By AUDITI GUHA/VTDIGGER
Megan Sorensen sleeps with her daughter’s ashes so that she can be close to her at the end and the start of each day.
Three months after 20-year-old student Evelyn Mae Sorensen died from an accidental overdose on the Middlebury College campus, her mother is still seeking answers. Megan Sorensen has become increasingly frustrated with the response of college administrators and alleges that the school failed to support her daughter, a transgender woman who struggled with mental illness and substance use.
Faculty members and friends of Evelyn have also been demanding answers from college officials. In a letter to the administration weeks after Evelyn’s death, 11 faculty members asked a series of pointed questions — about the circumstances of the third-year student’s death and the state of on-campus support services for mental health and substance use disorders, especially for marginalized groups such as LGBTQ+ people. Through a protest and social media posts, students have also been calling on the college to do more.
Middlebury spokespeople declined to discuss details of Evelyn’s case, citing privacy laws, and did not respond to repeated requests for interviews with college leaders. But they have disputed allegations that the school doesn’t provide enough support to students.
As she grieves at home in Oregon, Megan Sorensen has grappled with regret. She said she wishes her daughter had pursued higher education elsewhere — somewhere less elite and closer to home.
“You don’t expect to send your kid to college to come home in a coffin,” Sorensen said, through tears, during an interview with VTDigger earlier this month. “You expect (school officials) to be supportive if they are depressed. You expect them to be supportive if there is drug involvement. You expect that the college is going to take care of them.”
A difficult summer
Sorensen and other people close to Evelyn described her as a bright, caring student who was active in the mountaineering, bicycling and queer communities on campus. She enjoyed photography, nature and working at local cafes.
The summer, her mother said, was full of opportunity — but also significant challenges. Evelyn was earning straight A’s in her pursuit of a double major in geology and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. She was also looking forward to working as a research assistant in earth and climate sciences, collaborating on projects with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. And as a person who struggled with mental health issues and substance use disorder, Evelyn had achieved “an extended period of sobriety,” Sorensen said.
But Evelyn was also “struggling with the possibility of relapse,” her mother said, as is common among people in recovery, and had been “open to her providers at the college about her use.” She was working to stay healthy through an opioid treatment program, a local addiction support group and services through the college’s Disability Resource Center, Sorensen said. She said Evelyn disclosed to her medical providers on campus that she was “looking at ordering a package of fentanyl.”
According to Sorensen, Evelyn told her mother she bought the fentanyl, having it delivered to herself on campus sometime in late May, but threw it away without using it because she was on suboxone, which is used to treat opioid dependence.
In messages Evelyn sent her mother and a faculty advisor, Evelyn said that Derek Doucet, the associate vice president and dean of students, showed up at her summer dorm room days later, early in the morning of May 30. She said in the messages that Doucet gave her a short period to pack up and vacate her room and handed her a plane ticket to fly home to Oregon later in the day.
In an email sent to a professor, Lizz Ultee, on May 30, Evelyn wrote, “I am so sorry but I’m not going to make our 11am meeting and don’t even know if I will continue with the plans of having me as a research assistant. Derek Doucet told me this morning at 8:30am that I am being kicked off of campus effective at 1pm today so I need to pack and get on a flight back to Oregon. I don’t know if I could still continue my research remotely and would be incredibly thankful if I could.”
Ultee, an assistant professor in earth and climate sciences who had hired Evelyn for the summer, said in an interview that Evelyn told her the school wanted to put her on a forced medical leave of absence because of “a substance use disorder for which she was already in treatment, with a program overseen by a medical doctor.” According to Ultee, Evelyn “said that the dean of students did not understand medication-assisted treatment and wanted her to go to inpatient rehab.”
Ultee emailed Doucet the same day and Doucet confirmed to her via email that Evelyn had been required to depart campus but had access to telemedicine services. He said he could not share more because of “significant privacy considerations.”
