Sea of indifference?

The state police are investigating the disappearance of Bryan Nisenfeld.
Will they be able to crack the case?

by Jody Ericson

Bryan Nisenfeld

To try and make sense of the investigation into the disappearance of Roger Williams freshman Bryan Nisenfeld is to experience what Nisenfeld might have felt during the last week he was seen alive -- confusion and frustration. Despite much speculation, no one knows what really happened to him.

The fact that Nisenfeld's disappearance remains unsolved is troubling enough, but his parents' suffering has been compounded by the defensive and self-interested pose of the university and local police. Even by institutional standards, Roger Williams seems to be overly controlling of the flow of information in the case, while officials there are at a loss to explain why they haven't kept the pressure on the Bristol police to continue their search for Nisenfeld.

"Maybe Bryan doesn't want to be found," says dean of students Karen Haskell. But after a year of not hearing from him -- and the medical examiner's all but identifying bones that washed up on Hog Island last August as belonging to Nisenfeld -- that line of response appears to border on the callous.

Bristol police captain Joseph DaSilva also has run out of excuses. Criticized for not aggressively pursuing the disappearance of Nisenfeld, DaSilva initially said that the 18-year-old had run away -- and thus didn't justify a full-blown investigation. Now that the state medical examiner has preliminarily identified the bones, DaSilva says he is "leaning" toward declaring the cause of death a suicide. His theory is that Nisenfeld jumped off the Mount Hope Bridge behind Roger Williams -- and drowned in the churning waters below.

"I can't make up something that isn't there," says DaSilva, when asked why he discounts the possibility that Nisenfeld was a victim of foul play. But according to one ranking state criminal justice official, from the start the investigation was, in fact, not pursued vigorously enough. Faced with four options -- a runaway, a suicide, an accident, or foul play -- the Bristol police seem to have followed the path of least resistance.

This is partly why the state police, under orders from the state Attorney General's office and under political pressure from the likes of US Senator John Chafee (R-Rhode Island), are now looking into the case -- against DaSilva's stated wishes. While the ranking state official says he has no idea what the outcome of the state police investigation will be, both he and Nisenfeld's parents say that if there is something to find, the state police will find it. They will conduct their investigation to its natural conclusion.

In the end, the state police will have few facts and a lot of hearsay to go on. Wearing a blue Roger Williams sweatshirt, blue jeans, and a brown corduroy jacket with a leather collar, Bryan Nisenfeld was last seen on campus on February 6, 1997. According to his parents, six days before this, Nisenfeld had had a heated argument over the phone with Josh Cohen, a friend of his who'd dropped out of Roger Williams the previous semester (see "Invisible man," June 13, 1997). The parents claim that Cohen threatened their son.

DaSilva says Cohen did no such thing. But in a recent telephone interview from his home in Marietta, Georgia, Cohen himself admitted that he indeed could've left a menacing message for Nisenfeld last winter -- but only in jest.

Cohen says that he and Nisenfeld "used to mess around a lot" and say goofy things on each other's voice mail. "I think what [the police] got was an old message on the machine," he says, although the authorities have not mentioned anything about a message from Cohen. "We used to threaten each other. You know, `Hey, Bryan. I'm going to get you.' "

Cohen also acknowledges that prior to Nisenfeld's disappearance, he got into trouble at RWU -- because of a pipe he stored in Nisenfeld's dorm room. Cohen had picked up the pipe his previous year abroad in Israel, and he describes it as a "glass vase with a rod coming up and a hose.

"It can be used for drugs," says Cohen, but people in the Middle East smoke tobacco in it -- "It's like cigarettes," he says. Although Cohen invited university officials to test the pipe for drugs if they were concerned about this, they ultimately confiscated it.

Asked if Nisenfeld did drugs, Cohen says, "He went through his phase, but he was straight.

"It kind of makes me mad that I've been turned on," says Cohen, referring to the allegations made by Nisenfeld's parents. "I think the parents are desperate, and they're just so upset. There was never a dispute, nothing that would make him [Nisenfeld] disappear."

Nisenfeld's parents, though, insist that Cohen so frightened their son when he returned to school after winter break that Bryan called his father in New Jersey one night -- at 12:30 a.m. -- and asked him to come and get him that very instant. Worried that something was seriously wrong, Steven Nisenfeld contacted campus security the next morning. Six days later, he received word that his son was missing.

When local police searched Nisenfeld's dorm room on February 12, the door was unlocked and the stereo still on. Nisenfeld had left behind his gloves, glasses, and Walkman, which he usually took with him wherever he went. Packing up her son's belongings to take home a few months later, Nisenfeld's mother, Marianne Brown, says she found something else -- piles of sand in his bed. The discovery startled Brown, she says, because her son was such a neatnik. Something, she thought, was wrong.

In a practical sense, it's hard to blame Roger Williams officials for their initial knee-jerk response to Nisenfeld's disappearance, which was to put the best possible spin on it. Every university wants to protect its reputation and to avoid needlessly alarming students. More important, when it comes to publicly reporting campus incidents, college officials argue that they are caught between a rock and a hard place because they are also obligated to protect a student's privacy.

