In Binghamton University’s 63-year history, there are probably few events the University would want to be remembered for less, yet there’s never been anything it’s received attention for more: a bar fight leaves one student in a coma, the other an international fugitive. That’s the simple version, anyway (see page 1).

Miladin Kovacevic allegedly assaulted Bryan Steinhauer at The Rathskeller Pub on May 4, on the same weekend that a BU student was killed in a car accident — the third to pass away in the school year. It was a demoralizing way to close the semester, but as was to be expected, it was a story contained within the local community.

The tabloids, the national newspapers of record, the major television networks, even overseas outlets — they all had it, right in the middle of summer: Binghamton University’s name.

Before late June when national media took interest, we wrote that while BU did not have to endure an event on the scale of Virginia Tech, “A tragedy, no matter on how grand a scale or how much media attention it receives, is still a tragedy” (see “Everything that rises,” May 6).

We don’t rescind. But what the New York City tabloids did — branding Kovacevic “a Serb thug” and a “cruel lunkhead” the first day the story made a front page other than Pipe Dream’s and the Press & Sun-Bulletin’s, then in the days and weeks following, putting Steinhauer’s picture on the cover and describing his tragic state in detail, likely to his family’s chagrin — only salted the wounds.

Kovacevic should be returned to the U.S. to face prosecution. But the papers have wrongly presumed his guilt before he has been tried (granted, he may never be, at least not in the U.S.) and now the incident is being used as a vehicle in international diplomacy. Somewhere along the way, what happened on May 4 was forgotten: a tragic bar fight that has potentially ruined the lives of both men.

Realistically, there’s little the University could have done in the way of prevention. Still, it’s Binghamton’s name that’s attached to an event that’s been brutally stretched in the media and the public’s mind.

Binghamton University, known colloquially as that decent public school somewhere northwest of New York City, where Tony Kornheiser and one of the Baldwin brothers went. And now, that school where that “Serb thug” beat up that skinny kid from Brooklyn before fleeing the country.