Evelyn chose to stay in Vermont because, she said in texts to Sorensen, her health care team thought it would be the most stable option, given that she was on medication-assisted treatment for substance use.
Despite a severe shortage of options, Evelyn found temporary housing at a Middlebury homeless shelter. There, she told friends and family, other residents, mostly older men, encouraged her to take drugs.
Evelyn appealed Doucet’s decision, according to Sorensen and faculty. Emails shared by Sorensen show at least two concerned faculty members agreed that the college had put her in “grave danger” during a housing crisis in Vermont with very few emergency beds available.
“I honestly feel like we’re fighting for her life,” Sorensen wrote in a June 8 email in response to the faculty. “(Homelessness) is a death sentence either by drugs or suicide. Coming home is better than that, but it would just be prolonging the struggle, and there would be great doubts of whether she would ever return to Middlebury. The college holds her life and future literally in their hands.”
Evelyn sent her mother a series of texts outlining her condition during that time. One, sent from the homeless shelter in June, reads: “I haven’t slept a whole night since Derek kicked me out. I’m sick, weak, lost so much weight my ribs are showing. My mental health is the worst it’s ever been.”
“Every day I get more depressed and closer to wanting to die,” Evelyn wrote in another text to her mother on June 11.
Following the appeal, Evelyn was allowed back into a dorm room on June 16, according to Ultee.
Even as she struggled, Evelyn was open about mental health and substance use challenges evidently related to depression, anxiety and other issues. In a July TikTok post, she wrote, “Over 5 weeks without f3nt, c0ke, and x@ns,” referring to fentanyl, cocaine and xanax. “I know I have a long way to go and everyday is difficult but I finally feel like I have my life back.” The post logged more than 800 likes and 65 comments.
On Sept. 11 — a couple months after she was readmitted on campus and days before her death — Evelyn suffered a bicycle accident that totaled the beloved bike she had saved up to buy, according to Sorensen and a Middlebury Police Department report. She was hospitalized at Porter Medical Center with a concussion and a broken tooth.
Sorensen, faculty members and friends of Evelyn said they were upset that no one from the college administration checked in on her after she returned to her dorm.
A single mother of three, Sorensen said she became worried when, a few days after the bike accident, she stopped hearing back from her daughter. On Sept. 19, she called the college’s public safety department, asking it to check on her daughter. The call was logged at 10:05 p.m., according to a Middlebury Police Department report.
Within a few minutes, a security officer from the college’s public safety department conducted a wellness check at the Forrest Hall dorm room, found no response and forced entry at 10:13 p.m., according to the report.
Evelyn’s body, already in rigor mortis, was found lying on the bed, face down, according to the report. There was drug paraphernalia around the room, including needles, snorting straws, a spoon, Narcan and drug testing kits. Seven minutes later, Middlebury police responded and declared Evelyn dead.
College authorities confirmed that she had last entered the building three days earlier, at 10:21 p.m. on Sept. 16, according to the police report.
The 20-year-old’s death certificate showed she died from an accidental fentanyl overdose after using cocaine.
A demand for information
On Oct. 11, a group of 11 faculty members sent a letter to the Faculty Council to request “crucial information about Evelyn’s treatment at Middlebury and the handling of her death.”
In the letter they ask why she was asked to leave campus in May, whether there was a reentry plan in place, why no wellness checks occurred between the bike accident and her death, and what systems failures occurred to allow her to die and not be found for as many as three days.
The letter also poses broader questions about the availability of in-person mental health support, caseloads for resident assistants, whether health care staff are trained in dealing with substance use disorder and when a psychiatrist will be made available to students.
“We ask this not only because we know demand is high, but also because some of Evelyn’s friends heard from her that she was not able to access the resources she needed,” the letter states.
The Faculty Council, an elected executive committee representing faculty, backed the letter with a note to the administration on Nov. 1 encouraging it to respond to the concerns. (The council also voted in November to extend academic deadlines in light of two student deaths on campus, including Evelyn’s, The Middlebury Campus newspaper reported.)
