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WFU Asks For Dismissal Of Lawsuit Tied To On-Campus Shooting

Najee Ali Baker, a walk-on for Winston-Salem State University's football team, was shot and killed while leaving a party on the campus of Wake Forest University in January 2018. Courtesy of WSSU athletics.

Wake Forest University is asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from a fatal shooting on campus in 2018.

Najee Ali Baker, 21, was shot and killed as he left a party being held at The Barn, an on-campus events venue.

In the lawsuit, Baker's mother alleges that university officials ignored a report calling for campus police to provide extra security at student events and for failing to provide enough security measures to prevent the shooting.

Wake Forest attorneys dispute those allegations, arguing that even if they are true, the lawsuit fails to prove that the university's actions - whatever they did or didn't do - had anything to do with Baker's death.

Baker was a student and football player at Winston-Salem State University. Two people are facing criminal charges in connection with his death.

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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