Memorial Fund Honors Classmate, Promotes Community Awareness
(From Foundations Annual Report, 2005-2006, East Carolina University)
As the Brody School of Medicine’s Class of 2006 was preparing to begin their medical studies, excitement and anticipation of things to come were in the air. They were buying books, discussing schedules, and meeting their fellow classmates. Unbeknownst to them, a tragedy had occurred that would spark a call to action.
On a hot August morning in 2002, seventy-two members of the Class of 2006 gathered together at orientation and heard about the senseless death of their seventy-third classmate, Tiana Nicole Williams. Williams, a bright, young, African American woman full of dreams of becoming a doctor, was killed on July 7, 2002, at the hands of her domestic partner one month before beginning medical school.
Like Williams, millions of women are abused by husbands and boyfriends each year, and many more live in constant fear and danger. According to the organization Family Violence Prevention, on average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in the United States daily. Women are much more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner.
Four then-medical students–Charlene Davenport, Tana Hall, Amy Howell, and Andrew Southerland–decided they would not let William’s memory die. Although they had never met her, these four worked tirelessly to raise awareness and money to endow a medical fund to provide stipends to medical students to develop and participate in research and community service projects for the prevention of domestic violence.
“Our goal was to not let her memory fade,” says Hall, MD ‘06. “We wanted to get involved as a class, and Tiana‘s death helped us to put priorities into perspective.”
All four students knew this wouldn’t be easy, but with a unanimous vote from the 2006 class, the Tiana Nicole Williams Memorial Endowment project was set in motion and the silent victims of domestic violence would become the mantra for their fund-raising efforts over the course of four years.
With rummage sales, raffles, talent shows, and gifts from students, faculty, and parents, half of the sum was raised. That‘s when the class came and asked Carole Novick, interim president of the Medical Foundation, for help, desperately wanting to reach their goal by graduation. Novick discovered that several preceding classes had left sums of money on account with the Medical Foundation. She wrote to each of the presidents of those classes asking them to join with the Class of 2006 and transfer their funds to the endowment to help reach the $25,000 goal.
“Not one class refused,” says Novick. “We raised more than $12,000, putting us over the top and created a lasting bond.” Contributing classes were 1991, 1993, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2004.
“We knew how important it was to give to such a worthy cause,” says Howell, MD ‘06. “The Medical Foundation really helped us in reaching out and telling Tiana‘s story to the alumni community, which helped our fund-raising efforts.”
As part of the May awards ceremony just prior to their graduation, Hall, Southerland, Davenport, and Howell presented Williams‘s mother, Cynthia Foxx, and other family members with a certificate proclaiming Williams as an honorary member of their class and the Brody School of Medicine Alumni Society. They also gave the family a picture of the granite bench that will sit in the Brody School of Medicine courtyard to honor their seventy-third classmate, Tiana Nicole Williams.