Michelle McCauley, interim executive vice president and provost, emailed a response to the faculty letter-writers on Dec. 12 that did not answer the questions. “Middlebury cannot share students’ confidential health, medication or counseling information with the faculty as a whole, or a subset that requests it,” she stated.
McCauley further wrote, “Our colleagues have consistently gone above and beyond for our students and our community. To suggest otherwise is simply inaccurate.”
“We have had a horrific, sad fall semester,” McCauley wrote. “Many of us will have questions that are never fully answered around why two amazing young adults are gone. I have two children approximately the ages of Evelyn and Ivan and I am personally struggling to understand the challenges these young adults are balancing.”
Not enough support?
When families visited Middlebury College during Fall Family Weekend, which took place Sept. 27-29, a small group of students with black tape across their mouths held up black and white handmade signs outside the chapel with various slogans referring to Evelyn and the questions surrounding her death.
“How long until you find the next kid dead?” read one.
After Evelyn was found deceased on Sept. 19, another student died on campus. Ivan Valerio, a 19-year-old Filipino American from Florida, died by suicide on Nov. 7, according to a death certificate obtained by VTDigger.
A November editorial in the The Middlebury Campus, titled “Student death is now part of the routine at Middlebury,” cited these deaths, as well as that of a third student — Yan Zhou from China — who died of an apparent suicide in 2021, according to the student newspaper. Another student, William Nash, died after drug use in 2020. Middlebury Police confirmed that four deaths have been investigated on campus since 2019. The causes were accidental asphyxiation, accidental drug overdose and two suicides.
Middlebury Police Chief Jason Covey said in an email this week that the mental health struggles evident from these incidents are reflective of society at large. The school and the town “are not immune to the state and nationwide impacts of mental health and drug use. As a police department, we find ourselves routinely dealing with related matters.”
The department, Covey said, recognizes “the evolving nature of the law enforcement profession to one where officers serve many functions,” including filling gaps to act as social workers.
Students recently created an Instagram page — No More Dead Kids at Middlebury — in which they anonymously share their experiences and thoughts.
“I believe that if the college was better equipped to meet the needs of marginalized students in this rural, socially isolating, elitist pwi (predominately white institution), student death might not be normal as it is now,” one person identifying themselves as a current student wrote in November. They added that they had “tried and failed to find a counselor on this campus.”
“If I were to speak, I would say that addiction is terrifying, and that this school does not put enough attention to mental health and providing resources for students to have access to regular therapy,” Annika Raiha Vikstrom, one of Evelyn’s friends, told VTDigger in an email.
Sorensen said it took almost a year for Evelyn to get set up with a local doctor, counselor and psychiatrist. Instead, the school repeatedly referred her to online therapy modules that involved short conversations with a new person every time, Sorensen said.
“As a professional, I’m disgusted,” said Sorensen, who is a nurse practitioner in child and adolescent psychiatry in Oregon. “The college has not adapted to the mental health needs of their students, especially in the pandemic.”
Nationwide, rates of anxiety, stress and depression among young people have skyrocketed since the onset of Covid-19, with suicide rates of people ages 10-24 climbing, according to a 2021 advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. LGBTQ+ and other marginalized populations are particularly affected.
In an email to VTDigger, Julia Ferrante, associate vice president for public affairs, wrote, “While we can’t share information about any specific student’s use of campus supports and resources, we can confirm that Middlebury takes a comprehensive approach to student support and identifying students with needs.”
Ferrante declined to answer specific questions about Evelyn’s situation but shared general information outlining Middlebury’s approach to “harm reduction resources and educational programming about the risks of opioids.”
In a section about opioids, Ferrante said there are harm reduction stations that stock Narcan. She pointed to the availability of a 30-minute online course on “other drugs” and how students can access four 60-minute sessions “with a provider from Health and Wellness Education to explore your personal relationship with substance use, get individualized feedback, and learn about support services.”
