BPD: Dow’s injuries came in roof fall

The death of a college student who fell off the roof of a Glenville Avenue apartment in Allston early Nov. 17 was caused by injuries sustained from the fall, and not from a brawl that erupted inside the building’s stairwell less than an hour earlier, the Boston Police Department said in a statement Monday.

The autopsy of Shawn Dow, 21, revealed the Art Institute of Boston junior’s injuries were “not consistent with injuries sustained as the result of an assault,” according to the statement.

Further investigations will treat the death as accidental, the report says. Detectives interviewed 20 students at the party, none of whom said they saw Dow involved in the fight.

Shortly after 2:30 a.m. Saturday, police found Dow on his back in an alley behind the building with blood seeping from his head. The police were responding to the scene to treat a student who had been beaten with a spindle and had cuts, scrapes and bruises on his face as a result of the fight, according to District D-14 crime logs.

An Art Institute junior who wished to remain anonymous told The Daily Free Press on Sunday she saw students cracking beer bottles over each other’s heads and smashing each other into banisters, spilling blood over the walls of the stairwell. She said she did not believe Dow’s death was accidental.

“Isn’t it a little odd that he had so much damage to his face but was lying on his back, making his fall make no sense?” she said. “It strikes me as horrifying and odd that the police have reports of kids being spotted holding hammers, beating kids’ faces in, and [Dow] wasn’t beaten? He fell?”

A separate report from the same night, which police said may have been related to the fight inside 14 Glenville Ave., states a man walking down the street reported being smacked in the head with a ladder that cut his head open. He was taken to Brigham and Women’s Hospital and released.