Apparently, Fred Sontag isn't capable of holding a grudge. Four months after he survived a knife attack by a troubled student he was helping, Sontag, '49, is still more concerned about his assailant's condition than his own.
Sontag, now in his 49th year as a philosophy professor at Pomona College, is legendary on the small campus for his devotion to students, according to colleagues. That devotion was tested when 22-year-old Jared Essig, a Pomona senior, stabbed the professor in a bizarre incident last fall. After Essig was arrested for shoplifting and vandalism on October 30, Sontag bailed him out and was driving him home when the student became agitated and delusional. Sontag pulled over to try to reason with him, but Essig pulled out a pocketknife and stabbed Sontag twice in the neck. After Sontag was hospitalized, doctors determined that the knife blade missed his carotid artery by a few millimeters; had it not, the professor would have quickly bled to death.
Essig, now in a psychiatric prison program, was charged with attempted murder, but Sontag is working with the man's parents to mount a defense of temporary insanity.
"If you knew Fred, you wouldn't be surprised," fellow philosophy professor Paul Hurley told the Los Angeles Times.
