UCLA student or suspect: a case of mistaken identity prompts closer look at private information posted online
By Farzad Mashhood
Dec. 12, 2010 6:06 p.m.
Joshua Elder just wanted a night off from studying.
He had been busy preparing for Step 2 of his board exams, a critical battery of tests taken by prospective physicians during their time in medical school.
But with his books packed away for the evening, the UCLA student made the journey to Pasadena on Dec. 4 to watch the annual game between UCLA and USC. A big college football fan, he was not about to pass up an opportunity to watch his team compete against its sworn rival.
Instead of a relaxing evening, Elder was swept up in a fight to protect his privacy and confirm his identity. As it turns out, Elder shares a name with one of the suspects arrested in connection with a stabbing incident at the Dec. 4 game.
Like most of the more than 71,000 people who were at the Rose Bowl, Elder did not know about the 40-person brawl that broke out in Lot 1 just three hours before kick off. He did not know two people had been stabbed or three people had been arrested.
And he did not know he had the same name as a suspect.
Initial news reports gave no information beyond name and age. The suspect Joshua Elder is 24 years old, only three years younger than the UCLA student Joshua Elder. News spread fast, and many reports left out information about ages. Only one Joshua Elder was listed in the UCLA and USC online directories.
During the third quarter of the football game, Elder received an unexpected phone call. He was cheering on the Bruins from the student section, just 22 rows above the field, when he answered the call; it was a reporter from the Daily Bruin. The reporter told him there had been a fight, and one of the suspects had the same name as Elder.
And while the reporter quickly realized that the Joshua Elder he was speaking to was not the person who had been arrested, this was just the beginning of trouble for the student on the other end of the line.
Elder was concerned about his safety. The reporter explained to him that his phone number, as well as his other contact information, was available on the UCLA online directory.
Elder quickly checked in with a police officer, who told him he should be concerned that his information is so easily accessible. We can’t help you, the officer told him, but call us if anything does happen.
“It’s a situation nobody’s really been in,” Elder said. “Nobody could give advice to solve it.”
Elder rushed home as the game wound down. He flipped open his laptop and logged on to URSA, then clicked “Update Privacy Options” and removed all of his information except his e-mail address from the public directory.
The directory takes 24 hours to update, which left Elder in limbo for the next day. He worried if other media outlets or, worse, people out for revenge, would get to him and his contact information.
UCLA spokesman Phil Hampton said the university “takes student privacy very seriously “¦ and continually re-evaluates URSA for potential improvements, including reminders about updating privacy settings.”
By default, though, students have their personal address and phone number made available to the public.
“Facebook? That’s definitely something you should take down. Oh, URSA website? Doesn’t seem like a likely source of info that can hurt you,” Elder said.
He called his parents as well to assure them he was neither in jail nor a suspect in the stabbing incident.
Elder does not have a criminal record, just a parking ticket and a speeding ticket. This didn’t save him from a number of phone calls and e-mails he received from friends and family after the game.
A mentor of Elder, who is currently an emergency physician in Iraq, e-mailed him Sunday morning.
“Hey, Thought you might wanna (sic) know about this article I saw on espn.com; hoping that you behaved yourself at the UCLA–USC game last night;-),” the e-mail began.
The physician attached the text from an Associated Press story about the fight that had appeared on the front page of ESPN’s website.
“He got a kick out of it,” Elder said.
Elder’s classmates in a statistics class Monday joked that the professor bailed him out of jail to take the exam.
“People who know me were just like, ‘This can’t be you,’” Elder said. “I’m a pretty conservative guy going to medical school.”
Elder said he has always been careful to protect his privacy. His Facebook profile lists him as a male UCLA graduate student who “likes” the UCLA School of Public Health and Doctors Without Borders. He went to the University of Pittsburgh and is a member of the National Institutes of Health network.
“Before this, you look up on Google and you find information about Joshua Elder, fourth-year UCLA med student. Here are his publications. Here is the music he writes. Very identifying to me,” he said.
Now, that search will bring up a list of articles about the stabbing.
Fortunately for Elder, nobody aside from his friends and family would later contact him after the incident.
Joshua Elder, the suspect in the Dec. 4 fight, was in police custody through the weekend and released after being arraigned at a Pasadena courthouse on Monday.
The potentially dangerous coincidence gave Elder an opportunity to evaluate his identity and how he portrays himself online.
“Your name is a brand,” Elder said. “You want to do everything you can to protect it.”
One step to upping the protection of his name: using his middle name, Weimer.
Joshua Weimer Elder’s next big test, now, is his board exam.
