When Lauren McCluskey moved into her dorm room at the University of Utah for her senior year, she thought this would be the best year of her life.

She had earned it.

At 21, Lauren had already done more than most people twice her age. Born on February 12, 1997, in Berkeley, California, she grew up in Pullman, Washington, with her parents, Jill and Matt—both professors—and her younger brother, Ryan. The McCluskeys were the kind of family who read books at the dinner table and went for walks together after. They weren’t flashy. But they were close.

From the time Lauren could walk, she was moving—climbing trees, sprinting across fields, daring herself to jump from one level to the next. At eight, she started breaking track and field records. At nine, she qualified for Junior Olympic Nationals and finished second in the high jump. By high school, she was a state champion. By the end of her youth career, she was a 19-time USA Track & Field All-American.

She wasn’t just an athlete; she was a scholar, a volunteer, and, as her parents would later say, “the kind of person who wanted everyone around her to succeed.”

She socialized shelter cats so they’d be more adoptable. She helped at the YMCA, volunteered for Special Olympics, and always had time for a teammate who needed encouragement. She was shy, but not timid—she chose her words carefully and rarely wasted them.

When the University of Utah offered her a track scholarship, it felt like everything was falling into place. The campus was beautiful, the track program competitive, the city marketed as safe. There would be mountains to climb, meets to win, degrees to earn.

For three and a half years, that’s what she did.

She studied communications. She trained hard and competed for the Utes. She went to church. She did karaoke. She tried open-mic comedy. Her freshman-year roommate, Alex, became her best friend; the two of them got lucky—randomly assigned and perfectly matched.

By the fall of 2018, Lauren seemed to be glowing. She’d grown more confident, more outgoing. She was excited about her final season in track and the next chapter of her life beyond college.

Then she went dancing at a bar called the London Belle.

It was September 1st, a Saturday night. Lauren and Alex decided to go downtown, not for anything crazy, just to get dressed up, grab a drink, and dance. The London Belle had a bouncer out front—a big guy checking IDs and watching the door.

He noticed Lauren.

She noticed him.

It was a rare thing for her. She wasn’t used to feeling instantly drawn to someone. But as he checked IDs and let others in, he kept glancing at her. Later, inside, he came by to ask if she and Alex were doing okay, making little gestures that told her he was paying attention.

At the end of the night, Lauren did something bold for her: she wrote her number on a napkin and handed it to him.

The next morning, at church, she was giddy. He had texted. He wanted to take her out that night.

His name, he said, was Shawn. He told Lauren he was 28, studying computer science at a local community college, working at a call center and bouncing part-time to make ends meet.

Twenty-eight was older than the guys she usually dated—Lauren was 21—but he made her feel special. Seen. Their first date was like something out of a movie: he brought roses, took her indoor rock climbing (which she loved), then out to dinner with some of his friends. He charmed her parents over the phone. He told her she was different.

Within a week, he asked her to be his girlfriend.

Within two weeks, he was staying over most nights.

Within three, the dream started to crack.

The change was almost overnight.

The sweet, attentive boyfriend became controlling, suspicious, suffocating. Lauren’s friends noticed that she was always checking her phone, always answering texts immediately, sometimes pulling over while driving because “Shawn” demanded a response. If she didn’t answer fast enough, he got angry.

He wanted to know where she was at all times. Who she was with. What she was wearing. If she went somewhere without him, he’d demand photos as proof.

He didn’t trust her.

He didn’t trust anyone.

Lauren tried to explain it away. He’d been hurt before, she said. He had trauma. He was working through it. Her friends, including Alex and Diamond (her RA), weren’t convinced.

It got worse.

He started telling her what she could and couldn’t do. He didn’t want her hanging out with certain people. He didn’t want her to go out without him. He talked about getting her a gun and teaching her to shoot.

Diamond, the RA, took that seriously. Her job was to keep residents safe. She wrote an email to her supervisors on October 2nd, reporting what Lauren had said about Shawn wanting to get her a gun—seemingly outside normal channels—with no talk of background checks.

She waited for guidance.

