“I was thinking this is a life-threatening situation for the student,” Carroll told the Kansas City Star. Carroll elaborated to Fox 4 News that, as a Southern California native, he could not fathom living “in the woods at minus 2 degrees.”

“I made a choice. I was choosing between life — I’m not from here,” he said to Fox 4. Because the student did not have a place to stay, the pupil was camping out in the nearby forest, Carroll said. The student also had run out of the medication he took for schizophrenia.

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The former college president allowed the student to stay in the library on the condition that he would vacate the building by 9 a.m.; Carroll told KMBC 9 that he gave the student $10 and instructions to take a bus the next morning to fill his schizophrenia prescription. Carroll said the student complied.

A vice president for the college, Paul Ferrise, confirmed to the Kansas City Star that Carroll had lost his job and made a poor choice in letting the student sleep in the library. “Mr. Carroll had a range of options available to him to help the student. He made a bad decision,” he said. Ferrise would not further elaborate, citing privacy concerns about the student.

Vatterott College, which offers programs for vocations such as dental assistant and personal trainer at its Kansas City campus, had not responded to a request for comment from The Washington Post as of early Wednesday morning. The college has been at the center of controversy before. In 2013, a jury awarded $13 million to a woman who was improperly enrolled in a medical office assistant program — she wanted to earn a medical assistant’s degree — that cost her $27,000 in loans. A judge reduced the award to roughly $2 million in 2014, per a Missouri damages cap.

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Carroll said the college’s rules do not specifically address allowing students to stay overnight, but he knew that allowing students into his car was a violation of Vatterott policy. “I had a tough choice to make. He can’t stay on campus. I can’t put him in my car. I can’t take him to my house,” he told Fox 4 News.

The former president told Fox 4 that he was fired Jan. 9, when the school administration, based in St. Louis, reviewed the library’s surveillance cameras. The student did nothing to harm school property, Carroll said.

This was not the first time a school employee’s attempt to assist a student ran afoul of faculty and staff regulations. In late 2015, an Idaho school district fired a middle school cafeteria worker for giving a hungry student a meal. “The reason for your termination is due to your theft — stealing school district or another’s property and inaccurate transactions when ordering, receiving and serving food,” read a letter that the employee, Dalene Bowden, posted to Facebook. The school later offered Bowden her job back.