www.sacbee.com/education/...278124.html

CSUS rampage may have started before victim arrived
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Buzz up!By Laurel Rosenhall and Ed Fletcher
lrosenhall@sacbee.com
Published: Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 4B
Last Modified: Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009 - 9:49 am
Sacramento State officials released a detailed timeline Friday of the response to this week's deadly violence inside a campus dormitory that suggests Quran Jones started his rampage before his victim got home.

At approximately 2:10 p.m. Wednesday, a resident assistant reported hearing noise and windows breaking in the suite, said Gloria Moraga, vice president for public affairs. Records from an electronic lock on the door to the suite indicate that roommate Scott Hawkins entered the room six minutes later.

"We do know that something was going on before he entered the room," said Lori Varlotta, vice president for student affairs.

Dorm residents said Wednesday they saw Jones through a window, smashing up his room and hitting himself with a baseball bat. He is accused of beating Hawkins to death and charging at campus police with a knife. Officers shot him after he failed to respond to pepper-ball volleys.

Campus officials said nothing indicates Jones was using drugs, despite a roommate's account that Jones had recently expressed curiosity about a hallucinogenic drug called DMT.

"There is no evidence of any drug use," Dan Davis, chief of university police, said Friday during a news conference outside the American River Courtyard dorms.

A toxicology report might shed more light on what fueled the attack, but the results are not yet available, he said.

The Sacramento Police Department has interviewed Jones – who is in serious condition at UC Davis Medical Center after being shot by university police – but can't say what started the outburst.

When he's released from the hospital, Jones will face one charge of murder and one count of attempted murder of a police officer.

Spencer Dirrim, 19, who shared the five-bedroom suite with Jones, Hawkins and two others, said Jones had been researching DMT as part of a larger quest for spiritual meaning.

"He implied he might want to try it, but he never outright said he was planning on it," Dirrim said. "He believed it might be a path to a plane of higher consciousness."

DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, is a powerful psychedelic drug that has effects similar to LSD or hallucinogenic mushrooms, but is more intense, said Gordon Taylor, assistant special agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Sacramento.

"It's popular in club scenes in some areas, but we haven't seen it in the Sacramento area," Taylor said.

DMT can be smoked, snorted, injected or brewed into a tea, he said. It is derived from a plant, but synthetic versions are produced in illegal labs. In recent years, authorities have busted DMT labs in Mendocino County and Hollywood, he said.

Unlike drugs such as methamphetamines or PCP, DMT is not associated with violent behavior, Taylor said.

Jones was known on campus as a peaceful person, quiet and well-mannered. A professor described him as a devoted student; friends and roommates said he was thoughtful and a bit reserved.

Jones is the foster child of a San Francisco couple who have said Jones is a kind, loving son. His biological father, Willie Jones, said during an interview late Thursday night at UC Davis Medical Center that he had talked to his son just a few days before.

"It's hard to believe what happened," Jones said. "I really, really feel bad about the other people's son. I wished he hadn't died."

Willie Jones said his son is an inquisitive young man who had talked about entering the military.

"He's a really good kid," Willie Jones said. "(His) life's just getting started."

Dirrim said Jones "was looking for the greater truth in life."

"He had a feeling there was something greater he could be a part of, some form of ascension to a higher form of consciousness," Dirrim said.

Jones told his roommate DMT might lead to the type of experience he sought, Dirrim said. He said he never saw Jones take any drugs or drink alcohol. But "he mentioned a book called 'DMT: The Spirit Molecule' that talked about this extensively," Dirrim said.

The author of that book is Rick Straussman, a psychiatry professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine who conducted a large study on DMT in the early 1990s to see what kinds of reactions it caused.

Most of his subjects experienced visual hallucinations and out of body sensations, Straussman said. Some went into extreme emotional states, or felt anxious. But none of them became violent, he said.

"I've never heard of anybody attacking anybody after smoking DMT," Straussman said.

Dirrim said he didn't mention Jones' interest in DMT to police when they questioned him Wednesday following the attack. He said it didn't occur to him until later that night as he ruminated on the day's events. He sent Sacramento police a follow-up e-mail at 11:33 p.m.

"Quran takes an interest in hallucinogens in a spiritual context," Dirrim wrote.

"In particular, he has often discussed the compound Dimethyltryptamine or DMT as a gateway to powerful spiritual experiences. He had never taken it, though he has often expressed interest in the compound and the hallucinations and spiritual experiences that it produces. He has also extended this interest to other psychedelic compounds, though had never used any (to my knowledge)."