Fraternity Incident : SDSU Police Wind Down Inquiry Into Alleged Rape

San Diego State University police have completed a second round of interviews without developing new information on a woman’s assertion that she was raped at an off-campus fraternity party last month, and will sharply curtail their investigation, Director of Public Safety John Carpenter said Tuesday.

Carpenter said two detectives assigned full-time to the case since the Nov. 15 incident at the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house will return to work on other cases, devoting limited time to further investigation of the alleged attack.

“We’ve reached a point where we’ve interviewed pretty much all of the fraternity members who are willing to talk to us,” Carpenter said. “(The case) is not closed, it’s open. But we’re just not pursuing it as actively as we have been.”

On Friday, Carpenter vowed to continue the investigation another week, despite Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller’s decision Thursday not to file criminal charges in the case. University President Thomas Day also publicly urged Miller to reverse his decision.

Miller announced Thursday that prosecutors could not “prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that the 18-year-old Delta Gamma sorority member was raped. A source in Miller’s office added that prosecutors had concluded they could not show that “requisite force” was used against the woman and “cannot show that it was against her will.”

According to Carpenter, the woman told police that she became dizzy after drinking what she believed was a non-alcoholic punch and asked to be taken to a private room. She claimed she was raped sometime between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.

Carpenter has maintained throughout the investigation that he had enough evidence to charge one man with rape. He also has said he suspects two others of lesser sex offenses. “I’d like the D.A. to let a judge look at the evidence rather than holding it down in his office,” Carpenter said Tuesday.

But Miller’s decision and interviews over the weekend convinced him to curtail the investigation, Carpenter said. A backlog of cases has developed while two of the department’s three detectives were checking the fraternity incident, he said.

A separate investigation by the university’s Division of Student Affairs will probably be completed by Monday, said Sue Raney, a campus spokeswoman. Pi Kappa Alpha is on “interim suspension” pending the outcome of the inquiry.