A University of Southern California student is trying to put his life together after wrongly being swept up in a police dragnet last year.
The Nevada teenager’s advocates claim both the justice system and his own university treated him as a criminal after he was arrested on armed robbery charges while walking home through an area where cops were searching for violent suspects. He was incarcerated for weeks, but his troubles were not over when he got back to school.
In addition to the substantial time spent in jail, causing one professor to fear the student “might have broken some of those natural qualities that he had,” the university seemingly turned its back on the young man — not supporting him during this time and kicking him out of his dormitory.
Judah Adkins, described as a “soft-natured” individual in an Annenberg Media feature about his ordeal, is Black and Hispanic raised by his single father in Las Vegas. The young man was homeschooled growing up and dreamed of studying film and media one day in college. Through hard work and sacrifice by his father, who himself struggled to make ends meet, he was accepted into one of America’s top universities, USC, which ranks No. 28 on the 2024 US News World Reports’ Best Colleges list.
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His triumphant story of Black excellence unraveled during his freshman year’s second semester when the Los Angeles Police Department wrongfully arrested him.
On April 29, 2022, around 9:30 p.m., a couple was robbed at gunpoint by a group of young males. At the time of this incident, Adkins was attending a performance called the “SC Choreographic Showcase” at Bing Theatre near the center of USC’s campus. Annenberg Media describes how the next few hours would set Adkins on a path that led to his life-changing encounter with the criminal justice system:
Adkins’ actions from that night were self-reported in a “False Arrest Victim Complaint Letter,” which was…
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