CHAPEL HILL, NC–Missing since he descended into the labyrinth in search of his Physics 118 class on Wednesday morning, freshman Jason Morris was found dead late yesterday evening deep in the Phillips Hall basement. Campus Police say the gored and partially devoured student was slain by the minotaur that prowls the math and physics building’s unfathomable maze of corridors.

Graduate student Jarvis Nichols discovered the youth’s lifeless body behind a mass spectrometer.

“New students have a hard time finding their way around [Phillips Hall]” he said, “and every year a few of them are killed by the minotaur that roams around down here.”

Physics and Astronomy Chair Chris Clemens explained how the minotaur came to be.

“Back in the age of men and myth,” he said, “James Ross McDonald, Kenan Professor of Physics emeritus and pioneer of impedance spectroscopy, ruled over this department with pomp and daring. Good fortune was upon him until his fair wife Pasiphae had a perverse love affair with a bull from the computer science department and bore its child.

James Ross MacDonald, who banished the minotaur.

“When Professor McDonald saw the half-man half-beast that sprang from her womb, he was aghast,” Clemens continued. “But he knew that he could not kill the fruit of his own wife’s loins, and so he commissioned the brilliant engineer Dade A. Lutz, who had been banished to Chapel Hill from N.C. State, to construct a palace of corridors so complex that, once inside of it, the creature could never escape.

“The minotaur has been imprisoned there ever since,” he said, “and every year his feasts claim seven young men and seven young women, all of them virgins and pre-med students, who dared venture into Phillips Hall. [Morris] was the first one this time.”

Director of Public Safety Jeff McCracken said that the minotaur, which is rumored to have nearly completed theses in both quantum gravity theory and partial differential equations, poses no threat to those outside of Phillips Hall. He said, however, that he “cannot guarantee the safe return” of students already taking math or physics courses in Phillips, many of whom have not been seen by friends and loved ones since first entering the building.

At press time, Todd Austell, an undergraduate advisor and professor in the Department of Chemistry, the kingdom adjacent to Phillips, had descended into the labyrinth trailing a string from the entrance, saying he would lead out remaining pre-meds and strike down the minotaur.