CAMPUS BRIEFS: Tuesday, October 13, 1998

Penn vigil to mark death of Wyoming student Shepard, 21, was found pistol-whipped and tied to a fence post outside of Laramie, Wyo. He died yesterday morning in a Fort Collins, Colo., hospital. According to police, the main motive of the crime was robbery, but the two men who perpetrated the crime targeted Shepard because he allegedly flirted with one of them in a bar. "I want people to have the chance to be together and gain support from each other, to be there in solidarity," said Robert Schoenberg, director of the University's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Center. The vigil, part of the LGBA's "National Coming Out Days," is intended to be an informal gathering of students to get together and speak their minds about the incident. "Sometimes it's hard to remember that it can happen to you," said third-year Medical student Chris Nguyen, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual People in Medicine coordinator. -- Matthew McNulty Student loses $1,100 in flim-flam scam A female University student lost $1,100 in a "flim-flam" scam last week -- the second time in nine days that someone has been victimized by such a scheme in University City. University Police Det. Commander Tom King said he believes the same people are behind both incidents. Last Wednesday, two women approached the senior at 40th Street and Baltimore Avenue, claiming to have found $50,000 in a wallet. They offered to split it with her, but only if she first put up "good-faith" money to prove her trustworthiness. The con artists first drove the student to the Mellon Bank at 22nd and Market streets -- where one of them claimed to work -- so they could confirm that the money was real. Then the victim withdrew money from several different bank accounts at different automatic-teller machines. Finally, the two women dropped the student off at a deli at 11th and Chestnut streets, where they claimed that a bank executive would come to give her her cut of the money. The bank executive did not show up and the student never saw the two women again. On September 29, an employee at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was approached near 40th and Walnut streets, and gave $12,500 in cash to two women who claimed to have found a wallet with $100,000 in it. The descriptions of the women in both incidents are similar -- a 40-year-old 5'7" black woman of average build, and a black woman in her early 20s, about 5'6" and wearing gold jewelry. Both victims are foreign-born women, and police speculated that the culprits are targeting that demographic. -- Ben Geldon