Read the Sexual Victimization of College Women, 2000 study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice here. 

Read the database of campus rapes reported to the U.S. Department of Education here.

 

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. -- Sara figured her rape was an open-and-shut case.

She said police had a videotape of a man bringing her to his dorm room in Marshall University's South Freshman Hall after a night of partying.

They had another videotape of her and the man in a pharmacy the next day, where he bought her a Plan B birth control pill.

She gave them an audio recording of the man admitting to Sara that he'd had sex with her while she was in his bed.

On the recording, the man told her that he had only one drink that night, that he was sober, and that he knew what he did was wrong.

He told her, "I let my emotions get a hold of me" and "I made the decision to do this, whether you begged me or not," according to tape.

"It seemed pretty foolproof to me," Sara, now a junior at Marshall, said in a Gazette-Mail interview last week. "He completely admitted to what he had done."

The Gazette-Mail agreed to conceal Sara's real name, and the name of her alleged attacker for this report.

Campus police never pressed charges against the man. Sara and her father spent months trying to track down the Marshall police chief, university officials and representatives from the Cabell County prosecutor's office for updates on the case, or explanations as to why the evidence was not sufficient to convict.

Rarely reported, rarely prosecuted

Usually, that's the standard for college rape victims across the country, said Angela Rose, founder of Promoting Awareness Victim Empowerment, a national nonprofit that provides support for rape victims.

"What a travesty of justice," Rose said when she learned of Sara's situation. "Unfortunately, cases like this aren't rare."

Less than 5 percent of rape victims report the crime to the police, according to a 2000 study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice. Usually, the reasons for not reporting the crime range from the victims not wanting their friends and family to find out about the incident, to fearing police apathy or even hostility when they do make a report, according to the study.

Few of those rape victims receive much attention from the campus law enforcement agencies that are supposed to protect them, Rose said. In most instances, if universities do not ignore the rape completely, they keep the case within the school's disciplinary system and silence the victim with gag orders or other procedures that allow them to neatly sweep it under the rug, she said.

"There are some cases where [accused rapists] go through the system and are brought to justice," she said, "but that is extremely rare."

Rape on college campuses isn't so rare, however.

The same Department of Justice study found that about 35.3 out of every 1,000 women enrolled in a university may be the victims of rape or attempted rape in a given academic year. If that's the case, a school the size of Marshall, with an estimated 8,265 female students, could have as many as 292 rapes, or attempted rapes a year.

'I trusted him'

Sara and a few of her friends were throwing back shots in her dorm room one January night in 2009.

She noticed that one of the friends in her room that night, a man who had pursued her since high school, was not drinking. The Gazette-Mail contacted the man, but he refused to be interviewed for this story.

Sara, who weighs less than 120-pounds, blacked-out some time after drinking her sixth shot of vodka. The man apparently told the others at the party that he was going to take her down to his room and let her sleep in his roommate's bed.

The next morning, Sara, wearing only her bra and panties, woke up in the man's bed. He had taken her shirt and pants off and thrown them on the floor, she said.

He told her that they'd had sex, and asked if she was on birth control, Sara said.

They went to a local pharmacy, where the man bought her a Plan B birth control pill.

"I guess my first priority was to make sure that he hadn't gotten me pregnant," she said.

She tried to forget about the incident, but couldn't. She had trouble sleeping. Twice, she went to the hospital with an anxiety attack.

Sara and the man had gone to the same high school in Kanawha County. He'd asked her out several times, but she'd always refused. Once, he held up a sign while he was in the stands during a high school football game. It read, "Sara, will you go out with me?" in big letters.

"We were great friends," she said. "I trusted him. But he wasn't a Christian, so he wasn't dateable in my mind."

The hidden recorder

A week after the rape, she hid a voice recorder in her backpack and went to talk to the man in his dorm room.

The man told Sara that he thought she had sobered up after he brought her back to his room the night of the incident. She'd repeatedly begged him to have sex with her, the man said on the tape.

"You said so many things that I never thought you could say," the man said on the tape. "I guess one thing led to another and you kept telling me you wanted to have sex with me and I said, 'No, no, no.'"

On the tape, Sara said several times that she did not remember anything from the time she'd had her last shot of vodka to when she woke up nearly naked the next morning. She was not sexually active at the time, she said, and would have never asked for him to have sex with her.

She pointed out that the man knew she was drunk enough to need someone to take care of her. That's why the man brought her to his room in the first place, she said.

"By you begging, it just made me think that you were actually sobering up and you were willing to let it happen," he said.

"I'm not trying to twist this to make you sound like the bad guy here," he said. "I made the decision to do this, whether you begged me or not."

