Members of the Georgia Tech community expressed shock and concern Friday, a day after a student was reportedly raped in the midst of an evening of tailgating and football revelry.
Georgia Tech officials sent out an email notification of the attack to students shortly before 10 p.m. Thursday, as a near capacity crowd of 50,000 watched Tech play Virginia Tech.
It was the latest and most serious report of crimes against Tech students, including three assaults on females in the past several weeks.
The notification to students said the incident occurred behind the Sigma Nu fraternity house, which is near Bobby Dodd stadium, and said the suspect was an Hispanic man in his 40s.
According to a report filed by Georgia Tech police Officer Cassandra Davis, the victim declined Thursday evening to be interviewed by police at the scene but said she would contact them Friday. She also declined to accompany paramedics to Grady hospital for a physical exam.
A campus spokesman said Friday that the woman did get back in touch with officers and was interviewed. The spokeswoman did not provide further details.
Meanwhile, other students grappled with the implications of the reported rape.
“It happened at 6:30 p.m. when there were all these people around, which made it seem like it could happen anywhere," said student Christine Lee, 21.
Joe Gammie, president of Tech’s chapter of the Sigma Nu, said said proximity was his fraternity’s only connection to the incident and that the chapter is working with Georgia Tech police. The fraternity has no control over the alley, he said, which winds between wooden fences and brick walls and runs past an electrical substation to the loading dock of the library.
“It’s unfortunate that our name was associated with it,” said Gammie, 20, a third-year mechanical engineering student, “but the real tragedy is that a young woman was raped.”
Standing Friday on the columned front porch of the fraternity house, Gammie described the scene from the previous evening, when hundreds of students had gathered to tailgate in the street in front of the house and on the roof of a nearby parking deck.
Kasey Culler, 21, a fourth-year pre-law student, said she was disappointed that the university relied solely upon email to alert female students about the attack. Some did not see the email until Friday morning.
The university is outfitted with an emergency communications system used during tornadoes or other events that pose a serious risk to a large number of people. Those alerts are sent in form of text messages and voice messages as well as emails.
Tech’s emergency management personnel said utilizing that system to alert students to Thursday evening’s attack would have been inappropriate, since the school couldn’t recommend any specific action to ensure safety, according to spokeswoman Lisa Grovenstein.
Eran Mordel, vice president of student affairs within the school's student government association, praised the school’s action, calling it “a solid response.”
“It’s always disturbing when something like this happens,” said Mordel, "but Georgia Tech takes these things seriously.”
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