Legacy

The University has its own Crime Scene Investigator. But instead of being a white male named Gil Grissom, he’s a 48-year-old Lebanese-American, Sociology professor who specializes in criminology. His name: Ed Shihadeh.

“I study why crime happens, why crime goes down, why crime goes up, who’s committing most of the crime, who isn’t committing the crime [and] why the crime rate changes,” the sociology professor explained.

The Web site “CAPER,” or the Crime and Policy Evaluation Research Group, has assisted the University in becoming one of the strongest criminology programs in the country, according to Shihadeh.

“Anybody interested in doing research about crime on campus can be a member of CAPER,” he said. “We’ve got a guy in accounting who does forensic accounting. He can track criminals just by looking at their accounts.”

Sociology associate professor Matthew Lee co-founded CAPER with Shihadeh in 2005.

“The goal of CAPER is to consolidate the crime-related expertise on campus into one informational structure,” Lee said. “Through CAPER we can project to key stakeholders in the community that we have significant crime-related expertise on campus.”

Lee’s relationship with Shihadeh wasn’t a byproduct of the work the two have put into CAPER. It started in the ’90s when Shihadeh was Lee’s adviser for graduate studies and director for his doctoral dissertation.

“We worked very closely on macro criminology, or communities in crime,” Lee said. “[Shihadeh is] recognized as one of the top experts in that area.”

Shihadeh, a demographic criminologist, is currently researching the relationship between Latino immigration and crime.

Shihadeh believes the absence of “long-standing Latino communities” frustrates the Latino population in these areas, thereby increasing crime.

Shihadeh is passionate about his work. Students who walk into his cramped office in Stubbs Hall can expect to find an amicable man, slightly balding, wearing the professor’s choice: a button down and slacks. Most find him typing away at his computer on a desk covered in papers and books. A typical professor’s office, but in no way a typical professor. In fact, some might say his list of hobbies reaches astronomical proportions.

“In 7th grade, the kid in front of me turned around, and we started talking about his model rocket collection,” he reminisced with excitement. “These model rockets, they actually fly! The little ones, you know? I was enamored, and I’ve been in love ever since.”

Now that Shihadeh is an adult, he’s moved on to big-boy toys. He’s an avid collector of high-powered rockets. These rockets can be 15 feet tall and can travel up to 10,000 feet into the sky. He explained that every state has a rocket club, and you must obtain permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to shoot these rockets. The FAA gives them a limit on how much space they have to send the rockets off and makes sure no airplanes fly in that area. The club members put cameras into the rockets before they go up to film what it would be like to be inside of one.

“We’re not allowed to fly them unless there’s a recovery system. They go up into the air, and there’s a little computer inside with an altimeter that measures how high the rocket is above the ground,” Shihadeh explained. “The altimeter tells the computer, ‘Hey, I’m starting to come back down. Please pull the parachute out,’ and the computer has a timer on it, blows a little gunpowder charge, blows the nose cone off and [the rocket] comes down by parachute.”

When Shihadeh is forced to stay grounded, he does it in style in one of his classic cars. He has a 1969 Jaguar XKE, a 1970 Corvette Stingray and a 1976 Cadillac El Dorado convertible.

“I buy the classic cars that were the really cool things when I was a young man,” Shihadeh said.

The way he purchases vehicles now, however, is vastly different than the way he bought them when he was younger. Instead of searching rows of cars at a dealership, he scours the Internet.

“I decide I like a certain type of car, and I’ll go online,” he said. “For example, I found my Cadillac in Colorado. It was on eBay. I paid for it by credit card on Tuesday, a truck picked it up on Wednesday and delivered it to my house Thursday.”

Shihadeh said he wishes he had more room at home so he could buy more cars. But there is another reason he can’t afford to do that:

“I have three cars and my fourth car, my wife tells me, will have to come with a divorce attorney!” he said jokingly.

Though his wife, Margo Brault, doesn’t see a divorce in the future, she does admit she’s a little jealous of the way Shihadeh treats his “babies.”

“The garage is the apartment where he keeps his ‘other women,’” Brault joked. “He let me drive each one of them. He was OK with it, but I’m the one who was hesitant. It’s not my deal. I enjoy them because he enjoys them.”

Shihadeh isn’t a man who experiences many dull moments. Along with collecting cars, shooting rockets and teaching, he enjoys home-improvement projects, photography and a variety of other activities. With that said, he stresses that teaching is his true calling.

“[In the classroom,] I get to change people’s thinking about the world. It’s really quite rewarding,” Shihadeh said. “As far as the research goes, I get to create knowledge. That’s how I describe my job: ‘I create knowledge.’ I get to think of interesting questions that I get to explore. I get paid for it, and that’s pretty cool.”

See a slideshow of more photos from this story.