By EZEKIEL KINGSBURY
Early Saturday morning, pandemonium erupted in Pearsons. DK’s, the newly refurbished campus coffee bar, was left in shambles. According to Lilliane McCully’28, “I walked into DK’s, and it was like the apocalypse. Tables and chairs thrown around, metal legs of tables broken clean off, soup spattered everywhere.”
It was a grisly scene, less coffee bar and more of a grounds zero, made even more startling by the fact that McCully was the first to report it. She had to inform Security, whose office sits just one floor below, about the destruction. Having gone to DK’s with a classroom partner to work on an assignment, she recalls nothing but ruin and wreckage. “The seasoning and sauce packets were all dumped in the trash. The [food] donation box was torn apart. Basically, anything they could get their hands on was destroyed.”
Tables were indeed broken. Even well after the clean-up, the Round Table was able to find one truncated table, terribly twisted (as well as an empty can of soup laying about).
But who was responsible?
“This has to have been more than one person,” McCully speculated. “When we told Security about it, they agreed. We were wondering if it was a statement of some kind, but if it was, it is not clear what the statement was.”
McCully informed me of this at 12:30 p.m. during Commons brunch, and your intrepid reporter rushed straight to the scene. I was immediately met by security officer J. Bauer. When asked for a comment, Bauer told the Round Table that we were not allowed to print an article on the event. Tae Charles, ResLife Coordinator, sitting at one of the tables and steeped in dismay, simply and repeatedly told me and my co-journalist Vivian Kopka’27, “No.”
When asked why we shouldn’t run the story, we were told the police would be getting involved. Why Bauer thought this meant we shouldn’t run an article is a mystery of its own to be solved. While we were expressly forbidden from taking photos at the time or investigating further, Kopka has constructed an ink rendering of the scene based off our admittedly brief encounter. Truly, it was disgusting. The place was nasty.
And the worst part? Some poor tour guides had to parade parents and potential pupils past the pulverized property, McCully lamented.
Admissions confirmed with us that they did, in fact, have tours going into DK’s that dreadful morning. Olivia Ritze’26, a Beloit College tour guide directly exposed to the scene, recounted bringing her group in through the side door,and immediately spotting the sauces spilled all over the floor. Moving into the dining hall, she noticed tables and chairs flipped over, and finally, when reaching the front of Pearsons (where the stained glass window once was) she spotted something on the carpet that looked like vomit.
She was leading a tour with two parents and one student. The scene was actually “pretty common for a Saturday morning tour, actually. There’s always something messed up,” she said. “Especially in the warmer months, places like the Wall are completely trashed.” Ritze made light of the situation and apologized, and the parents and student seemed to be pretty understanding.
The trouble was, “We walked in on this right while I was explaining how [Pearsons] is open 24 hours and how Security was in the basement.” It seemed to “give a bad impression, that Security is not diligent enough to stop that from happening in their own building.”
Ritze agrees with the hypothesis that this act was done by multiple people. “It’s the typical M.O. for fiascos like this.”
There have been some whispers that this could have been the actions of those mysterious figures (perhaps local high school students?) that have been sneaking into dorms this past week. Pearsons is open 24/7 and, unlike basically every other building, does not require an ID card to get in. More terrifying is the idea that the culprit(s?) could have been one of our fellow students. While there supposedly is a security camera at the interior west entry of Pearsons, the scrambling at the scene indicates that it came up short.
But nothing right now is certain. What we do know is that the hooligans must have wreaked their havoc after 11:30 p.m., when our sports editor, Elliot Ave-Lallemant’27, left the building. As for me, when I left around 10:00 right after guest-starring on Ave-Lallemant’s radio show “I’m Just the PR Guy,” the place was as sparkling clean as the day it had been born.
For a guy like myself, who has the privilege of pouring your precious pick-me-ups, the sheer amount of soup slopped and smeared onto every surface was simply sickening. I pray this is not retaliation for that time I put only one shot in a double-shot iced caramel macchiato. If it is, why go for the donation box? Sicko behavior.
Featured image: Vivian Kopka’27
Additional images: Ezekiel Kingsbury’25
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