Official Silence Surrounds Rape in Georgetown Apartment
By • September 3, 2019 0 3427
A young woman woke up in the bedroom of her basement apartment on the east side of Georgetown early Friday morning, Aug. 30, suddenly terrified. It was 1:30 a.m. and there was an unknown man standing at the foot of her bed.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told the woman, who is in her early 20s. “I’m a nice man. Can you just sit on the bed and talk to me?”
According to her landlady, the woman sank onto her bed shaking. And then the man raped her.
Metropolitan Police came. By 3 a.m., the victim — along with all the bedding — had been taken to Howard University Hospital.
“I can’t believe I slept through the whole thing!” said the homeowner, who asked not to be identified. But the “very upset young woman and her equally upset apartment-mate — a young man, a family friend who was asleep in another room and also didn’t hear anything until it was over and he called the police” — told her about it the next morning.
Since then, there has been silence. According to the homeowner, the victim’s mother flew in from Massachusetts to take her home for the long weekend. “Several plainclothes officers who were walking around the neighborhood talking to people Friday morning could tell me nothing. A police detective assigned to the case was reticent to the point of seeming disinterested in hearing or sharing any details at all. He even disputed that she was taken to Howard University Hospital. He said it was George Washington University Hospital,” she said he insisted.
“No media has reported on the rape over the holiday weekend, at least that I know of,” the homeowner said. “I’ve been looking.”
A two-paragraph story that appeared in Saturday morning’s online edition of the Washington Post Metro section was not included in its print edition.
“It makes me feel terribly uncomfortable,” the homeowner said. “Although the two young people downstairs made a terrible mistake — they left their front door unlocked — still the official response has been less than satisfactory.”
At press time, no MPD officer or spokesperson had responded to The Georgetowner’s request for updates about the investigation, even to confirm whether or not an investigation was ongoing.
UPDATE: The following response was received from MPD: “The case remains under investigation. We encourage anyone with information to contact us.” Also, MPD later indicated that the woman had been taken to Washington Hospital Center.
