Students on their own
Afterward, it would seem impossible to have missed all the signs.
There were 29 students from Antioch studying or working in co-op programs overseas in the spring of 2000. Of those, only two — Howell and Sellers — were overseas without direct supervision.
The hand of Shaun Sellers frames a photo taken on a Puerto Viejo beach.
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The school provided no formal orientation to Costa Rican culture or laws on campus, or in the Latin American country once they arrived. The school provided Sellers with no contacts in Costa Rica. Howell’s contacts were the employees of a radio station where, to fulfill a scholarship requirement, she was to work.
Most of the school’s other students abroad, spread across the globe from India to Kenya, had jobs with employers who had long-standing relationships with Antioch. Many of the employers provided or helped find homes for the students, many times with guest families or in university dormitories.
Howell and Sellers were left to find housing on their own — a hotel Sellers picked out of an old guidebook. They knew nobody in Costa Rica. Neither spoke fluent Spanish when they arrived in January; nor did Eagen when she joined her friends in late February.
Howell and Sellers were on the school’s most unstructured overseas program, called “creative co-ops.” In essence, the students decided where they wanted to go and what they would do when they got there. Such independent study programs are rare across the United States, and usually are reserved for graduate students. Sellers told the school she would write a screenplay, the plot of which would be two American college girls in Costa Rica. Howell was going to photograph Costa Rican culture. Mostly, she took photographs of herself, Sellers and Eagen goofing off in their small apartment.
What they knew about Costa Rica they learned from outdated guidebooks, written reports of Antioch students who had been there in past terms, and from the Internet. On the Internet were occasional tales of strange and violent crimes, plus hints that violence was escalating dramatically.
Warnings from their parents that they could become victims themselves were greeted with polite nods, the kind given when Dad told them to change the oil in their cars. They were teens headed for the adventure of their lives, filled with idealism, naivete and an American sense of invincibility. “When you’re 19,” Eagen’s father, Charles Eagen, would say later, “you’re bullet-proof.”
