,000.
One of the wrestlers who spoke on condition of anonymity said that he felt Whitney handled the situation responsibly. “I don’t know what he said to other people but I do know he told us that wasn’t cool in terms of having a party and we were obviously supposed to be supporting our teammates,” he said.
The other wrestler said JW’s claims about Whitney, which JW told him about at the time, were consistent with the coach’s behavior during other incidents when wrestlers ran into trouble. “It is what he always does. He has this big loud mouth, nice guy, it’s about development and academics first, things that parents like to hear, but as soon as there’s the slightest trouble, he runs.”
Whitney’s teams have continued to post losing records the past three seasons. However, Whitney says the program has its priorities straight. “We have a young team, but all are what we consider to be the quintessential fit to Norwich,” Whitney said heading into last season, in an article on the Norwich athletics website. “They’re hard working, teachable, and all work with the team in mind first and foremost.”
The Norwich way
Norwich University is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, marked by banners throughout campus and a series of events that have doubled as something of a farewell tour for Schneider, who has been the school’s president since 1992.
“One of the longest seated college presidents in the country, Dr. Richard W. Schneider proudly carries on the tradition Norwich University founder Capt. Alden Partridge began 200 years ago of developing ‘citizen soldiers,’” says a biography of Schneider on the university’s website.
“With Dr. Schneider’s guidance and direction, Norwich University continues to educate and prepare tomorrow’s leaders who excel in the fields of battle as well as in corporate boardrooms,” it continues.
JW said he had initially hoped to enroll at the Air Force academy, but didn’t get in and learned of Norwich through online ads and an email recruiting him to apply. “It seemed like a place for me to go and grow — become a man, learn my craft,” he recalled.
Schneider stayed silent as statewide media attention briefly focused on his university this autumn, when a football captain was allowed back on the field despite facing criminal charges of assault and battery. Through Larkin, he declined multiple interview requests about that incident, and again for this story. Norwich’s head football coach, Mark Murnyack, did not return calls seeking comment about both incidents
JW says he blames many people for what happened to him. “I blame President Schneider first and foremost because he was president of the university and he was aware of the situation. So it’s his responsibility to go down the chain of command and say ‘Hey, athletic director you need to talk to the football coach and have something done about this.’ It’s the football coach’s responsibility to say ‘Hey, you guys are getting drunk at parties beating up underclassmen, you can’t do that on my team.’”
JW Sr. said his desire for justice has been reignited by the latest assault involving football players, and the stories he has been hearing from other Norwich parents whose children say their own experiences of abuse were mishandled or buried by the administration.
“The issue,” he said, “is that Norwich continues to cover up behavior of athletes and allow them to play while other students and their families have their lives turned upside down.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: For one-time cadet, recent assault at Norwich University felt painfully familiar.