On May 10, a DU student became paralyzed after an unclear chain of events beginning in J-Mac and ending at Denver Health. The Clarion sat down with Ben Gerig, one of DU’s External Communications Specialists, to find out details about the incident.

“The student came home to J-Mac at about 1:30 in the morning, at which point the res-life (Resident Assistants) folks saw that he was in distress,” said Gerig.

“There’s pretty clear action steps no matter what the health issue is, so they called Campus Safety and Campus Safety called Denver Paramedics because we aren’t medical professionals. We don’t diagnose.

So, once they were on site, they did their assessments, and he was in the care of Denver Paramedics at that point and we were confident that he was in the appropriate care.”
DU let Denver Paramedics drive the student towards Denver Cares, a detoxification center downtown, and heard news on Tuesday that the student had gone into paralysis.

“Will [Will Jones, DU’s External Communications Manager] and Kevin [Kevin Carroll, DU’s Vice Chancellor of the Division of Marketing & Communications]were notified that the student had experienced a very severe injury and the parents were obviously distraught, at which point we looked back on the sequence of events leading up to that,” said Gerig.

“We have a very clear understanding that we saw the Denver Paramedics walk the student to their mode of transportation, at which point it’s not in our care anymore.”

Gerig said this has been a hard experience for all parties involved.

“This is difficult to process for a lot of students, not just the student and his family, So we want to provide as much support and understanding for the family and immediate friends, people in the residence hall and all of our students. To my knowledge, the University did what they always do.”

The Clarion has no further information on this situation, and wishes the best to the student along with his family, friends and peers.