Students, visitors flock to New Library
According to Taras Pavlovsky, dean of the library, at least twice as many students use the New Library each day than used the old one around the same times last year.
The new four-story building has experienced steady increases in usage since its opening Aug. 29. While last year on the first day of classes only 927 people used the library, 2,550 walked through the New Library's doors on Aug. 30, as professors piled on the first day of the semester's homework. Pavlovsky believes that people are not just gawking at the building, but also actually using it. "Walk around and see how many people are working," Pavlovsky said.
He attributes the changes to the new, roomier and friendlier architecture. "We built it for people, not just a place for storing books," Pavlovsky said, comparing the new library's brightly-lit corridors to the gloom of the old library.
Escaped patient's body found with bloody plastic knife
A body found on Trenton Psychiatric Hospital grounds has been confirmed as Michael Janicki's, a patient who had escaped and been missing since Aug. 30, State Police officials said.
Two employees found the body about noon Sept. 6 after noticing a smell coming from a patch of woods behind a maintenance building. The identity was confirmed by matching the body's fingerprints to those recorded on the ornamental samurai sword Janicki used to kill his father in July 2002. A bloodstained plastic knife found near the body has lead officials to examine if Janicki committed suicide by stabbing himself. However, the body was too decomposed by the time it was discovered to examine the wounds. The knife has been sent to State Police crime labs for analysis.
Two weeks prior to the incident, Janicki told a doctor that he had thought of hurting himself. Consequently, his privileges to wander the campus alone were removed, but his keycard was never changed.
As of Monday, the hospital is examining exactly how Janicki was issued a keycard that allowed him free access to the grounds, and why the workers did not know he was not allowed to wander the premises unattended.
The New Jersey Department of Human Services is currently examining the techniques used during the search for Janicki to discover why the body was not found earlier.
According to Gary Brown, a State Human Services spokesman, the dogs used in the search had Janicki's scent within feet of the body and then lost it.
"I just wanted to hold my son and kiss him goodbye, and now I can't do that because his body is so decomposed," Cheryl Janicki said to The Star-Ledger. "That's all I had left was to give him a hug and say goodbye, and they took that away from me."