S. Daniel Carter, director of Security on Campus Inc., a national nonprofit organization that helps make sure universities are compliant with federal crime reporting laws, said that the structure of West Virginia state code places an obligation on persons engaging in sex to determine if their partner is physically or mentally incapacitated.

"If they fail to do so," he wrote in an e-mail, "but continue anyway ... or even if they incorrectly assess the person's condition, there is still a crime."

Because Sara described herself as "incoherent" and that the man's pretext for taking her to his room was because she was drunk, the incident could be described as second- or third-degree sexual assault under state code - crimes that carry a potential 10- to 25-year prison sentence, Carter said after reviewing a transcript of the recording.

The problem is that while the law seems to properly define the crime, rape myths and societal biases still prevail in disciplinary proceedings, a fact that often softens criminal investigations in these cases, Carter said.

"Our institutions, including colleges and universities, need to do a better job of educating on these issues and what the law actually expects," he said.

"So long as individuals accused of sexual assault can simply claim they didn't know they were obligated to assess their partner's mental capacity, and often do so credibly, these injustices will continue as authorities or jurors will feel they didn't have the 'criminal intent' necessary to warrant a finding of responsibility or conviction."

'Marshall University police did everything possible'

On Feb. 2, Sara went to the Marshall police department with the recorder in hand, and told an on-duty officer that she had been raped.

The officer who made the report interrupted her when she told him that she had been drinking in the room the night of the rape to inform her that alcohol possession in the dorms was a violation of the student code of conduct.

For weeks afterward, neither Sara nor her father heard any word from the university about the case.

Sara wrote her phone number on a piece of paper every day, and handed it to a receptionist at the police department to give to James Terry, the university's police chief, but she said he never called.

Terry repeatedly has denied requests from the Gazette-Mail to be interviewed about this case and others involving on-campus assaults, including an alleged gang rape that was reported to have occurred in a Marshall dorm in September.

After a while, Sara's father began traveling to the department every day from his home near Charleston to speak with Terry, only to sit in the lobby for hours.

Terry sat down with Sara and her father in May, three months after the incident. He told them that security cameras in South Freshman Hall captured footage of the man carrying Sara to his dorm room the night of her rape, according to Sara's father.

Terry had a video recording from a local pharmacy, he told them, which showed the man buying Sara the emergency birth control pill, her father said.

Along with the voice recording, the evidence was more than enough to bring charges against the man, Terry allegedly told them.

A representative from the Cabell County prosecutor's office told the family that a grand jury would indict Sara's assailant later that month, Sara's father said.      

"I was like, 'Finally, something's going to happen,'" he said.

The May 2009 grand jury session came and went. The man was not indicted. A representative from the prosecutor's office blamed Terry for not sending the evidence to court. Terry said he sent the evidence, and blamed the prosecutor's office for not presenting it during the indictment, according to Sara's father.

Prosecutors did take the case before the grand jury, Marshall University spokesman Matt Turner said, but the jury failed to indict.

"Marshall University police did everything possible to prosecute the alleged assailant," Turner said. "The university did not ignore the woman or her father and, in fact, with their cooperation, worked to prosecute the case."

Cabell County Prosecuting Attorney Chris Chiles confirmed that the case was "fully and completely presented to the grand jury."

Chiles said he is not ethically permitted to discuss what evidence had been presented. He would not comment on the validity of the evidence against Sara's alleged attacker, or why the grand jury did not return an indictment.

"I cannot look behind that," Chiles said. "I do not know why; it is not ethical or proper for me to ascertain why."

After the grand jury session, Sara's father continued to drive to Huntington every day to wait in the lobbies of the Marshall University police station and the county prosecutor's office, seeking an explanation as to why his daughter's alleged assailant could not be indicted.

Terry promised that he would personally present the evidence in another grand jury indictment in the following weeks, her father said. Again, the indictment came up empty.

Ready to give up

In the weeks after the alleged attack, the man accused of raping Sara would sit near her during lunch and stare at her, she said. Sara's father eventually started making trips to Marshall just to have lunch with her.

The constant traveling eventually took a toll on his contracting business. After the second round of grand jury indictments, he and Sara gave up hoping that university officials would follow through.

She moved out of her dorm. She slumped off the dean's list that semester, but decided to stay at Marshall despite everything that had happened. She didn't want to feel defeated.

Most of all, though, after months of bouncing from police officer to university official to prosecutor, the experience had worn her down, her father said.

"I kept seeing what it was doing to her," he said. "She couldn't tell the story one more time."

Reach Zac Taylorat Zachary.Tay...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5189.