NEW BRUNSWICK — Within a matter of days last month, the promising lives of two New Jersey college students are destroyed. The story of one tragedy becomes a cautionary tale, heard around the world, about indifference, humiliation, and threats to privacy posed by uncontrolled, computer-based social networking. The details of what happened to Tyler Clementi at Rutgers University will not soon be forgotten.

But what happened to Jessica Moore, a Seton Hall sophomore, already seems destined soon to become just one more senseless act of urban gun violence, blurred together with other, similar incidents and, perhaps, soon forgotten.

Why? Is it a matter of race, or class? Moore was an African-American from the rural south, shot and killed at a party in East Orange, where many poor blacks live. Clementi was white, raised in Ridgewood, one of the state’s wealthiest suburbs.

“We have become tragically accustomed to the idea of African-Americans killing each other,” says James Harris, a dean at Montclair State University and head of New Jersey’s NAACP.

Or, perhaps, were there elements of the stories themselves that led one to become grist for talk shows in a dozen languages throughout the planet, while the other grabbed headlines for a few days and then receded quickly into the back pages of memory?

Previous coverage, Tyler Clementi:



• Lawyer for Dharun Ravi says no evidence will be found to support bias charges

• Molly Wei's lawyers say her reputation was 'unjustly tarnished' by Rutgers suicide tragedy

• Evidence may not be enough to upgrade charges against Rutgers students Dharun Ravi, Molly Wei

• Hundreds attend Rutgers University's candlelight vigil in memory of Tyler Clementi

• Rutgers student Tyler Clementi's suicide spurs action across U.S.

Previous coverage, Jessica Moore:

• Man accused of fatally shooting Seton Hall student pleads not guilty

• Hundreds gather to remember Seton Hall student killed at off-campus party

• Seton Hall sophomore is killed in off-campus party shooting



“The story of Tyler Clementi was, in many ways, a perfect storm for our fears about the modern world,” says Karen Cerulo, head of Rutgers’ sociology department in New Brunswick.

Clementi leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after a live video feed of his intimate encounter with another young man was viewed over the internet; his roommate and another student have been charged with violating privacy law.

“Many of us have fears about whether details of our private lives have somehow been sent out into cyberspace where strangers can learn about them,” says Cerulo, who writes about modern culture."

Many of us also have had experiences with bullying.

“These are things we fear and we know they could happen to us, so the story just stays with us. It’s the stuff of TV dramas.”

Clement Price, a history professor at Rutgers in Newark, thinks race affects how we see the two events. “Race is always in the room,’’ he says. “Race factors into our perceptions, our belief systems, our values."

If a tragedy occurs to a “rich, young, talented white person," says Price, then it becomes a story for the mainstream. “But if another young black life is crushed in the city, then it’s just a story of another young black life crushed in the city.”

There was much about Jessica Moore’s story that commended itself as a touching drama. Like Clementi, she was an aspiring musician and had a date for an audition at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. If her music career did not succeed, her friends say, she wanted to become a counselor to help veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Her death was an act of bravery. She threw herself in front of a friend who already had been shot and likely saved the other woman’s life, according to witnesses. Two men were charged in the shooting, including one allegedly turned away from the party Moore was attending.

“She was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman,” says A. Zachary Yamba, the retired president of Essex County College, a predominantly black college, and former member of the Seton Hall Board of Regents. “Perhaps we have become too jaded by what we know, or think we know, about black college students.”

Rutgers hosts community meeting to discuss Tyler Clementi tragedy, bullying problem

Still, says Yamba, it was the nature of the Clementi story that transfixed so many. Not just fear of cyberspace, but also the attention given to issues around homosexuality. Same sex marriage. Celebrities coming out. Don't ask, don't tell in the military.

"It's all around us,'' he says.

But isn’t violence also “all around us?” Cerulo says that, while many of us fear for our privacy and have encountered bullying, “not many of us think we will die a violent death by shooting.”

Bryan Miller disagrees. He is head of an organization called “Ceasefire-NJ” and he lobbies for stricter gun control laws. Cyber-bullying and invasion of privacy might be the modish concern of the day, he says, but violent death stalks us all.

“The story of the young woman’s death in East Orange should be a concern for all of us,” he says. “We are deluding ourselves if we think it only can happen to poor black children in the cities.”