No charges filed against UW-Whitewater wrestling recruit in sexual assault case
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WHITEWATER—The Walworth County District Attorney's Office will not file charges against a 22-year-old collegiate wrestler after he was accused of sexually assaulting a female UW-Whitewater student during an April 2013 recruitment visit.
The district attorney's office is not charging the wrestler because the case cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, according to a district attorney's office letter dated Jan. 21 sent to the police department and 22-year-old.
DNA evidence, clothing and sheets were collected from the wrestler and UW-Whitewater student.
The letter was among 49 pages of documents recently released by the Whitewater Police Department about the case.
The recruit was 21 and competing for Lincoln College's wrestling team in Lincoln, Illinois, at the time of the incident, according to documents.
The female student alleges she was sexually assaulted by the recruit April 17 or 18, 2014, after a night of drinking that ended at her off-campus apartment.
The student told police she was asked by a member of the university wrestling staff to take three wrestling recruits to parties April 17, according to documents.
Various versions of what happened that night and early morning are reflected in the statements given to police, according to documents.
The female told police she woke April 18 and found blood on her shorts and sheets and was in pain after she “blacked out” the night before from drinking, according to documents.
The 22-year-old told police he and the girl “made out” and were consensually physical but did not have sex in the back of her friend's car and at the girl's apartment, according to documents.
He told the girl they were not going to have sex and eventually ended up sleeping in the hallway of the apartment building, he told police.
The recruit did not have blood on his clothing, and his DNA was not found on the student's sheets, according to documents.
He was picked up at about 2:30 a.m. by a former UW-Whitewater student who has assisted the wrestling team with recruitment. He to took the recruits to dinner that Thursday and was “in charge of watching out for the recruits if they went out,” according to the documents.
People who were in contact with the student and recruit provided differing accounts of how many people were in the female's apartment, the locations of people in the apartment and their states of intoxication, according to documents.
The recruit was on campus April 16 for a recruitment visit and was supposed to leave the next day, former head wrestling coach Tim Fader said previously.
Fader and the former assistant coach, Chris Heilman, are no longer with the university. Fader reported the student's sexual assault allegations to Whitewater police but not to university staff, as is required by university policies.
The sexual assault report spurred an internal investigation into the university's Division III wrestling program that found nine National Collegiate Athletic Association and Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference violations. The investigation led the university to create annual training on hosting athletes and recruitment practices among other things.