Aid to Minor Puts Student Before Court

A Harvard student will appear before the Somerville District Court this morning, and may face charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

The Somerville police issued a complaint against Peter M. Brigham '70 last Saturday for failing to turn a 14-year-old runaway girl over to them, according to John Fauvre, a third-year law student who is counseling Brigham.

Brigham was working with the Inter-Seminarian Benevolent Association House, an apartment for runaway teenagers set up in Somerville by several Divinity School students.

"Contributing to the delinquency of a minor carries a maximum penalty of a $500 fine and a year's imprisonment," Fauvre said yesterday. "But we are convinced that the police are doing this merely to harass us; the charges will have to be dropped. They just want to keep the hippie element out of Somerville."

"Kind of a Refuge"

"We're not the law and we're not the druggie pads," Peter A. Callaway, a third-year Divinity School student and president of the House, said yesterday. "We're kind of a refuge."

The House was set up in early January by a group of students from several seminaries in the Boston area, Callaway said, adding that an average of four or five runaway teens, between the ages of 14 and 25, appeared each night.

"No one has been staying there since April 4," Callaway said, "when the police lodged their first complaint. We were supposedly housing over ten people a night, which would qualify us as a rooming house and require a license. The absurd changes were dropped, of course, but we closed temporarily."

Friday night a runaway girl was brought to Brigham at the House. Since she was under age and couldn't stay without her parents' knowledge, Callaway said, she was housed for the night with a cooperating local family.

The police charged Brigham for failure to report the girl's whereabouts to them.

"We feel that the way to get kids home is amically," Callaway said. "We make every attempt to get in touch with the parents, to counsel the kids, to achieve reconciliation."

"But the kids are more important than forcing Somerville to see its responsibility toward them," Callaway said, adding that his group will be moving to Boston next month.