Ayoola Ajayi (left) is accused of murdering Mackenzie Lueck (right).
Last Wednesday, while Mackenzie Lueck was still considered “missing” and before Ayoola Ajayi had been named as a “person of interest” in the University of Utah senior’s disappearance, the Daily Mail broke an important exclusive: The 23-year-old sorority girl had been using social media and dating apps to seek out “sugar baby” arrangements with older men, boasting about it as “NovaBaby96” in private Facebook messages.
Given the circumstances surrounding her disappearance (e.g., arranging to meet a guy at 3 a.m. in a park) this struck me as ominous, and led me to a strongly-worded declaration of unfortunate truth:
Let’s be blunt: Mackenzie Lueck was a whore. Also notice my use of the past-tense verb “was” — they won’t find her alive. And her parents will have to ask themselves how they failed so badly: Why did their daughter turn into a whore?
We should not pretend that “seeking arrangements” as a “sugar baby” is anything other than prostitution, and if participants in such “arrangements” don’t enjoy being told the truth, that’s not my fault. No one should blame a college girl for preferring the companionship of an older, successful man to the typical “date” with a college boy. What girl wouldn’t rather be wined and dined by a guy with a good job than to engage in a makeout session in a dorm room with a drunk fratboy? But the “arrangements” being brokered via “sugar baby” sites (or Tinder) are more of a fee-for-service transaction, and not sophisticated romantic adventures. Where do we draw the line? At what point does such behavior cease to be “dating” and begin to be prostitution? What is the difference between a girlfriend and a common whore?
My suggestion (and I think most parents would agree) is that a woman who doesn’t want to be treated like a whore should scrupulously avoid any situation that might put her in such a light. We don’t yet know exactly how Mackenzie Lueck was lured to her death, but the 2+2 deduction is that Ayoola Ajayi was a prospective “sugar daddy” client, and her sorority sisters are angry that people are making that deduction:
“There’s a lot of people that say she deserved this because she put herself in this situation and we don’t officially know that,” Kennedy Stoner, a sorority sister and friend of Lueck’s, told Fox News in an exclusive interview on Sunday.
Two other friends, Ashley Fine and Katie Kvam, speaking to Fox News, called out people on social media who were blaming Lueck for her own death.
“No person regardless of their gender or dating life deserves to die,” Fine said. “Mackenzie is not responsible for the death and murder of Mackenzie. There’s only one person responsible for that, and we’re here to hold him responsible and we’re going to keep holding him responsible.”
“If Kenzie knew what was gonna happen she would not have met that individual at the park,” Kvam said. “Her death is not her fault… and for people to say things other than that is hurtful. It’s hurtful to us. It’s hurtful to her family. It’s hurtful to other victims out there. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Well, critical comments are less “hurtful” than being strangled to death and having your dismembered corpse burned beyond recognition, but you see that the sisters of Alpha Chi Omega are in denial about the predictable risks of using the Internet to arrange sex with strangers. One suspects that such behavior is not rare at AXO, and that by defending Mackenie’s behavior, these sorority girls are defending their own promiscuity. And there’s more sorority girl philosophizing:
“All of her friends and her family can see what a huge light of our lives is,” Fine said, “and this man stole our friend away from us and she’s gone way too soon. And, it’s just not fair.”
Lueck’s friends said people closely following this case have speculated that Ajayi’s heritage as an African man who “survived a tyrannical dictatorship, escaped a real-life crime, traveled internationally,” according to an author page on Amazon, somehow played a role in his alleged crime, but the girls said his race was irrelevant.
“Evil comes in every color, every gender. Just because you know Mackenzie was white and he is African-American, the suspect, it doesn’t matter to me,” Fine said. “It doesn’t matter to me, it doesn’t play a part in this story, it never played a part in this story. Mackenzie’s death and murder did not have anything to do with race. It had to do with an evil person with bad intentions who is a danger to society.”
“I’d feel [a] strong amount of hate for not just him because of his color, that shouldn’t matter. Her color doesn’t matter. It was just an evil, sick person,” Kvam said.
