Lauren Burk's parents are still fighting Auburn University for a campus police force
Eight years after Lauren Burk's murder, not enough has changed for her parents. Burk, an 18-year-old Auburn student, was abducted, shot and left to die in 2008. Her parents, James Burk and Viviane Guerchon, spoke to The Plainsman about their struggles with Auburn University to institute an on-campus police force so what happened to their daughter could never happen again.
[Her parents] believe that if the University had an on-campus police force, then Lauren might still be alive.
“I went and saw that there were video cameras in the parking lot the night Lauren was abducted,” James said. “So how come no one noticed that the killer sat in the parking lot all day, left and came back? That’s ridiculous.” [...]
“Auburn had some serious issues that they didn’t take care of,” James said. “In the official record next to her name it says, ‘robbery,’ but then has an asterisk in really small print that says, ‘murdered off campus.’ So that is kind of a slap in the face.”
The rules (PDF) Auburn University uses for reporting and recording crimes under the Clery Act define crimes committed "on campus" as "any building owned or controlled by an institution within the same reasonably contiguous geographic area and used by the institution." Burk was found on the side of Alabama Highway 147 5 miles away from the university.
The Plainsman article said Auburn disbanded its on-campus police force in favor of integrating with the town's police and fire department.
Auburn statistics rate crime levels on campus at C+. The vast majority of crimes were burglaries, followed by car thefts, robberies and sexual assaults. According to data (PDF) for the most recent year, 2014, there were 5 rapes, 1 robbery, 4 aggravated assaults (including use of date rape drugs), 21 burglaries and 8 motor vehicle thefts on campus. There were no hate crimes reported.
This story was originally published March 11, 2016 at 1:22 PM with the headline "Lauren Burk's parents are still fighting Auburn University for a campus police force."