OSU Victim Skips Meeting With Donald Trump Over His Simplistic Reaction To Campus Attack

Emeritus Professor William Clark said he was "put off" by Trump's anti-immigration tweet.
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At least one victim of last month’s attack at Ohio State University refused to meet with Donald Trump Thursday when the president-elect visited survivors on the campus in Columbus.

Thirteen people were injured in the Nov. 28 attack, in which a student drove through a crowd of students and staff outside an engineering building, then slashed onlookers with a knife. A nearby OSU police officer shot the assailant to death less than a minute after the attack began.

Emeritus Professor William Clark was among those injured. He said he has no interest in meeting Trump while the facts of the case are still unfolding.

“Honestly, I didn’t see a real purpose to it in terms of me moving on,” Clark told The Columbus Dispatch.

“I was frankly a little put off by Mr. Trump’s initial reaction to the attack where he got on Twitter and quickly blamed immigration policies for allowing this to happen,” Clark added in a followup interview with CNN. “I’ve been a professor for 35 years and I know ... when students do these things they’re often more complex than that.”

Ohio State spokesman Chris Davey told The Washington Post that Trump requested the meeting.

It’s unclear if any others hurt in the attack also rebuffed Trump’s visit.

Several student groups condemned the president-elect’s overture as empty political theater.

The Ohio Interfaith Immigration Coalition, the Socialist Alternative of Central Ohio, and the Student/Farmworker Alliance at Ohio State co-sponsored a protest.

“We stand in complete solidarity with both the victims of last week’s attacks at OSU and all refugees and immigrants,” protest organizers wrote on a Facebook page promoting the event. “We reject any attempt to use racism or xenophobia to divide us.

“We reject the exploitation of a tragic event on our campus and the disrespect of our fellow students’ pain for Trump’s racist political purposes.”

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