Sean McMinn
smcminn@mustangdaily.net
When San Luis Obispo police received a call reporting a sexual assault at a fraternity house the weekend before Halloween, they launched an investigation.
Seventeen minutes later, the case was closed — the report was labeled: “unfounded.”
But it wasn’t because police were confident no crime had been committed. Instead, there was just no more information to go on, San Luis Obispo Police Department Lt. Keith Storton said.
“The officer did what they could with the information they had,” Storton said.
Just minutes before midnight on Oct. 26, a female called the San Luis Obispo Police Department to report she had been sexually assaulted at a Pi Kappa Alpha (PIKE) house approximately 45 minutes earlier. The woman, Storton said, did not want to file a police report, but only wanted to put the alleged assault on record with an authority.
When police attempted to ask her questions about the alleged assault, the woman became confrontational, Storton said. She did not provide any additional information to police, including who the alleged attacker was and where she was assaulted.
“In order for us to investigate rape allegations, we need a willing victim,” Storton said. “But quite often in cases we deal with here, that’s not always the case.”
Police later tried to get in contact with the phone number that placed the call, but the person who answered denied making the original report.
This brought the investigation to a halt, Storton said, because there is no official PIKE residence and cell towers could not narrow the call down to a specific address.
San Luis Obispo police did not contact the Cal Poly University Police Department (UPD) or the university itself about the report after it was called in. Storton said he was not confident this would have helped with the investigation.
“I’m not sure if contacting either (the university or the fraternity) would have been the best thing we could have done at the time,” he said.
But Cal Poly did find out about the alleged sexual assault when a Mustang Daily report was published three days after the Friday night call to police. It was then that director of Cal Poly Student Life and Leadership Stephan Lamb began his own investigation into the incident.
Lamb said after three sexual assaults were reported during the course of one month in Spring 2011, the campus takes these kinds of incidents very seriously.
“After what happened … two years ago, sexual assault is a very big issue for this campus,” he said. “And we’re going to respond and respond very directly and immediately if we have the evidence to do so.”
That response, Lamb said, was contacting PIKE President Thomas Maher about the report. Maher said Monday he was not aware of the allegation of a sexual assault at one of his members’ houses, though he specified there is no official PIKE house. He has since declined to comment Mustang Daily.
Lamb said Maher found nothing when he questioned members to suggest PIKE fraternity brothers were aware of the incident.
After the investigation into the PIKE fraternity, Lamb also contacted Christina Kaviani, the coordinator of Cal Poly’s sexual assault prevention program, Safer.
Based on the information available, Kaviani believes a sexual assault “probably did happen.”
“I know of a lot of people want to report something but they don’t want to give names — they don’t want to give anything — they just want it to be put out there,” she said. “And that’s what I think happened.”
Sexual assault is a problem on college campuses nationwide, Kaviani said, and Cal Poly is no exception.
According to Safer, 10 sexual assaults were reported to its rape crisis counselors during Winter 2012 — based on nationwide estimates, this indicates 190 cases were not reported.
“Even if we don’t have all the facts, I think general student public doesn’t want to acknowledge that bad things are happening,” Kaviani said.
Safer is already scheduled to give a mandatory presentation to PIKE members this quarter as part of sanctions against the fraternity for an earlier violation of its risk management policies. That presentation will now incorporate the alleged sexual assault as part of its discussion on masculinity.
“We couldn’t ignore it, and I’m sure it would come up naturally,” Kaviani said.
Safer — which routinely gives educational presentations to on-campus organizations, including greek life — serves as a resource to help students, faculty and staff handle sexual assaults and relationship violence. It also advocates for survivors of sexual assault.
The Safer office is located inside the Gender Equity Center on the second floor of the Julian A. McPhee University Union.