LETTER: Quoted Victim

To the Editor: The victim's description of the mugging -- "Don't move,if you do, I shoot you, I kill you." -- and subsequent disenchantment with the United States -- "In America, some people is not so good." -- stood out from the typically mundane DP crime reports. Your image of the incoherent, prostrate Pakistani just robbed of $700 and paralyzed with fear certainly warrants a motion picture comedy of sort. Ha! Ha! Very funny stuff. Sarcasm aside, your story's mockery of the victim's English trivializes a traumatic personal experience. I feel that your coverage of this story not only insults Pakistanis, but foreign students as well. It emphasizes errors in syntax, thereby reinforcing stereotypes such as that of the "incomprehensible Asian." I wonder how -- and how often? -- you would have quoted a victim suffering from speech dysfunction, such as stuttering? How can you expect an individual to provide you with accounts of incidents if you're going to make an ass out of them? ASAD ALI College '92