Her bosses told her they’d “talk about it later.”

Later never came.

Everything changed when Lauren found his ID.

She’d gone home for fall break in early October. While he was at her apartment one day, she came across his wallet. There, on a Utah state ID, was the truth:

His name wasn’t Shawn.

It was Melvin Shawn Rowland.

And he wasn’t 28.

He was 37.

Thirty-seven.

Lauren’s stomach dropped. A decade older than he’d claimed. A different name entirely. As she dug deeper, it got worse:

He was a convicted sex offender, with prior convictions for enticing a minor and attempted forcible sexual abuse, stemming from 2003. He had been caught in an internet sting trying to meet what he thought was a 13-year-old girl and had raped a 17-year-old in her home before that. He had spent years in prison. He was on parole.

The man sleeping in her bed was not who he said he was.

Lauren called her mom.

Jill could hear the horror in her daughter’s voice. Together, they made a plan: break up with him. In public. Safely. On campus, where there were cameras and people.

On October 9th, back in Salt Lake, that plan fell apart immediately.

Because when Lauren looked out her dorm window: he was already there.

Standing outside.

Waiting.

She let him in.

She felt like she had to. He had her car; he’d borrowed it over break. She needed her keys back. She needed to end it face-to-face.

The conversation in her dorm was ugly.

Lauren confronted him: You lied about everything. Your name, your age, your past. You’re a registered sex offender.

He denied it. Then he tried to spin it. It was all a misunderstanding, he said. The charges were unfair. He’d been at a frat party. The girl lied about her age. He’d been forced to plead guilty. The same tired story predators tell.

At some point, he blocked her from leaving. He wouldn’t let her go. Some sources say he forced himself on her; either way, she felt trapped.

To get away, Lauren said she had to tell him she had track practice. She told him he could borrow her car again. She told him whatever he needed to hear to let her walk out.

Once she was alone, she called her parents.

They agreed: she needed him out of her life. Permanently.

What they didn’t know was that while they were making plans, he was making his own.

The harassment started almost immediately.

Texts from unknown numbers:

“Why did you break up with the big guy? He really loves you.”

“You should just kill yourself.”

Messages saying he was in the hospital. That he was dead. That there was going to be a funeral.

“Will you come to the funeral?”

Lauren recognized the writing. The same spelling errors. The same cadence. She knew it was Melvin, pretending to be other people.

Her mom was terrified.

She called University of Utah campus police, asking them to send someone to stand by when the car was dropped off.

“I’m worried he’s dangerous,” Jill told the dispatcher. “He lied about his age. He’s a sex offender. He has her car. They’re supposed to meet at the stadium. It’s fall break. No one’s around. Please don’t let her go there alone.”

The dispatcher was calm.

They called Lauren. They reassured her. They suggested she come wait at the police station.
Lauren initially said she’d just have the car dropped at her dorm, but after talking to her mom again, she changed her mind. She called the campus police back and asked for a ride to the stadium with an officer present.

The officer drove her there.
Waited with her.
Watched her get the keys.
Watched her drive away.

Jill called back to say thank you.

For a moment, everyone exhaled.

The immediate danger felt… addressed.

But the texts didn’t stop.

They escalated.

On October 13th, Lauren began receiving explicit threats.

Melvin—pretending to be someone else, but very obviously himself—emailed and texted her, saying:

He had intimate photos of her.
If she didn’t send him $1,000, he would share them.

It was sextortion.

Lauren was terrified. She didn’t want those pictures sent to her teammates, her coaches, her parents, her community.

She did what she was supposed to do:

She went to campus police.

With Alex by her side, she walked into the station and told an officer named Miguel Deras what was happening. She handed over her phone. She handed over the screenshots. She trusted him with some of the most private images of her life.

He told her it was “probably a scam.”

He told her not to worry.

He said a detective would follow up in a few days.

Lauren still felt desperate enough that she called Salt Lake City police as well, but they told her it was a campus jurisdiction issue and routed her back to university police.

She didn’t feel safe.

And she couldn’t wait.

So, in panic and fear, she sent Melvin the money.

