A tradition turns violent

Just after midnight on Thursday, the Business School sophomore was sitting in his third floor room in South Quad Residence Hall with his jacket on, waiting for the signal. He was ready to go and defend his dormitory against the impeding attack from West Quad on a minute’s notice.

When the anticipated signal – the ringing of the fire alarm – finally came, Mirsaeedi rushed outside onto the snow-covered lawn in front of South Quad eager to engage his rival students across Madison Street in the annual snowball fight between the two dorms.

But for Mirsaeedi, the good-natured snowball fight took a violent and unexpected turn just minutes after the first snowball was thrown.

As Mirsaeedi was standing on the south side of the street, getting ready to throw a snowball, a large man wearing a tan North Face jacket grabbed him and tackled him to the ground he said. Shocked, Miraseedi immediately tried to get back up off the frozen ground.

“He got on my back and started punching me in the face,” Miraseedi said.

Miraseedi remembers hearing something snap when he was punched, but he didn’t have too much time to think about the noise. A group of his friends pulled the man off of him and helped Miraseedi to his feet. His face was numb, and a friend didn’t see any blood, so Miraseedi rejoined the snowball fight.

But after the snowball fight ended, Miraseedi said he saw that his nose was “deformed,” and his resident advisor recommended he go to the emergency room.

Miraseedi said a doctor at the University Hospital later confirmed that his nose had been broken.

Miraseedi’s broken nose was not an isolated incident. Many other students interviewed in the days following the snowball fight reported that the cherished campus tradition degenerated into what one student called a m