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STL Today
December 15, 2014
Blythe Grupe cried Friday for the man who tried to kill her.
She wiped tears from her cheeks after Jevon Mallory, 20, of St. John, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sneaking up behind her and choking her last year in a bathroom on the campus of St. Louis Community College at Meramec.
Grupe said she thought Circuit Judge Robert Cohen’s sentence was fair but that she still felt bad for Mallory because of his troubles.
“I still feel sad for him because I don’t know what it takes for someone to do that,” Grupe, 21, said after Friday’s sentencing. “It seems he’s been crying out for help.”
Grupe was not seriously hurt in the attack on April, 18, 2013, but the handling of the case by the college sparked a furor, the departure of several top college officials and sweeping changes in the college’s security policies.
Mallory faced five to 15 years after pleading guilty to a felony count of assault on Oct. 24. He entered a blind plea, meaning he took no deal with prosecutors. Cohen followed the prosecution’s recommendation of 10 years in prison. Mallory will get credit for jail time served since his arrest in April 2013.
In court Friday, Mallory made his first public statements since his arrest. He apologized to Grupe and her family, saying he has matured while in jail. His lawyer, Chris Dulle, said Mallory has a history of mental illness for which he is taking medication and undergoing therapy.
“I’m not the same person,” Mallory told the court. “I was angry then. I felt alone and hopeless. … I simply made a bad decision, one that I will regret for the rest of my life.”
Mallory, then 18, was caught choking Grupe after sneaking up behind her while she was standing at a bathroom sink, grabbing her around her neck and trying to cover her mouth and nose.
The attack was interrupted by Grupe’s instructor, Aurora Hill, who heard her screams and burst into the bathroom, police say.
After the attack, Grupe first turned down medical treatment but later saw doctors for neck bruises, ruptured blood vessels and a cut on her face.
Mallory, meanwhile, was released by campus officials within hours of the attack on Grupe, and despite his admission that he was attempting to “withdraw her from life” and that he attacked her, a stranger, to “vent his rage.” Officials didn’t alert the campus to the threat, and addressed the assault only after Grupe, then 19, went public.
A scathing report commissioned by the college’s board of trustees said the way the incident had been handled showed “a lack in leadership and management from key personnel at the district and campus levels.”
The police chief and a vice president of student affairs for the Meramec campus and the police chief for the community college district were removed. The president of the Meramec campus resigned, and Chancellor Myrtle Dorsey left later in the year after the Board of Trustees voted not to renew her contract.
Mallory had previously been in trouble. He was 13 in 2008 when he held an 8-inch butcher knife to a female teacher’s throat in the lunchroom at Ritenour Middle School. After the attack, the teacher gave up her teaching career because of anxiety, her husband told the Post-Dispatch last year.
Mallory was sent to the Lakeside Center, a juvenile detention center in St. Louis County, for the attack, according to records obtained by the Post-Dispatch. The records do not say how long he was held there. Juvenile records are typically closed unless suspects are certified as an adult to stand trial. Mallory wasn’t certified in the case but the disposition of the case is an open record by law.
Mallory’s mother and sister were among his relatives in the courtroom Friday. His mother, Janice Mallory, blamed the press and what she characterized as an unfair justice system she believes discriminates against blacks.
“The judge and prosecutor don’t care,” his mother said as she left court after learning of her son’s sentence. “If you’re black and you mess with a white girl, you get what you get.”
Asked for further comment about the sentencing, she told a reporter, “It’s the white journalists’ fault. You’re the one who did it. You’re the one who started it.”
Cohen suggested in court that the case had nothing to do with race.
“What this case amounts to is an attempted murder,” Cohen told Mallory. “Despite what others may think, this is strictly a matter between you as a human being and her as a human being. I would feel this way under any circumstance.”
Grupe, who now attends classes at the Wildwood campus of the St. Louis Community College, said she is glad the college changed its policies to improve campus safety. She also hopes her speaking out about the attack encourages other crime victims to do the same.
“Something good should come out of it,” she said.
Lastly, she said, she hopes Mallory really has matured and won’t hurt anyone else.
“I hope what he was saying about changing was true,” Grupe said.