She hoped it would make him stop.

It didn’t.

In the days that followed, Lauren did everything right.

She kept calling.

She spoke to Officer Deras again and again—16 more times.

She told him that Melvin had lied about his name, his age, and his sex offender status. She told him she feared he would share the photos. She repeated that she believed he was behind the messages.

He told her the case was being assigned to a detective, Kayla Dallof, but that she was out of the office until October 23rd.

They told her to wait.

The campus department never even properly ran his name.

It would have taken one search to see:

He was not a student.

He was a registered sex offender.

He was on active parole.

One search.

It never happened.

Instead, someone—maybe more than one person—looked up the wrong man. They told Lauren her ex “seemed like a good guy” with “only a traffic ticket” on his record.

She had literally done their work for them—telling them he was a convicted felony sex offender on parole.

They did nothing.

When she called a second time about new texts—about someone impersonating a police officer and summoning her to the station—she was told simply:

“We didn’t send that. Don’t reply.”

When she told Salt Lake City Police she worried there might be an insider leaking her case updates to her harasser, they directed her back to campus police.

Everyone bounced responsibility like a hot potato.

No one truly took it.

On October 19th, campus cameras captured something chilling.

A man in a Deadpool costume lurking outside Lauren’s residence hall.

It was Melvin.

The security footage shows him entering her building several times that day carrying a small black bag. He had befriended other students who let him in.

Inside that bag was a gun.

A co-worker from his bouncer job had helped him obtain it illegally, lying on forms so Melvin’s record wouldn’t come up.

Despite prior warnings and an RA report about him trying to get Lauren a gun, nothing and no one stopped him from walking around her dorm with that weapon in his hand.

He read her email.

He hacked into her accounts and saw everything she had told the police.

On October 22nd, he texted her pretending to be the campus police chief, urging her to come to the station to see “something important about the case.”

The spelling gave him away.

Lauren called campus police to verify.

They told her it was fake.

They did not arrest him for impersonating law enforcement.

They did not seek a warrant.

They did not station officers outside her dorm.

Lauren tried to hold on.

She went to counseling that day. She went to track practice. To her evening class.

She did what she was supposed to do.

He waited.

It was a little after 8:00 p.m. when Lauren left her night class and started walking back to her dorm.

She called her mom on the way.

On the other end in Pullman, Washington, Jill answered, grateful for the sound of her daughter’s happy voice. They didn’t dwell on fear. They talked about Lauren’s quiz, her assignment she needed to upload, ordinary things. In the next room, her dad, Matt, was doing yoga, listening to their conversation drift through the house.

At the end of the call, Lauren said, as she always did:

“I love you.”

Jill smiled. “I love you too.”

Then, through the speaker, the tone changed.

Both parents heard their daughter say:

“No—no—no—no—no—no—”

The line stayed open.

There was rustling. A struggle. Then nothing.

On the sidewalk outside her dorm, Lauren’s phone and backpack hit the ground.

She was gone.

In the seconds that followed, panic and disbelief collided.

Matt grabbed their landline and dialed.

First 911.

Then campus police.

He told them what he heard. That Lauren had been on the phone. That she had cried out. That she had just broken up with a man who lied about his identity. That he was a sex offender. That she had received weeks of threats. That she was now missing.

A passerby found Lauren’s phone and backpack in the grass and picked up the call, telling the dispatcher they thought someone had been mugged.

The campus department said they would look.

Matt also called Salt Lake City Police, just in case.

An hour later, there was no good news.

By 9:55 p.m., Lauren’s coach was on the phone with her parents, voice shaking.

Police had found a silver Buick in a campus parking lot. Inside, they found Lauren’s body. She had been shot seven times.

Security footage would later show Melvin lying in wait near her dorm, watching, then forcing her into the car. After killing her, he walked to a light-rail station and met up with a woman he’d been chatting with on a dating app, who unknowingly gave him a ride and let him shower at her home to wash away evidence. When she realized who he was from news alerts, she went straight to the police.

It didn’t matter.

Hours later, cornered in a church, Melvin killed himself.

