Richard T. Antoun

On Friday afternoon anthropology professor of Binghamton University, Emeritus Richard T. Antoun was stabbed to death in premises of BU science building. A male suspect was taken into the custody by Campus police, but had not been charged as of 5 p.m. 77-year-old Antoun was taken to the to Wilson Hospital in Johnson City but he didn’t survived the brutal attack. The name of the suspect graduate student was not released by the police.

Students were informed about the stabbing by text message from the university. According to Vestal supervisor, Peter Andreasen, the arraignment of the suspect will not held in Vestal because of the involvement of the two state agencies (the State Police and University Police). According to police radio transmissions, suspect stabbed the victim four times with a 6-inch kitchen blade inside a campus office. A student of BU, Devin Sheppard said, she heard from the students about the incident that campus police had tackled the attacker. She said,

“The police asked the grad student, ‘did you just stab him,” and he said yes,”

BU President Lois DeFleur said the incident is “an act of senseless violence.” Jacqui Boroda, a BU senior who worked at Jazzmans, a coffee house in BU’s Academic Building B said,

“It’s kind of scary because it’s so close,”

The fear surrounded the building as everyone was shocked by the incident. Associate professor of geological sciences, Peter Knuepfer said,

“It’s scary as hell.”

He added,

“It’s another one of those things like the downtown shooting (at the American Civic Association, where 13 people were fatally shot in April). You think it happens somewhere else, but it happens here too.”

Antoun lived for several years on Vestal’s Murray Hill Road, he wrote several books. He also published the book Understanding Fundamentalism: Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Movements. In 1963, Antoun received a doctorate from Harvard University in Massachusetts.