Inside The Police Failure To Stop Darren Sharper's Rape Spree

[n2doc]

by ProPublica by Ryan Gabrielson by T. Christian Miller by Ramon Antonio Vargas by John Simerman

It was 5:06 a.m. on a Tuesday in September 2013 when sex crimes Detective Derrick Williams caught the call. It came from the hospital. It was a distraught woman. She was saying she had been raped.

She told Williams a familiar story of French Quarter trespass: She'd hit the clubs the night before, she said. Drank a lot. Met a man. Went to his house. And awoke the next morning to find him on top of her, naked. But she told Williams she had never said yes to sex.

Williams typed up a brief report. He labeled the incident a rape. But Case No. I-31494-13 wasn't quite ordinary. The accuser was a former cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints. And the alleged rapist was Darren Sharper, a hero of the Saints' 2009 Super Bowl team, former Pro Bowl player and broadcast analyst for the league's television network.

News of the Sept. 23, 2013 incident quickly shot up the ranks. New Orleans' police superintendent and top prosecutor were briefed. In the weeks that followed, police records show that Williams gathered evidence. He got a warrant to collect a sample of Sharper's DNA. It matched a swab taken from the woman's body. Witnesses told of seeing Sharper with the intoxicated woman at a club, and later at his condo. Video footage confirmed Sharper and the woman had been together.


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http://digg.com/2015/inside-the-police-failure-to-stop-darren-sharpers-rape-spree

[brer cat]

1. I feel so angry and disgusted

reading accounts like this, and we see it over and over again. He could have been stopped if only...and that is the worst part to me. Failure to take these women's accounts seriously and investigate this predator left him free to keep on.