A Murder on Campus
Last February 6, 21-year-old Nick Armstrong pledged Tau Kappa Epsilon at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. After the traditional bid-night party, he fell asleep on a couch at the fraternity house. He never woke up.
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In the fall of 1996 he enrolled at Southwest Texas State University but lasted only two semesters. "He liked to party more than he liked to study," says Jeanette. In the spring of 1997, after dropping out of school, he moved to Edgewood to live with his father. Also that spring, Jeremiah was caught with marijuana in his car, a violation of his probation. In June, when he was nineteen, he met fifteen-year-old Summer Martinez and they soon became inseparable. In September Jeremiah was sentenced to six months in an intermediate sanction facility (ISF), a low-security, work-intensive alternative to prison, in Gonzales; he started serving his sentence in November 1997. While he was in the ISF, he learned that Summer was pregnant. According to Summer, he welcomed the idea of having a child, and his letters to her were filled with their plans for the future.
Jeremiah was released from the ISF in April 1998, and in June, Nikolas Austin Wilkerson was born. The young family moved in with Jeremiah’s father and stepmother. Both Jeanette and Summer say that Jeremiah was somehow different after his incarceration—a little more quiet, a little more aggressive. Summer says that he was "meaner," as though something dreadful had happened to him in the ISF. According to Rex Malatek, the facility’s director at the time, Jeremiah’s confinement was uneventful. As for Jeremiah, all he would say about it was, "I don’t ever want to go back there."
Although Jeremiah and his father "got along like best friends," says Summer, Gary had rules for living with him that Jeremiah wouldn’t follow, and he asked them to leave, which incensed Jeremiah. Summer moved back into her mother’s house in Terrell and Jeremiah moved back to Lockhart, although they still considered themselves a couple. Jeremiah worked as a plumber’s assistant in Austin, trying to save up enough money so that Summer and Nikolas could live with him. Through the fall, he sent them a quarter of his paycheck every week. At Christmas he gave her a ring and promised that they would soon be married. That was the last time Summer saw Jeremiah.
George and Becky Armstrong received a telephone call at around six in the morning on February 7, informing them that their son was in Austin’s Brackenridge Hospital with head trauma. As they made the agonizing three-hour drive from their Baytown home to Austin, Nick’s friends were assembling at the hospital—thirty or forty of them, from all over the state. "At the hospital, you couldn’t even walk down the hall," Becky says. She and Nick had always been close, and they had talked on the phone the day he was assaulted. "He was so excited because he was finally going to have a weekend off," she says. "He had worked [at San Marcos’ Outback Steakhouse] straight through since Christmas because they needed him, and he hadn’t had a weekend off since then. He didn’t say anything whatsoever about a fraternity."
And it was a little odd that Nick would want to join a fraternity. "When he first got to Southwest," Becky says, "he kind of talked about it. He called me and said, ’Well, Mom, the girls all like the fraternity boys and [if you’re not in a fraternity] it’s hard to feel like you’re somebody.’ And I said, ’Well, now, if you really want to be in a fraternity, we’ll figure out a way.’" But before they hung up the phone, Nick seemed to have made up his mind. He told his mother that he had decided not to pledge because once you joined a frat, you were encouraged to socialize mostly with fraternity brothers. "I have too many friends to just hang around with one group," he said. About sixteen months later, however, Nick changed his mind.
He had enrolled at Southwest Texas as a sophomore, after spending his freshman year at a junior college in Baytown. He had considered going to the University of Texas in nearby Austin, but deciding it was too large, he chose Southwest Texas because of its proximity to the Hill Country—a part of Texas that he loved—and its easy access to camping sites and other places where he could enjoy the outdoors.