As RWU's Haskell points out, the students "are legally of age and adults, [so] the information is confidential."

Still, in Nisenfeld's case the school's own actions make it hard to believe that Roger Williams is acting purely in the best interest of the missing student. In the wake of so-called "scandals" at other schools -- the recent date-rape controversy at Brown, for instance, or the 1996 attack on a fraternity house by University of Rhode Island football players -- college officials also acted decisively to protect their institutional images, but they did so in part by being more open with the campus communications.

After the fraternity house incident, URI president Robert Carothers held a press conference to publicly denounce the violence and to forfeit an upcoming football game in atonement. At Brown, campus officials wrote letters in response to the student newspaper's aggressive coverage of the date-rape controversy, thus furthering the debate -- and the community's overall learning process.

But such has not been the case at Roger Williams. In fact, one college staff member was so intent on controlling the outcome of the Nisenfeld controversy, the official allegedly made up a story to tell prospective students and their parents. According to a report in the Hawk's Eye, Roger Williams's student newspaper, last fall a member of the admissions office told university tour guides that if anyone asked about Nisenfeld, they should say that he was "safe at home with his parents."

Furious about the article, Nisenfeld's mother, Marianne Brown, immediately dashed off a letter to RWU president Anthony Santoro. "You have four children. Is this how you would want one of them treated if something happened to them?" she asked.

But rather than vow to investigate the allegation, Santoro simply blamed the newspaper for printing inaccuracies and lamented how he didn't have more control over students. "Unfortunately, our society has seen fit to eliminate much of the authority that a college president could exercise as late as the 1950s and early '60s," Santoro wrote. "It is very difficult to censor a newspaper, even if I were so inclined and even if it were to print the truth."

But according to several sources at the university, Roger Williams officials have found other ways to suppress the truth. One employee says that he and others at the university have been subtly discouraged from coming forward with information about the case. (He would not allow the Phoenix to elaborate on what he knows.) When Nisenfeld first disappeared, he says, employees were told to stick to the script and read an official statement prepared by the university. What's more, if a student had questions, he says, they were told not to answer them.

"If they [university officials] knew I was talking to you, I'd be fired on the spot," says the employee.

In response to the brewing controversy on campus, the Hawk's Eye ran a front-page series about Nisenfeld last October. But when university officials asked the editor in chief not to distribute the publication at the entrance of a RWU open house, she, too, cried "censorship."

"I thought it was a good thing, because we considered the issue a memorial to Bryan," says editor in chief Beth Lebowitz. But an administrative staff member insisted otherwise, saying that the issue was "too dark" and that it would leave visitors with a negative impression of the school.

Asked to comment on this, RWU officials again took the offensive, criticizing the newspaper and refusing to acknowledge that Nisenfeld's disappearance is not good PR. Dean of enrollment management Lynn Fawthrop says that the Hawk's Eye was an "embarrassment to the university" at the open house not because of its content but because it was "appallingly written." That's why Lebowitz was asked to sit back down among the other clubs in the lobby, where she was still allowed to give a copy of the Hawk's Eye to anyone who asked for one.

"Appallingly written," of course, is not a very diplomatic -- or even a completely accurate -- description of the newspaper. Although the Hawk's Eye does have its flaws, the stories about Nisenfeld came out of a journalism class assignment, and they were accurately reported. Certainly, they didn't engender the degree of "embarrassment" that Fawthrop describes.

Roger Williams officials also apparently quarreled with the paper's layout. Haskell says that when they complained that the Hawk's Eye containing the Nisenfeld series was "too dark," they meant that the cover, a collage of photos of Nisenfeld and his family, had too much black in it. It wasn't that the topic was too dark for prospective students, she says.

The student newspaper issue dedicated to Nisenfeld and the administration's negative response to it suggest the conflicting point of views at Roger Williams. As Haskell says, "we all have our filters." And, indeed, in the telling of any story it is important to consider what lens is on the camera.

As an example, Haskell weighs why Nisenfeld's father, Steven, is no longer allowed on campus without an escort. Nisenfeld says he suspects that RWU officials are trying to thwart his investigation into his son's disappearance. But Haskell claims they are really looking out for the students.

Steven Nisenfeld is "welcome to talk to any student he wants to," says Haskell, "but we felt a need to have him not just show up on their doorstep. They don't have to deal with an agitated individual. Many have moved on and don't want to talk about it."

Ultimately, both sides have a point, but the larger question of when -- if ever -- college officials have a right to keep certain incidents confidential remains. There is no doubt that, in some instances, universities abuse their autonomy or hide behind the students'-right-to-privacy argument to avoid taking responsibility for troubling incidents which take place within their jurisdiction.

