The University of Chicago announced Wednesday morning that it has identified a person of interest in a sexual assault at a fraternity house this past weekend.
The person of interest was identified through witness statements and video evidence, all of which has been shared with the Chicago Police Department, the university said.
The university said the person of interest is not a student or affiliated with the university but has been banned from campus. A source with knowledge of the investigation told CBS News Chicago that the university has banned multiple people associated with the incident from the university. Those people, the source said, were also not students.
No one was in custody as of Thursday morning.
The assault happened at the Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity house at 5625 S. University Ave., across the street from the west side of UChicago’s Main Quad in Hyde Park.
According to a University of Chicago report, a 21-year-old woman reported she was sexually assaulted in a bathroom during a frat party at 1:50 a.m. Sunday. A UChicago alert issued this week said the woman was not affiliated with the university.
The woman did not know her attacker, the university said. They said when someone intervened, the unidentified suspect ran off.
Surveillance video in the area picked up someone matching the description running from the frat house, UChicago said.
A University of Chicago police officer on patrol was flagged down to respond, and UCPD arranged for the woman to be transported to the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Students described to CBS News Chicago what it’s like along Fraternity Row on University Avenue during “rush season,” the time of year when fraternities and sororities are actively recruiting new members. The student said at UChicago, rush season means frequent parties and other larger events.
Video has surfaced online showing a woman, who identified herself as a friend of the 21-year-old victim, chasing down a man she claimed to be her friend’s attacker and yelling that he assaulted her friend in a bathroom at a frat party.
Later, the friend commented that the 21-year-old woman was “drugged and taken away from us against her will…practically incapacitated, being held to the ground with a man over her, kissing her and taking her clothes off.”
The video appears to have been taken near the Henry Crown Field House along 56th Street, about a block from AEPi. The woman pursues the man she says is the attacker around a corner onto a pathway between the fieldhouse and the Smart Museum of Art just to the west on 56th Street.
CBS News Chicago as of Thursday morning was still trying to independently verify who was recorded and if those people were definitively involved.
“Sexual violence, in my opinion, on college campus is not a series of isolated incidents,” said Jillian Furey, a clinical services supervisor for Resilience, a standalone rape crisis center in Chicago. “It is a pervasive public health crisis.”
“We’re going to see survivors having to relive their trauma, potentially face their perpetrator in court, be questioned and disbelieved, know that they’re facing a 4% chance of a conviction rate,” Furey added. “Why would someone want to retraumatize themselves again?”
Students are also speaking out about the incident.
“There needs to be a serious look at the safety of frats in general and whether or not they should be kept around at all,” one student said.
Another student said the incident is likely to ruin the wrong reputations.
“It’s going to follow the frat around, and I think that that’s unfortunate in a sense of like, people who aren’t culpable aren’t forced to take responsibility, and the people who are responsible generally are not forced to take responsibility,” the student said.
The incident at the UChicago frat house comes amid the fallout from separate sexual assault allegations at the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell University, which is also raising questions about fraternity culture.
The National AEPi organization has told this chapter to pause all events and programs while they cooperate with the investigation. In a statement, the fraternity said, “The chapter hurts for the person who was the victim in this incident.”
No charges have yet been filed against the person of interest.