An entirely random coincidence, you see. There is no pattern to evil, according to these AXO philosophers, and it is “hurtful” to suggest that their deceased friend probably should have avoided meeting a Nigerian immigrant at a park on the north side of town at 3 a.m. Yes, of course, her error is apparent in hindsight, the sorority girls are willing to admit, but that doesn’t mean there are any lessons to be learned in terms of future hookups with exotic strangers arranged via dating apps: “YOLO!”
What makes Internet dating so dangerous is the lack of social context. Like, if a guy from work or school asks a girl on a date, she can evaluate him by his appearance and demeanor: Does he seem like a potential serial killer? Or she can ask around among her friends to get their feedback: What is this guy’s reputation? But if all she’s got to judge him by is his profile on a dating site, or maybe his Instagram account, how can she evaluate whether he poses a safety risk?
Only a fool would meet a total stranger at 3 a.m. in a public park. No matter how committed to the YOLO creed a sorority girl might be, a basic concern for her personal safety would suggest that the first meeting should occur during daylight hours — coffee at Starbucks — rather than at night. And while it is nowadays considered unacceptable to criticize anyone’s sexual preferences (“De gustibus non est disputandum”), are we really required to suppose that it was just random coincidence that the blonde Mormon girl fell prey to a Nigerian immigrant? These white college girls are understandably defensive about saying anything that might be deemed “racist,” but the facts are the facts, and random evil is an inadequate answer to the question of how and why this happened. Stipulating that we don’t yet know exactly how this tryst was arranged, or whether Ajayi used some sort of subterfuge to lure Mackenzie to her death, wouldn’t it make more sense to suspect that race was a factor in how these two met? “Opposites attract,” or whatever?
Our fear of being accused of racism, like our reluctance to engage in “slut-shaming,” serves to inhibit the kind of common-sense discussion that might be helpful to young women seeking to avoid certain risks, like getting murdered and dismembered by your next Tinder hookup.
“It’s just not fair,” as Mackenzie’s friend says, but I can hear my late father’s voice: “Son, who ever told you life was supposed to be fair?”
UPDATE: More developments in the story:
Utah State University barred Ayoola Ajayi, who is in jail on suspicion of kidnapping and murdering MacKenzie Lueck, from its campus after a theft investigation, according to documents from the school.
Campus police reports also describe Ajayi, a Nigerian immigrant, as overstaying his visa and perhaps using a stolen iPad to find a wife to reduce his chances of being deported. When USU police booked Ajayi into the Cache County jail in 2012 on suspicion of misdemeanor theft, officers notified Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a Nigerian consulate. . . .
“This letter is to inform you that if you feel you need to visit our campus,” Eric R. Olsen, the associate vice president for student services, wrote to Ajayi on Aug. 2, 2012, “you must first contact the Utah State University Police Department and have them escort you on and off campus. If you violate this mandate, you will be cited for trespassing and will face additional legal consequences.” . . .
USU said Ajayi attended classes off and on between 2009 and 2016, with a break in attendance between 2011 and 2015. He did not obtain a degree. . . .
The first report is from May 18, 2012. Officers on patrol found Ajayi sleeping in the lounge at San Juan Hall apartments. Ajayi told officers he was waiting on his girlfriend, who lived in another campus housing complex, Aggie Village. The officers told Ajayi he was not allowed to sleep in a building where he didn’t live.
Officers later went to Aggie Village to find the girlfriend and check out Ajayi’s story. The report says a woman told police she knew Ajayi but neither he nor any girlfriend lived in Aggie Village. Reports written over May 20 and 21, 2012, describe officers reaching Ajayi by phone and then in person, accusing him of being “deceitful” and warning him that he would be charged with trespassing if he was found on campus again.
The final sentence of the report says USU police contacted ICE. The federal agency informed officers Ajayi had overstayed his visa and ICE needed to be contacted if he was arrested.
Then, on July 22, 2012, campus police investigated the theft of an iPad. The next day, campus technology staff found that someone was using the tablet to access the internet. Police found Ajayi using the iPad in the iconic academic building known as Old Main, a report says.
An officer searched the iPad’s web history and found that, though Ajayi was married, he accessed dating sites, listed himself as single and was pursuing “a female as a prospect to marry to keep from being deported.”
So here was a guy with a history of immigration fraud, theft and using the Internet for illicit purposes, and how did he manage to convince Mackenzie Lueck to meet him at a park at 3 a.m.?