According to a recent article in the New Republic, schools neglect to report as many as 75 percent of the crimes committed on their campuses. Even worse, a 1992 survey of campus police and security personnel found that college officials actually discouraged student victims from reporting a crime to campus security. Instead, if their attacker was a fellow student, complainants were advised to use the campus judicial system -- where it's easier to keep things under wraps.

Why would campus officials go to such lengths to hide crimes and other potentially unpleasant incidents? (According to one article in a publication called Campus Watch, after a student was brutally murdered at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, the administration actually shut down campus phones to keep the word from getting out.) Connie Clery, co-founder of Security on Campus, Inc. (SOC), sums it up in a word: fund-raising. Every school, she says, wants to present a bright and flawless package to potential donors.

As a result, "justice is more likely to be served off campus than on," says Clery. "If you get attacked in a bar, you're better off than if it had happened in your dorm."

In 1986, Clery's own daughter, Jeanne, was raped, beaten, and murdered in her dorm room at Lehigh University by a student she didn't know. And since then, Clery has dedicated her life to avenging Jeanne's death. She does this by telling a side of the story that most universities don't want you to know -- that students may not be as safe at college as parents think.

Something happened to Bryan Nisenfeld. That's for sure. Nobody knows what it was. And that's troubling.

Haskell says that Roger Williams has turned over all information they possess to "the experts." Those experts are the Bristol police captain Joseph DaSilva in particular. DaSilva has been almost aggressively indifferent to Nisenfeld's disappearance since the beginning. Having spent 30 years of his life as a small-town cop, he says no one has the right to tell him how to do his job -- not Steven Nisenfeld and not the state police. And he refuses to be boxed into other people's theories, including those that Nisenfeld was murdered.

DaSilva seems content to stand by his preliminary conclusions. The police captain says he acts on tips as they come in. Other than this, he apparently hasn't worked on the case in months. Several faculty members contacted by the Phoenix (one of whom claims the school knows more than it is saying) have yet to hear from DaSilva, they say, while the captain has talked with Josh Cohen only briefly, over the telephone.

Still, even if he did suspect that Cohen could shed more light on Nisenfeld's disappearance, DaSilva says that there is not a lot more he can do. The Bristol Police Department "won't pay for" a flight to Marietta, Georgia, where Cohen lives with his parents. Unless an officer is following up on a definite homicide, he says, the town can't afford to sink a lot of money or manpower into an investigation.

"And you can't ask me to do it on my own time, my own costs," says DaSilva.

The captain says this and yet, all along, he has resisted bringing in the state police, who obviously do have the resources and time to fly to Georgia for more information, if need be. A possible reason for this is that, according to one Rhode Island law-enforcement source, bad blood flows between the Bristol and state police.

Because Bristol is considered a "friendly department," the source says, local police officers have been suspected in the past of warning potential targets of state police drug busts in their town -- and ruining planned sting operations in the process.

In July 1996 the state police also publicly embarrassed the Bristol Fraternity Order of Police by seizing a video poker machine from the FOP's lodge. (Oddly enough, the machine had been seized by the Attorney General's ill-fated strike force in a gambling raid in Central Falls two years before. How it ended up with the Bristol FOP is still a mystery.)

As for DaSilva himself, he had what must have been a disturbing brush with the state police. In August 1995 they charged him with assaulting a hearing- and speech-impaired 18-year-old woman after she claimed that the captain had hugged and kissed her in his office. A District Court judge later cleared DaSilva of the charges, and DaSilva says he doesn't blame the state police for bringing them in the first place. "They followed up on a complaint and did their job," he says.

Still, a defensive edge creeps into his voice every time he talks about the state police getting involved in the Nisenfeld case. DaSilva says in no uncertain terms that they "can't take over the case unless I give it up."

Later, in exasperation, he says, "If they want the case, they can have it." But then he admits that he has yet to talk with anyone from the state police -- or that he has, in his own words, even "given up the case."

According to state police assistant detective commander Michael P. Quinn, it doesn't matter. The state police can -- and are -- looking into the Nisenfeld case. Quinn won't say why the Attorney General's office has asked them to do so, but in copies of letters Steven Nisenfeld gave to the Phoenix, it is obvious that political pressure was brought to bear on the case.

Both of Rhode Island's US senators, Jack Reed and John Chafee, approached Governor Lincoln Almond and Attorney General Jeff Pine about the case. And in response, Almond's deputy executive counsel, Harris Weiner, told Steven Nisenfeld, in a letter dated November 5, 1997, that "we were informed yesterday that the attorney general of Rhode Island has reviewed this matter and is directing the Rhode Island State Police to conduct further review and investigation of this case."

"When we're called to assist, we go," says Quinn matter-of-factly. "We're asking the Bristol Police Department to be part of this cooperative effort."

In the end, if the state police do uncover something that explains why Nisenfeld vanished, it may not be what everyone is hoping for. "I think Bryan slipped on the rocks and fell into the water," says Steven Nisenfeld, after a particularly long day of missing his son last December. "I think that's what I want to believe." But he doesn't know for sure. The question remains unanswered.

Jody Ericson can be reached at jericson[a]phx.com.