And she said that the college was planning to open a LGBTQIA+ resource called the Prism Center for Queer and Trans Life at Middlebury that “will focus particularly on student empowerment and center on the experiences of queer and trans people of color.”
It was slated to open in 2021, according to a press release on the college website.
Speech censored?
Sorensen’s criticism of Middlebury extends to how it handled the aftermath of her daughter’s death. Sorensen flew in for an Oct. 5 vigil and ceremonial bicycle ride in honor of her daughter, she said. But before her speech, Sorensen said, the chaplain told her she couldn’t include comments about the administration and how it had treated her.
“He said, you can’t say this stuff at a vigil and if you’re going to say that stuff we are not holding a vigil for everyone tonight,” she said. “So I had to completely rewrite my vigil remarks 45 minutes before the vigil occurred to align with what Middlebury wanted me to say.”
More than 300 people showed up at the vigil, which she said was beautiful.
Smita Ruzicka, the vice president for student affairs at Middlebury College, informed Sorensen the next day that Evelyn’s room had been packed up and sanitized, Sorensen said. “So we didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to her in her room or to pack up any of her belongings,” she said.
Sorensen was directed to the Scott Center, a religious and spiritual building on campus, to pick up Evelyn’s things, she said. Many of the items were damaged, she alleged, and several were missing, including some of Evelyn’s journals, a roller suitcase, and two fish fossils that Sorensen had given her daughter when she went home last year.
After she followed up with Middlebury again this week about the missing items, the school’s general counsel, Hannah S. Ross, invited her to a phone meeting.
Sorensen responded to say she was too upset for another meeting and had lost all faith in the college after three months of waiting.
“I want my daughter’s belongings back, and I want to know what happened to them. I don’t need to go through another traumatic experience of the College giving me no answers, and a bunch of excuses of why they have not been sent to me,” she wrote back.
‘A terrible tragedy’
Yumna Siddiqi, associate professor of English, said in an email that Evelyn was in one of her advanced classes as a first-year student. “She was extraordinarily thoughtful and bright, and pushed herself very hard,” Siddiqi said.
Evelyn also worked part time at local cafes. Caroline Corrente of Haymaker Buns said Evelyn worked on and off there since her first year at Middlebury. Corrente described Evelyn as “a quiet, kind individual who was a talented barista and a hard worker.”
“She shared her dislike of the college from year one, which I do remember at one point sparked a conversation between us where I asked her why she didn’t think about transferring because it was so much money to spend on something that she did not like. She said she was going to give it some more time,” Corrente said in an email. “I unfortunately think her time at Middlebury never improved and she did not or could not get to a school that was a better fit.”
Though Evelyn endured many challenges, Corrente said, Evelyn came to work with a positive attitude every day and described Haymaker “as a safe space where she felt the environment and her co-workers were really supportive.”
Corrente attended the vigil and bike ride. She said she felt very sad and was still in the dark about what actually happened.
Sorensen has created a Facebook page called The Evelyn Project that focuses on mental health and substance use struggles on the Middlebury College campus. It is modeled after the Elis for Rachel nonprofit formed by students and alumni at Yale University after first-year Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum died by suicide in 2021.
The nonprofit claimed in a class-action lawsuit that the university limited her access to care and discriminated against students with mental health disabilities. This August it won a historic settlement that has set off a series of reforms to better serve students with mental health needs.
Sorensen said she hopes The Evelyn Project will force similar changes on campus for students struggling with mental health and substance use disorders.
Grieving has been “lonely and exhausting” for Sorensen, who has two younger kids at home. Between digging for information and her exchanges with Middlebury College, she’s reading books about grief, connecting online with other parents who have faced similar situations, and poring over the ways in which she thinks she somehow failed Evelyn — a trauma faced by many parents of youth lost to suicide or overdose.
“I cope by trying to keep Evelyn’s legacy alive,” she said. “I can only hope I can make her proud and find how to honor her in the time I have left here on earth, if only for my kids so they will go on the remainder of their lives remembering her.”
