Meghan Shelley ’27 is an English major in the JDP. She frequently contributes to the College’s’s literary magazine, The Gallery and is a member of Delta Gamma. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, reading, going to the movies and spending time with friends. You can contact her at mcshelly@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
Homecoming has always been one of the things I’ve loved most about the College of William and Mary. It’s a time meant to bring us together as a campus community, to welcome back friends who have graduated, to have fun and remember why we love our school. 2026 marked 100 years of Homecomings at the College, making the weekend all the more exciting.
For those in Fraternity and Sorority life, Homecoming is an opportunity to bring organizations closer as Fraternities and Sororities pair up and spend the week running events together. I still remember Homecoming my first year at the College two years ago as the highlight of my semester. After spending last year abroad, I was anticipating Homecoming more than ever. I never could have imagined it ending with my friends in the emergency room with concussions and broken bones.
On the night of Friday, Oct. 23, I was standing on an off-campus fraternity house’s deck when it collapsed. In a matter of seconds, I watched as the floor beneath my friends disappeared and dozens of my peers fell to the ground below. Though I was on the deck, I was about 5 to 10 feet away from where the floor broke and very luckily uninjured. Still, it was difficult to process what I saw in front of me.
I remember my friend behind me grabbing me and telling me that we needed to get off the deck, now. I remember the frantic shouts of my sorority president trying to move those of us who hadn’t fallen to a safer location. I remember my friend’s tears, immediately aware of something I hadn’t yet processed. Some of my best friends were on the side of the porch that collapsed, and I didn’t know if they were okay at all. Nobody who saw what happened knew how bad it was yet; none of us knew if our friends were alive.
When I got out of the house and made my way to the backyard where the group had fallen, I immediately began calling people, unsure if I would get a response, unsure if I would hear anything over the sirens, the screams of those in pain and the shouts of confusion. I saw my sorority sisters in tears, saw people being carried out of the wreckage from the porch, saw people bleeding.
I found my ex-boyfriend first; he had fallen and hit his head, but he assured me he was okay. The relief I felt was immeasurable, but I still didn’t know where two of my best friends were. He offered to go back into the mess to look for them. My roommate appeared shortly after, and as we looked around us, we knew we needed to leave.
My other roommate, who had been next to me during the collapse, had vanished, too. I found out soon after that she had run into the collapse to look for our friends. She comforted our friend as she breathed through the pain of a leg fractured in three places.
It was all a blur. I hardly registered the firefighters and police officers yelling directions at us. All I knew was that I needed to know the people I loved were safe. We were some of the last people to leave the backyard, as our close friend was the last person carried out to an ambulance.
My friends and I immediately made our way to the hospital, hoping to beat our friend there. I spent the entire night in the ER, waiting for friends and trying to help in any way that I could. The hospital became a revolving door of Delta Gammas and Kappa Alphas as the hours ticked by.
Sitting in the Riverside Doctors’ Hospital until 7 in the morning, you can imagine there was not a lot to do. Although a part of me knew that I shouldn’t, I opened Yik Yak, the anonymous messaging platform organized by communities and popular at colleges, including ours.
I was unsurprised to see that word had spread quickly about the incident, with it promptly being termed the “KAllapse.” I watched as the posts rolled in, most just seeking clarification within the first hour or two of the collapse. Some posts were straight-up fearmongering, reporting incorrect information regarding the severity of injuries.
However, as the night went on, the tone shifted; people were already making jokes. None of these posts struck me as having come from anyone present at the event, at least not yet. Within comment sections, anonymous users were arguing, some angered that the event was being made light of so soon, others responding that they were being overly sensitive and dramatic, insisting that the fall wasn’t so bad.
Eventually, I had to close the app. I hadn’t even begun to process what I had just lived through; I wasn’t in a place where I could read about how funny it was to some students on campus. When I checked the next morning, it was even worse.
One user wrote that “the ka incident is not a joke. that’s a very real traumatizing thing a lot of people in our community had to go through have some respect.” A reply to this that received over 400 likes states, “white b—tches be like ‘it changed my life’ like alright you fell bruh.”
Another commenter wrote, “I dont think some of yall realize how traumatic the kallapse was … we all genuinely thought our closest friends were dead.” To which someone responded, “They weren’t though so hopefully that makes you feel better.”
These are just two comments in an ocean of insensitivity, with the platform being flooded with jokes downplaying the incident. We live in a moment in time where we have access to the world at our fingertips. We are constantly one notification or Google search away from another terrible headline, another violent video on our feeds.
Has all of this desensitized us to the point that we can not take these calamities seriously, even when it transpires in our own community? A confirmed 28 students spent the Friday of their homecoming in the hospital seeking medical attention, and, at least online, they were not met with the empathy they deserved.
Senior Vice President for Student Affairs and Public Safety Ginger Ambler ’88 Ph.D. ’06 issued a statement to students in the aftermath of this event. She wrote, “We recognize that such an experience may affect our students deeply and in different ways. They will need our help in the coming days as they recover and maintain momentum at William & Mary.”
For a campus that was just recently voted by The Princeton Review as having the friendliest students, I had hoped for more empathy from my peers during this difficult and confusing time for those of who were there for the “KAllapse.” Of course, it is natural and even expected to cope with humor during difficult times, but I implore my fellow students who were not affected to consider the impact of their words.
In the end, we got very lucky that no one was more severely hurt, as the doctors at Riverside hospital even confirmed this could have been a life threatening fall. I hope that going forward, if our campus is ever faced with a similar event, we can use it as an opportunity to come together and lend support to our peers who need it. It doesn’t hurt to think twice before posting; it does hurt to fall through a deck.
