Students’ big cleanup honours party victim
Students work to clean up Castle St North after a request from the family of Sophia Crestani, who was killed at a student flat party on October 5. It should have been a normal Sunday morning on the notorious student street of Castle St North, but it was anything but typical.
Students, joined by university staff and the wider Dunedin public, were urged to ‘‘turn our grief into action’’ by University of Otago vice-chancellor Professor Harlene Hayne.
They turned up in their thousands yesterday to honour the wishes of the Wellington-based family of Sophia Crestani, 19, who was killed at a student flat party on October 5.
The crowd included university staff member Claire Gallop, who said the tertiary institution was a ‘‘tight-knit community, and this has been a horrible tragedy’’.
It was important to acknowledge the wishes of the Crestani family and ‘‘just do our bit’’, she said.
The large response showed that students cared, Gallop said. ‘‘These are good, smart kids and they want to do the right thing.’’
One of them was Emmanuel Osigwe, from Nigeria, who said he wanted to show
his support for the Crestani family. While students in his home country often lived in untidy areas, they were ‘‘not this bad’’, he said as he gestured from the corner of Castle and Dundas streets.
Within hours, though, most of the debris synonymous with the student quarter was gone, thrown into skips supplied by the Dunedin City Council.
The rubbish included bags of glass, old bicycles, mattresses, and the items the area is infamous for – couches.
It was a sobering start to his new role for mayor-elect Aaron Hawkins, who said the university was at the heart of Dunedin both ‘‘physically and culturally’’.
It meant the city celebrated the university’s successes, but also ‘‘we share in its moments of grief, of which this is certainly one of them’’, he said.
He praised council staff who volunteered for the ‘‘fantastic cause’’.
Otago University Students’ Association president James Heath said the cleanup offered a chance for students, still dealing with grief and shock, to ‘‘come together’’. He said about 2500 people were involved in the cleanup.
‘‘We filled at least 12 skips, each with 1200 to 1500 kilograms of rubbish in them. The cleanup ended earlier than expected, due to the incredible volume of people helping, which is a fantastic result.’’