He would never face a courtroom.

Lauren’s parents would never see him answer for what he did.

The aftermath was a wave of grief and fury.

Classes at the University of Utah were canceled the next day. Students gathered for vigils, candles glowing against cold autumn air. Teammates sobbed at the microphone, speaking about Lauren’s kindness, her work ethic, her laugh. Friends like Diamond, the RA, cried on camera, hating themselves for not having been able to do more.

The truth, of course, was that Diamond had done more than many would—she had reported, followed procedure, sounded alarms. It wasn’t her who failed Lauren.

It was the system around her.

As journalists and investigators dug into the timeline, as recordings of Lauren’s calls to campus police surfaced, the public realized just how profoundly she had been failed.

She had:

Told them he was a sex offender.

Told them his real name.

Reported sextortion, harassment, and impersonation of a police officer.

Asked for help repeatedly.

They had:

Not run a proper check on him.

Never contacted his parole officer.

Dismissed her fears as “a scam.”

Left her case in limbo because a detective was on vacation.

Allowed a twice-convicted sex offender on parole to stalk campus with a gun.

To make matters worse, an internal investigation found that Officer Deras, the one who took her private photos into evidence, had shared them with other officers and bragged that he could look at them whenever he wanted.

He was never criminally charged for it.

The university’s first response to the scandal was to insist an independent review found “no reason to believe this tragedy could have been prevented.”

It felt like a slap.

To anyone who knew what had happened — who’d heard the recordings, read the reports, watched the footage — it was obvious: there were chance after chance after chance to stop this.

To revoke parole.

To arrest him for harassment.

To treat Lauren like a victim in danger, not a nuisance.

The wrong person paid the price.

Jill and Matt refused to let Lauren’s story end there.

They filed a lawsuit against the University of Utah for $56 million—not because they wanted money, but because money talks where words fail. They wanted institutional change. Accountability. Pressure. They wanted no other student’s parents to receive the call they got on October 22nd.

In 2020, the university settled for $10.5 million, plus an additional $3 million directed toward the Lauren McCluskey Foundation, which her parents created in her name.

They gave every cent to the foundation.

The foundation has three pillars:

    Campus safety – pushing colleges nationwide to take stalking, dating violence, and harassment seriously.

    Amateur athletics – supporting young athletes like Lauren.

    Animal welfare – including a cat wing at their local Humane Society, because Lauren loved socializing shelter cats.

One of the foundation’s most powerful initiatives is called Lauren’s Promise:

“I will listen and believe you if someone is threatening you.”

Professors, teachers, and staff across the country have started adding that line to their syllabi and class materials. It doesn’t sound like a lot. But to a terrified student with a controlling partner, seeing those words on paper may be the difference between staying silent and asking for help.

They’re also working on a Campus Safety Score—a rating system for colleges based on their training, policies, and history in handling safety threats. The goal is simple: force universities to compete not just on rankings and football records, but on how well they protect their students.

Even with all the reforms, even with the foundation’s extraordinary impact, nothing can change what happened to Lauren.

Nothing can rewind the clock and make someone run Melvin’s name when she first mentioned “sex offender.” Nothing can make an officer take her tears more seriously, or stop a parole violator from walking free.

Nothing can give Jill and Matt another phone call with their daughter.

Other students have died at the University of Utah since Lauren, in cases that also involved domestic violence and system failures. Her story is not an anomaly; it’s part of a pattern.

And that’s exactly why her parents keep telling it.

At a memorial, Matt once said:

“Remember Lauren Jennifer McCluskey.
Remember how she lived.
Remember how she died.
And through your actions, honor her memory.”

To remember Lauren is to remember a girl who ran fast and loved big, who adopted shy cats and skipped drama and believed people when they said they were good.

To honor her is to listen when someone says, “I’m scared. He’s not who he says he is. I need help.” And to answer that with something more than a shrug and a postponed report.

It’s to be the person who says, “I will listen and believe you if someone is threatening you.”

Because Lauren did everything she was supposed to do.

It’s the world around her that didn’t.