Nick was the kind of student every college hopes to attract. The middle child of a supervisor in an Exxon chemical plant and a kindergarten teacher, he was by all accounts a magnetic, gregarious young man. Literally a choirboy, he seemed to like most of the people he met and was liked in turn by everyone who met him. Growing up in Baytown, he was happiest in a group, whether singing in the church choir or playing basketball or going camping with friends. "He was hardly ever home," says Becky. "He’d come home in the afternoon and instantly get ten phone calls from his friends wanting him for all sorts of things." The uncomplicated yet difficult art of being comfortable in the world came naturally to Nick. He had the enviable ability to live perfectly in the moment, free of the anxiety and self-consciousness that torture so many young people. He played on the football team in high school because he enjoyed the camaraderie. Of his fondness for pickup basketball, his mother recalls, "He was always getting a game going, and the guys would laugh and tell me that Nicholas wasn’t the best basketball player—he might accidentally jump on their feet—but he was the hardest playing, and they all liked to have him on their team."
The Armstrongs are a devoutly Christian family. Besides singing in the church choir, Nick also sang and played guitar at early-morning services. "Nick’s secret was that he gave a lot of love and he received a lot of love," his mother says. "Old ladies loved him, children loved him, and his friends loved him because he was fun." One of the most touching things the Armstrongs found when they were cleaning out Nick’s dorm room was a series of meditations on the Bible that he had done for a class at school. "It was important to me that he was keeping his faith," says Becky.
Southwest Texas boasts one of the most beautiful campuses in Texas. Set on a hill rising from the middle of downtown San Marcos, the school’s signature building, a castlelike structure known as Old Main, dominates a serene setting of ponds, the spring-fed San Marcos River, and green slopes that invites studying outdoors on beautiful spring days. But its placid academic ambience notwithstanding, the school has long been infamous as a party school.
That reputation dates from the seventies, when two things happened simultaneously: San Marcos went from being a dry town to one that allowed the sale of alcoholic beverages, and the state’s drinking age was lowered from 21 to 18. Almost instantly, locals say, clusters of bars opened everywhere—around the courthouse square, about four blocks south of the campus, there were two or three per block—and a wild, drunken element appeared in San Marcos; before long, the university had become a magnet for Texas students looking to drink and be merry instead of hitting the books. This hedonistic atmosphere persisted throughout the seventies and the eighties.
Since Jerome Supple became Southwest Texas’ president in 1989, however, the university has taken dramatic steps to improve the quality of both its academics and its student body. In 1992 the school significantly raised its admission standards and is now among the most selective of Texas’ public universities; enrollment has grown steadily to 21,798 this year, its largest student body ever. President Supple, ever mindful of the lingering shadow over the school’s image, had made drinking the focus of his 1998 fall convocation address. "The abuse of alcohol threatens the health, safety, and academic success of our students," he said. "We can’t ignore it. We will embark on an aggressive alcohol education campaign this year to raise awareness and to help educate the entire campus community." With nationally recognized physics, geography, creative-writing, and teacher training-programs, Southwest Texas seemed, at the beginning of the spring 1999 semester, on the verge of overcoming its party school reputation.
But the events of February 6 and 7—Nick’s murder and the near death of the other fraternity pledge from alcohol poisoning—would only reinforce it. Of course, student drinking and fraternity hazing aren’t limited to Southwest Texas. In Austin a University of Texas student who won a $1.65 million settlement from the Kappa Alpha fraternity in September still suffers memory problems from the head injuries he received last year during Hell Week hazing, when he was also spat and urinated upon and thrown against a wall. A year ago a student who was drunk fell to his death in the stairwell of a parking garage at Texas A&M. And on September 5 a graduate of West Texas A&M passed out and died at a frat party where he had been drinking. Unfortunately, the alcohol-related death of a student is not all that uncommon at the state’s largest universities—but a brutal, senseless murder at a small school like Southwest Texas can be a transforming event.
The day after Nick Armstrong died, hundreds of Southwest Texas students gathered in a candlelight vigil around a statue of two rearing stallions in a part of the campus known as the Quad. During the vigil, which was organized by the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, friends of the slain young man were asked to talk about him. There was a religious atmosphere to the event, which attempted to find some good in such a terrible tragedy. "I haven’t seen so many people caring for each other at one time," the student newspaper, the Daily University Star, quoted one student as saying. At the end of the vigil, a bell was rung 21 times, once for each year Armstrong was alive.
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