Friends and family of Florida State U. graduate student Vincent Binder will gather to honor his memory at a wake in Brooklyn, N.Y. on the afternoon of May 10.
Binder, a former teaching assistant in the School of Communication at FSU, went missing during the early hours of April 2 after leaving a friend’s house on foot. His friends and colleagues reported him missing on April 8 after he failed to report to work. With the help of law enforcement, they spent the following weeks on a state-wide search for Binder.
On April 28, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement located what they believed to be Binder’s deceased body in a field near I-95 and State Road 16. Two days following the discovery, the Tallahassee Police Department held a news conference where Police Chief Dennis Jones indicated that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had in fact confirmed the identity of the body to be that of Binder’s, thus concluding the month-long search.
“He was one of ours,” said FSU graduate student and close friend of Binder’s, Beth Frady.
Frady said she felt it was important to keep the FSU community informed on the most current information regarding Binder’s case.
She met Binder in her first year of graduate school at FSU, where they quickly became friends. The first class they had together was a communication theory class, said Frady, and any time she struggled, she made sure to consult Binder.
“He had that uncanny ability to take complex issues, twist them and put them in layman’s terms to where you understood them,” she said.
Frady recalled instances where not even a dictionary could help her more than Binder could.
“I would look up (a word) in the dictionary, not understand it, circle it and literally write ‘Vince’ next to it,” she said. “I’d ask him and he would explain to me very simply what it is — he just had that ability.”
Frady said she, among others, was quick to befriend Binder, but that the depth of his friendships did not just include shared intelligence.
“You try to surround yourself, when you are in graduate school, with really smart people, because that makes you seem really smart. So we surrounded ourselves with Vince because he was so smart, but then we got to know him and love him, and we were like, ‘This works out really well.’”
Binder completed a few years as an undergraduate at FSU before attending U. Florida, and eventually graduated from U. West Georgia in Carrollton, where his talent for debating warranted a “seventh best team in the country” award, leading him to receive an automatic invitation to national competitions, according to helpfindvince.com.
“He was brilliant,” said Frady. “He was a debater, so anything you brought up, whether he cared about it or not, he would research it and he would debate you on it.”
Binder, a debate coach at FSU, had just returned from Berkeley U. with his debate team about a week and a half before his disappearance, a trip that inspired him to continue on as a teacher, according to Frady.
“He wanted to go to Berkeley and get his Ph.D. to teach debate and public speaking.”
Frady is among many friends of Binder’s who hope to have another memorial service sometime in the near future, so that his students and others close to him in the Tallahassee area can honor him as well. They also hope to solidify plans for a walk in his memory, titled “Binder’s Buddies,” aimed to encourage a buddy system for students while walking at night. As a teaching assistant at FSU, Binder was, according to Frady, devoted to his students.
“One part of Vincent’s family — and by family I mean his figurative family — that people tend to forget are his students,” said Frady. “We don’t want to forget them. They have been struggling with this just as much as all of us, and they deserve to have their time as well.”
Every handout Binder put together, he signed, “Brought to you by the letter V.”
Binder’s fellow graduate assistants describe him as a teacher that was easy-going, but who always made sure to stress the importance of what he was teaching.
“He just kind of had this self-confidence, kind of self-awareness, that he knew what he was going to say and he knew that what he was going to say most likely had weight behind it,” said Philip Crowe, Binder’s fellow public speaking teaching assistant. “He would give his students the opportunity to grow at their own pace, but he kept them to a standard.”
Crowe said he met Binder when they both became TAs in the fall of 2009.
“He was always willing to share some good advice, some Pokey Sticks and kind words,” said Crowe.
Crowe was among the first people in charge of one of the several Facebook sites created to raise awareness of Binder’s disappearance. Later, Crowe and Binder’s classmate, Chase Porter, created helpfindvince.com to spread information to as many outlets as possible. According to Porter, the Web site reaches a nationwide audience and, at first, featured a money-raising campaign towards a $5,000 reward for information regarding Binder’s disappearance.
When word spread regarding the discovery of Binder’s remains, everything changed.
“The primary goal (of the campaign) now that Vince’s body has been found is to serve as a memorial to him and continue to raise funds toward a $25,000 debate scholarship in his name,” said Porter.
In a span of eight days, the Web site collected over $5,000, while the Facebook page had almost 1,000 new members a day during the first 12 days of its existence. As of May 5, helpfindvince.com lists a total of $8,307, with 139 donors total.
“The scholarship is aimed toward helping young debaters get their foothold in the debate circuit, because debating was Vince’s passion,” said Crowe. “It was that one thing in his life that he kind of grabbed onto and he knew the impact of that.
“The community outreach he has received on the site really speaks to the kind of person Vince was. People don’t go out on a limb for someone that was not a caring, heartfelt person.”
At the FSU graduation ceremony on Friday, April 30, speakers took time to honor Binder.
“We are deeply saddened by the recent events,” said FSU President Eric Barron. “He will be deeply missed.”
Following his disappearance, an initial search of Binder’s apartment on the day he was reported missing was unsuccessful. The next day, investigators from TPD’s Special Victim’s unit reviewed Binders financial and phone records, which led investigators Anne Johnson and Greg Wilder to Miami on Friday, April 9.
As investigators continued their work in Miami, TPD received notification from the South Florida U.S. Marshal’s Task Force about the discovery of an abandoned black Chevrolet pickup with evidence that linked the car to the Tallahassee area.
The task force had been searching for the car because it was believed to have been involved in the escape of three inmates from Avoyelles Parish, L.a.
It quickly became apparent that the three fugitives might have been involved in two robberies in Tallahassee, and possibly the disappearance of Binder.
Inside the car, U.S. Marshalls discovered a Florida I.D. card belonging to Chris Pavlish of Tallahassee, maps of Tallahassee and an ATM receipt from Binder’s account in the car.
Pavlish was robbed earlier on the same day of Binder’s disappearance around the same area where Binder was last seen.
Further investigation listed in the TPD report and reported by the Tallahassee Democrat indicates that Binder’s credit/debit card was used at ATMs and gas stations in Tallahassee, Madison, Jacksonville and various locations along I-95 South. TPD worked closely with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and U.S. Marshals Service, aiding the South Florida U.S. Marshals Task Force in the arrest of the three escaped Louisiana inmates in Miami. All three escapees, Kentrell Johnson, Quentin Truehill and Peter Hughes, were arrested without incident and later interviewed by investigators from the Tallahassee Police Department.
At the April 30 news conference, FDLE Special Agent in Charge Don Ladner confirmed that the case had become a homicide investigation. All three men have been charged with Binder’s kidnapping.
Ladner added that the investigation is ongoing, but once the investigation is completed, his team will turn over its findings to the State Attorney’s Office, which will then determine what other charges to file.
Meanwhile, Binder’s friends continue to share the impact he had on their lives.
“He was brilliant, he was charismatic, he was hilarious and he was caring — anything you needed, he would do it, anytime you needed to talk, he’d talk,” said Frady. “I called him my big brother.”
For more information, visit www.helpfindvince.com.