A year and a half ago, an obviously distressed Gina Grant sat down with her boyfriend, Liam Case, and his parents, explaining that she wanted to tell them how her mother had died three years earlier.
What unfolded that day in the airy living room of the Case home in Cambridge, Mass., was the tale of how Grant, while living in Lexington, S.C., had killed her mother by repeatedly striking her on the head with a heavy lead crystal candlestick."She was crying, and we were crying," Liam's mother, Quaker Case, recalled in an interview. "We all cried over it for three days."
Quaker Case and her husband, John, who have been among Grant's staunchest defenders, took Grant's candor as evidence of her integrity.
She was less forthright, however, with Harvard University. On her application last fall and in a subsequent admission interview, she described her life as an orphan. She told the interviewer that her mother had died in an accident. Her lawyers now say that the interviewer inferred that Grant's mother had died in an automobile accident and did not ask further questions. Grant's father died of cancer when she was 11.
Harvard initially accepted her but rescinded its offer in April after administrators were sent, anonymously, a packet of newspaper clippings about the 1990 killing and the eight months Grant had served in a juvenile center at the age of 14 after pleading no contest to manslaughter.
In the days that followed, and amid the barrage of publicity after Harvard's announcement, Columbia and Barnard Colleges also quietly withdrew their acceptances of Grant, one of her lawyers said in an interview. All three institutions have declined to discuss the case, citing a desire to protect the privacy of applicants.
That left Tufts University, in Medford, Mass., as Grant's only remaining option for the coming year, and, last week, after receiving permission from Grant's lawyers to speak about it, university officials said they would stand by their acceptance. They said they expected Grant to enroll as a freshman in the fall.
"Our admissions people advised me that there was no apparent fraudulent statement, nothing deceitful, in her application," John DiBiaggio, the president of Tufts, said in an interview. "She paid her penalty. That's supposed to be enough under our system. I like to think that this university is caring and forgiving. Any other choice would have been antithetical to our beliefs, so I don't think we even had a choice about what to do."
While DiBiaggio has the authority to reverse the decision of the admissions staff, he said he strongly supported it. He said that word of her acceptance at Tufts, which was disclosed last month, had drawn letters of support from alumni. "They're going about four-to-one supporting our decision," he said.
"I've been told," DiBiaggio said, "that people find her a thoughtful and understanding young lady."