Author: Ryan Strong & Faryn Borella
A female student was sexually assaulted on Yosemite Drive on Friday, Sept. 2 as she was returning alone from a party, according to an email sent by Campus Safety to all campus administrators. Although the student did not initially file an incident report with Campus Safety, she brought the attack to the attention of her Resident Advisor (RA), who relayed the message to Assistant Dean of Residential Education and Housing Services Tim Chang, who in turn notified the head of Campus Safety, Hollis Nieto.
Per the Clery Act, RA’s are required to report information concerning sexual assaults to their supervisors, which led Dean Chang to notify Campus Safety. Though the Clery Act only requires colleges to issue “timely warnings” for crimes that occur on campus or in the direct vicinity of campus, Nieto believed it was necessary to inform the community regardless.
“We’ve always reported more crimes than we’re supposed to,” Nieto said. Although the student body was not notified immediately via e-mail, Nieto wrote a bulletin which RA’s posted on residence hall doors in order to inform students of the incident and to ask them to take extra safety precautions.
“I know that they were very direct about needing to get these flyers out,” said RA Zach Ehmann (sophomore). “I was posting some of them and they said ‘We want these posted by the end of tonight and we want them posted on doors and we want people to know when they’re leaving and when they’re coming in that this happened and just to be more careful.'”
Aside from the bulletins, the students received no other notification of the incident until Sept. 6, when the same warning arrived by e-mail in the student digest. This was the first digest to come out since the incident, as it was the weekend when incident occurred.
The warning described the suspect as “a male, 25 to 30 years old, with tan skin, wearing a tee shirt and green basketball shorts. He spoke with no accent.”
It also provided students with tips on staying safe off-campus at night.
“If you choose to walk through the neighborhood at night, travel in well-lit areas in groups of three or more,” the safety alert stated, adding that Campus Safety provides “dusk-to-dawn safety escorts on campus and within a three-block radius of the College.” Despite the actions of the administration, however, some students did not feel they were adequately informed of the incident. “I think there could have been more done to make students aware of what happened,” RA Hana Kaneshige (sophomore) said. Some students found out from sources far removed from Occidental. “I didn’t know about it until my mom texted me that she saw it on the news,” Abigail Martinez (sophomore) said. Students also expressed that they heard about the incident only through word of mouth. Several students who live off-campus also expressed concern with the fact that the only immediate method of communicating this incident was the bulletins, and for the most part they were only located in residence halls.
This sexual assault is not the only incident in the near past where students felt they were inadequately informed of an issue of security concern. On July 27, LAPD Gang Detail Officers observed a car on York Boulevard with two occupants, one of which appeared to have a handgun. The officers pulled over the car, but the passenger fled on foot. LAPD set up a perimeter, and Campus Safety took all the necessary precautions to secure the integrity of the campus, but OxyAlert was never activated to inform students of the event, a concern to many students on campus. “I was actually on campus in the library and I had no idea what was going on, I just saw that there were cop cars in the neighborhood and that there was a ton of commotion going on on Alumni,” Danielle Caban (senior) said, who was participating in the Undergraduate Summer Research Program.
“I wasn’t made aware of it from school at all which I thought was weird because they had my phone number and they could have used it.” Nieto explained that decisions were being made real-time during the incident and that she thought issuing an email explaining the situation was “the prudent approach.” Nieto submitted the information to the digest at 1:17 p.m., but the students did not receive the information until the digest was published at 5:30 p.m., long after the incident was resolved. Students on campus, including Caban, don’t recall receiving any other form of communication.
After setting up the perimeter, the LAPD officers methodically searched for the suspect, eventually finding and apprehending him. No firearms were found on the suspect or recovererd from the scene, and no shots were fired. “We were in communication with the police,” Nieto said. She said Campus Safety Officers had a thorough plan to protect the integrity of the campus, in addition to the solid perimeter that LAPD was holding. If the situation worsened, she was ready to take further measures, such as activating OxyAlert sirens, voicemails and more to keep the community safe.
However, she did not find that the situation, as it was, merited the activation of OxyAlert. Some students wished they had been informed of the situation more promptly. “I feel that Oxy has the ability to notify all of their students, and even if I wasn’t around Oxy and I had friends who were doing research, I would want to know when something like this was happening,” Eliana Yoneda (senior) said. “I understand there can be an issue of not wanting to panic everybody, but I think that everyone needs to be informed of these things.”
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