text message transcripts penn state fraternity case

#Text message transcripts penn state fraternity case trial#

He saw the woman on the floor, face down, and he heard the other men talking about sex and what he said sounded like porn. Mack Prioleau, Vandenburg’s roommate, was also there that night, asleep in his bed when the players arrived. DeAndre Woods, a football player who had just arrived on campus, helped Boyd move the woman’s body from the hallway into the bed. He, along with Michael Retta, a Vanderbilt tennis player, said they saw the woman lying unconscious in the hallway. Boyd did not testify at trial, but Van der Wal did.

“Vanderwall” referred to tight end Dillon van der Wal, who was present in the dorm, but against whom the DA chose not to press charges. 13, 2013, Boyd “promptly deleted because he didn’t want his girlfriend to see it.”Īccording to a text Chris Boyd sent to Batey on June 24, after Boyd arrived on the scene, “Me Carta and Vanderwall and Vandenburg helped us move her out of the hallway.” While speculation arose that Boyd was referencing Austyn Carta-Samuels in that text, the deputy district attorney said Boyd was wrong and Carta-Samuels, then the starting quarterback, was not there that night, and his name did not come up at trial. According to a statement by the deputy district attorney during a plea hearing for Boyd on Sept. 1 junior college tight end” at the time he committed to Vanderbilt, but like the other defendants, he had yet to play a down for the program. He was, according to ESPN, “the nation’s No. The sender of the text was Brandon Vandenburg, a tight end who had recently transferred from the College of the Desert in California. It showed an unconscious 21-year-old woman being sodomized. In the early morning of June 23, 2013, the Nashville deputy district attorney says then-Vanderbilt wide receiver Chris Boyd received a text message with a photo attached. This incident, though, serves as an example of how sexual assault cases affect not only a team or a university, but also an entire community, with some ripples reaching far beyond the city limits. Unlike other well-known football sexual assault cases - Steubenville (Ohio) High in 2012 or the investigation into Jameis Winston at Florida State last year - the Vanderbilt football team is not the center of the community in Nashville, and the players involved were not particularly prominent. James Franklin, Vanderbilt’s football coach at the time of the assault, has left the school and is now the head coach at Penn State, a program whose recent history includes the horrible case of Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant who was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison on 45 counts of child sexual abuse. The case has tangentially involved the Tennessee legislature and the state supreme court, and the local media has sued the metro police department over failure to release information. In the long lead-up to the trial, the local media speculation hit on the hot-button themes of sports, sex and campus politics.

But the case was more complicated than it appears, and its effects are wide-ranging and far from over.

They tried to cover it up, got caught, and at least two of them will serve time for it. On the surface, the case appears straightforward: four men, all of them Vanderbilt football players at the time, sexually assaulted a fellow student, and some of them took videos and photos of the incident on their cell phones. 27 a Nashville jury convicted two former Vanderbilt football players on multiple counts of sexual battery and aggravated rape.

#Text message transcripts penn state fraternity case trial#

After 19 months, two previous trial attempts, a trial that lasted 12 days, and just over three hours of jury deliberations, on Jan.