In less than five minutes, one repeated question and several death threats thrust an FAU evolution class into the national spotlight. After over 400,000 YouTube hits the question is still being asked: What happened on March 21 in GS 120?

It was 11:35 a.m. and Jonatha Carr raised her hand and asked professor Stephen Kajiura a question. “How does evolution kill black people?” she said. Within minutes, Carr then threatened to kill him. Seconds later? Another threat; this one against her classmates. All of them. Junior mathematics major Rachel Bustamante recorded the whole thing and her video ended up on YouTube.

Kajiura’s class was reviewing for a midterm when Carr raised her hand and asked her question. “I and no one else in the class can say exactly what triggered it,” Bustamante said. “We really have no idea.

According to an anonymous student, after Carr asked her question, Kajiura tried to answer, but “[Carr] started clapping and shouting that he hadn’t answered her question, and she was going to ask him one more time,” the student said.

“Never was there a discussion about race or a certain group of people — nothing of the sort,” Bustamante said. The class had been discussing animal reproduction and sexual selection amongst female peacocks when Carr asked her question.

Later Carr shouted to the entire class, “I am having a fucking mental breakdown.” Kajiura tried to interrupt Carr’s rant and continue reviewing, but Carr stood up and shouted: “No, no, no!” She then walked up to a group of white students and pointed towards individuals shouting, “I will kill you bitch.”

The mood of the room changed once Carr stood up, according to the anonymous student. “I don’t think most of us felt Dr. Kajiura was in control or anyone was in control, we were just waiting to see what would happen,” the student said. The student said some classmates left immediately, others sat laughing and several called FAU police. Most, the anonymous student said, including herself, moved nervously towards the exit, waiting to see what would happen.

Next, Carr turns around and walks up to Ryan Murphy, sitting in the row behind her, and calls him a bitch, based on the video. She then yelled “Take that shit off,” and proceeded to smack him in the forehead and knocked his glasses off, according to Kajiura.

Justin White, director of the Spanish basic language program, said he was teaching across the hall when one of Kajiura’s students ran into his room saying “there’s someone acting crazy.” White could hear the noise, so he told the student to call the police, and had his class lock the doors. After a few minutes, White went in to help.

Once he walked into the room, he saw Carr. Standing. Screaming. In the video, White told Carr to leave. She mocked his order, took four steps towards him, and pushed him three times before he grabbed her arms and restrained her.

“My goal in telling her to get out was to take attention off the student,” White said. “I practice Jiu-Jitsu at Renzo and Gracie’s Jiu-Jitsu Academy of Boca Raton, so since I’m aware of what to do, I figured I better get in there.”

While she was kicking and pushing, White said Carr started calling him “the White Devil.” Within a minute, however, White had Carr in his control. “The more quickly I could restrain her, the more likely it was she wouldn’t harm anyone else,” White said.

Carr was then escorted out of the classroom by White and another faculty member. White held the resistant Carr down for a few minutes until police arrived. “I took her to the ground, held her wrists with my knee on her stomach, and I kept her till the police arrived,” White said.

According to a police report, Carr refused to calm down and when reporting officer William Hernandez tried to get her to sit on the ground instead of lying face-down, she punched him in the chest.

That’s when he handcuffed and Baker Acted Carr. (See the sidebar for more information on the Baker Act.)

Hernandez and three other officers then tried to place her in the police car, but she stiffened her body and resisted, according to the report.

“The police were never in any danger, but she did threaten to kill them,” White said.

Hernandez told Carr he would use a taser on her if she didn’t cooperate. She didn’t. So Hernandez used his stun gun. White said this was done for Carr’s safety. “When she was put in the squad car she went ballistic,” he said. “She kicked off her shoes and could have hurt herself.” Carr was administered the taser twice more in the police car on her way to South County Mental Health Center — once in the left side of her torso and once in her left shoulder. According to the report, Carr refused to walk into SCMHC on her own, so staff and police had to carry her inside.

“While at SCMHC I spoke to Joyce Carr who is Carr’s mother, who just wanted to make sure that her daughter arrived safely at the facility,” Hernandez said in the report.

Meanwhile, back in Kajiura’s class, no one told the students Carr was taken to the local hospital. “I hadn’t realized she’d been grabbed by the police so I was not very comfortable,” the anonymous student said. Kajiura thanked his class for remaining calm and continued lecturing for the midterm after Carr was escorted out of the classroom. The test, however, was later postponed because of the incident.

Two days later, the next time there was class, they weren’t alone. Terry Mena (associate dean of students) and Ingrid Johanson (associate dean of the College of Science) showed up with police and counseling staff. The students were allowed to ask the officers questions. Bustamente said the main question was: What took the police so long to arrive?

The cops held a Q&A, but according to both Bustamente and the anonymous student, the police seemed defensive and insisted they had done their best.

Mena denied comment on what happened at the meeting.

“We want to assure you that University law enforcement responded immediately to the situation and apprehended the individual appropriately,” Senior Vice President of Student Affairs Charles Brown said in a statement afterwards.

According to the anonymous student, several people asked for a university official to provide protection for the rest of the semester. “They said if [Carr] came back we should call the police, and if she did come back they were confident she would not have a weapon,” the anonymous student said.

According to Bustamante, several students felt administrators were trying to defend themselves during the meeting. “It had a ‘clean up the mess’ kind of feeling,” Bustamante said. Both her and the anonymous student said Kajiura spoke first in the meeting, and appeared to be defending the way he acted during the incident in front of administrators.

Evidently, Johanson spoke with students about Carr and was, according to the anonymous girl, “Very intent on telling us that we should respect her feelings. She was concerned for the girl’s well being and her reputation.” Bustamente said this speech about Carr led to claims that there was no way the University could have predicted Carr’s outburst, and that administrators “admitted they never expected anything like it.”

The two students also mentioned that Mena talked to them about filming the incident. “He kind of reprimanded us,” Bustamante said.

Once Carr was escorted on the day of her outburst, Bustamante took another video. In this one, Kajiura talked to his shaken students saying, “If you guys have [the incident recorded] on your phones or anything like that,” he says in the video. “Save them for now, just in case a need will pop up later.”

Both Bustamante’s videos and the UP’s online report following the incident went viral, and were cited or linked to from international news sites such as the Drudge Report, Huffington Post and the Daily Mail.

Carr is currently facing battery and disturbance charges. No one confirmed whether or not Carr is expelled. According to Brown’s statements, those details are confidential under state and federal law.

In the class following Carr’s outburst, White showed his students the YouTube videos. White wanted to share his jiu-jitsu skills with them so they would know, “what to do, and what not to do if it happens again.” Even though there is evidence of Carr attacking him, White does not plan on pressing charges. “As a professor, I hate to see a student get a stain on their record for a momentary lapse in reason.”