A 19-year-old African-American student at Trinity International University has been charged with sending racially inflammatory hate mail to her classmates, prompting last week’s evacuation of minority students from the suburban Chicago school.
Alicia Hardin of Chicago was charged with disorderly conduct and committing a hate crime for allegedly writing threatening letters to other African-American students.
The letters were written in an attempt to convince her parents to let her withdraw from Trinity, Lake County Assistant State’s Atty. Matthew Chancey said.
Hardin lived on the Bannockburn campus, was unhappy there and wanted to transfer to Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss., he said.
“By writing these notes, we believe she wanted to have her mother believe [Trinity] was an unsafe environment,” Chancey said.
Hardin was assigned a $5,000 bond during a hearing Tuesday morning in the Waukegan courtroom of Judge Victoria Martin. The defendant could be freed after posting 10 percent of the amount, or $500 cash.
Chancey told the court the prosecution requested the low bond because Hardin did not pose “a real risk to the safety of the community, as long as the conditions included she has no contact with the victims or the university.”
Martin granted the prosecutor’s request, and set a 24-hour curfew for Hardin, restricting her to home except to go to work or meet with her attorneys. After Hardin told the court she did not believe her family could afford a lawyer, the judge also assigned a public defender to the case.
Hardin appeared confused in court. Questions put to her often had to be repeated as she stood before the judge, her arms wrapped around herself, softly answering “yes, ma’am” or “no, ma’am.”
The defendant told the judge she was taking anti-anxiety medication and had a prior arrest record from 1998 or 1999, when she was charged with battery and criminal damage to property.
Police said the woman was one of a number of students interviewed Monday by a task force of investigators from the Bannockburn Police Department, the FBI, campus security and police from Deerfield, Highland Park and Libertyville.
Hardin allegedly admitted writing the three letters that caused the uproar.
The letters, sent over a two-week period, had been written on notebook paper and apparently in the same handwriting. They were turned over to the FBI for analysis.
Tuesday in court, Chancey read portions of the third letter, received last Thursday: “I saw you in the chapel. … I had my gun in my pocket, but I wouldn’t shoot.”
That letter prompted university officials and police to take the precautionary step of moving 43 students of color to an unidentified hotel Thursday night.
