Last Tuesday all 4,000 copies of the Justice were stolen from the loading dock at the Usdan Student Center before they could be distributed. Mark Brescia, then the senator for the class of 2004, accepted responsibility for the theft on Wednesday morning, after Brandeis Police, acting on an anonymous tip, recovered about half of the missing issues from his residency. The remaining copies have yet to be found.Brescia resigned from his senate position at Sunday night's Senate meeting.

Brescia has said that he meant no harm by stealing the newspapers and that he simply wanted to pull a prank. This incident, however, is not a joking matter. As an elected official, Brescia betrayed the trust of the class of 2004. As a student, Brescia betrayed the trust of the Brandeis community. His actions undermined our continued hard work towards change, progress and healing on this campus.

For a media group to be so callously undermined by one individual is troubling. Brescia effectively cut off the eyes and ears of the community and silenced the voices of reporters, columnists, photographers and other contributors to the paper. As with any school organization, the Justice should be safe to work toward its goals and purposes. No student group should fear its events will be ruined, its property disturbed or its product damaged.

The Justice is the product of countless hours of work not only by editors, but also by a large and dedicated staff that puts in time and effort to record, through words, photographs and artwork, the events that occur on this campus. That their hard work should be so casually disregarded is extremely upsetting and disturbing.

In addition to the costs of time and effort, there are monetary costs. Production of a newspaper is not inexpensive, and there was a potentially great cost that would have been incurred to reprint the issue. By taking the newspapers off the loading dock Tuesday afternoon, Brescia committed a felony. While the Justice is free on campus, there are subscribers to the newspaper and advertisers in the newspaper that pay our organization for the services we provide. We are funded, in part, by Student Activities Fund (SAF) money that comes directly from students. The severity of the incident cannot be emphasized enough, as property of an organization was blatantly stolen.

If a student has a concern, we have been adamant in our desire to have opinions heard in the pages of our newspaper. By preventing those opinions from being heard, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are stifled and dialogue comes to a halt. It is foolish to think Brescia would have done this were it not for the events of the last few weeks. If this was indeed done as an act of social protest, the injustice to the community is far greater than to any cause he protested. It pains us that an environment has been created at Brandeis where a student could genuinely believe that actions of such gravity could be thought so insignificant as to not render severe consequences. His abhorrent actions do not speak louder than the community's words.