By Pam Kelley
This story was originally published by The Assembly.
Two former St. Andrews University students are suing the Laurinburg school, alleging that it knowingly admitted the convicted sex offender who later sexually assaulted them.
Mison Mickle is now serving a nearly 12-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2024 in Scotland County Superior Court to crimes related to sexual assaults of three former St. Andrews students, including the two plaintiffs.
Mickle was recruited as a wrestler and enrolled at St. Andrews in fall 2022. Like numerous small colleges seeking to boost low enrollment, St. Andrews has added athletic teams as a way to attract more students. In the 2022-23 school year, it had about 630 students and more than 20 varsity sports, plus equestrian teams. The Assembly wrote about the college’s struggles in 2023.
Mickle had been a successful high school wrestler at Northwestern High School in Rock Hill, South Carolina. After graduating in 2018, he enlisted in the U.S. Army but was dishonorably discharged in 2020 after being convicted by court martial of sex offenses equivalent to felony convictions in North Carolina, the lawsuit says. He spent a year in military prison, and at the time of his admission to St. Andrews, the then-23-year-old was registered as a sex offender in South Carolina.
The two plaintiffs, identified in the lawsuits as Jane Smith and Jane Roe to protect their privacy, allege in separate suits filed last week in Scotland County that Mickle disclosed his convictions during the admissions process. They also claim St. Andrews’ wrestling coach, Marquise Camp, knew Mickle and his family and knew, or should have known, about his convictions for sexual assaults.
When The Assembly contacted Camp recently, he said Mickle was recruited before he arrived as coach. Camp was hired in September 2022 after 12 years as a head coach at five South Carolina high schools, according to St. Andrews’ website. Speaking to The Assembly, he denied that he’d known Mickle was a convicted sex offender.
St. Andrews President Tarun Malik didn’t respond to The Assembly’s requests for comment.
Mickle’s convictions in 2024 include failing to register as a sex offender in North Carolina. The two lawsuits charge that St. Andrews took no action to confirm he’d registered when he moved to North Carolina and that the school didn’t notify students or local police that a convicted sex offender was living in a coed dorm.
Jane Smith, who is from Florida, had been in her first semester at St. Andrews in fall 2022. Early on, she’d noticed the lock on the door allowing entrance to the residence hall didn’t work properly, according to the lawsuit. Though both she and her mother reported the problem, it wasn’t fixed, and the inoperable lock allowed Mickle to enter her dorm on October 29, the suit alleges. When he knocked on the door of her room, she opened it, expecting a friend. Instead, uninvited, he entered, “backed her up to her bed and violently raped her,” the lawsuit says. Initially, she didn’t feel empowered to report the assault, the suit says.
Jane Roe had also been in her first semester that fall. She’d come from Arizona, and, like most St. Andrews students, she was an athlete. According to her lawsuit, she entered into a sexual relationship with Mickle that resulted in “repeated domestic violence, including a violent sexual assault.”
During the 2022-23 winter break, Roe said, she searched for Mickle’s name online and discovered he was a convicted sex offender. She assumed his offenses weren’t serious, her lawsuit says, because Mickle had told her that “Camp had recruited him personally and knew his family well.”
After returning to campus in January 2023, Smith learned from friends that Mickle had assaulted at least two other female students, including Roe, according to the lawsuit. That night, Smith, Roe, and a third woman went to the Laurinburg Police Department, and Mickle was soon arrested.
Days later, when the school’s interim president Ellen Bernhardt left without explanation, there was speculation that Mickle’s arrest had triggered her departure, according to people who spoke with The Assembly.
Along with St. Andrews, defendants in these lawsuits are Florida’s Webber International University and Everglades College Inc. Webber acquired St. Andrews in 2011 when the Laurinburg school was on the verge of closure. Bernhardt was an employee of Everglades, the parent entity of Keiser University and a consultant for St. Andrews, at the time of the assaults.
Both plaintiffs left the school after the assaults. The lawsuits say they now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and emotional distress, and have incurred damages in excess of $25,000.
Durham lawyer Emilia Beskind, who represents both plaintiffs, told The Assembly that this is an unusual case. Colleges rarely enroll convicted sex offenders. ”It’s just impossible to understand what the school was thinking,” she said.
Pam Kelley is a longtime Charlotte journalist and author of Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South.
