Lacrosse Players' Case a Trial for Parents

Dancers Hired for Party

On the first weekend of Duke's spring break in March, many parents flew to San Diego to watch their sons play Baltimore's Loyola College in an invitational tournament. The idea was to play golf, sit in the sun and take in the game, but rain and sleet made for a miserable weekend. After beating Loyola, the team returned to an empty Duke campus and a week of practice.

A team spring tradition was to go out to a strip club, but many of the younger players didn't have ID's. So that Monday, March 13, one of the team captains hired two exotic dancers to perform at a party at the off-campus house he shared with two other team captains.

By the next morning, there was a report waiting for Duke's campus police director from the Durham police saying a woman had said she was raped by white lacrosse players. It was relayed up the university chain of command that the accuser's credibility was in question, an assessment that would slow Duke's responsiveness to the situation. Also omitted from the discussion was the fact that the woman is black.

Police served a search warrant on the lacrosse house, and team captains gave voluntary statements and DNA samples while denying to the police and Duke administrators that any assault had taken place. Several days would pass before parents learned there was trouble, not from Duke but from their sons. Police investigators wanted to bring the team in for questioning.

Tkac got a call from her son, who denied that anything had happened. She trusted him, but alarmed, she called Sally Fogarty.

"Oh, come on, Tracy, there is no way," Fogarty recalls saying.

Slim and tan from golf, Fogarty is a powerhouse fundraiser for Duke who last year raised $2 million for the Class of '75 reunion. Two of her four kids played varsity lacrosse at Duke. Her husband is Robert H. Fogarty, president of Sport Chevrolet Co., and many a Duke lacrosse player has spent time at their beach house. She knew the inner workings of Duke as well she knew lacrosse, and she believed the university would have contacted the parents if something was seriously wrong. Besides, the allegations seemed preposterous.

"These kids are not capable of this," Fogarty said. "I am not being naive."

Parents scrambled to find lawyers in Durham for their sons. The team interviews with Durham police investigators were called off.

"Unfortunately," Walsh said, "that's the way our society is now, and it doesn't imply guilt. It implies good sense."

Authorities said the team was hiding behind a wall of silence. Police ordered the entire team, except for the lone black player, to submit DNA samples and be photographed shirtless, presumably because the accuser said she had fought off her attackers during a 30-minute assault.

The gravity of the situation became clear two days after the DNA roundup, on March 25, the Saturday Duke was scheduled to play Georgetown. Many parents had made the trip to Durham. The ritual for some was to tailgate under the oak trees next to Koskinen Stadium and then take their sons out for an early dinner.