Boulder – Four racist and life-threatening e-mails sent to a University of Colorado football player include language and patterns similar to hateful taunts made against a student government leader this week.
“They are very similar,” CU director of football operations David Hansburg said Thursday. “Almost to a T.”
On Tuesday, profane and hateful comments were sent in an e-mail to Mebraht Gebre-Michael, a black CU student who is one of three elected heads of the student government. But four more e-mails, revealed to The Denver Post on Thursday, are strikingly similar and the latest in a series of publicized reports of racial prejudice.
While Hansburg said campus police investigated the e-mails last school year, a police spokesman said they have not connected them to the one sent Tuesday.
“It’s too early in the investigation,” Lt. John Kish said.
Like the message Gebre-Michael received, the e-mails sent to an unnamed black player are rife with profanity and racial slurs such as the N-word. Each is also sent from student e-mail accounts, as was the one sent to Gebre-Michael.
The e-mails to the football player appear to follow up on previous threats:
“I still see u at my (expletive) school and don’t think for 2 seconds I forgot my promise,” an e-mail sent in February reads. “U and your (racial slur) friends still got it coming.”
Cara McKinley, the former diversity director of the University of Colorado Student Union, said the football player gave her the e-mails last spring. She released the e-mails Thursday without the player’s name.
McKinley said she immediately connected the writing style of the e-mail received by Gebre-Michael to the ones sent to the football player.
“I mean word for word,” McKinley said. “You can see it in style and everything.”
CU and Boulder have been stung by several racial incidents since last spring, including cases of graffiti, complaints that black students were spit on and violence.
All the while, CU has been battling stagnant enrollment of black students.
For more than a decade, black enrollment has remained below 2 percent of the 30,000-student Boulder campus.
At the same time, increases in Latino and Asian enrollment have generally outpaced the school’s 11 percent growth since 1995.
The e-mail incidents prompted stern responses from CU and the city, which formed the Citizens United Against Hate committee.
Both the city and CU issued statements condemning the e-mail sent to Gebre- Michael. But Trevor Martin, spokesman for the Student Union, said university leaders should take further action.
“If this continues to go unnoticed, continues to be not acknowledged … you never know what could happen,” he said.
The Student Union is calling on school president Hank Brown to form a talked-about blue-ribbon panel on diversity that includes students and minorities, Martin said.
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 720-929-0893 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.
