Free Missoula by Jon Krakauer Page A

bars jammed between the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks and the Clark Fork River. Just to the southeast, on the other side of the river, is the University of Montana campus, accessible via a pair of four-lane bridges for vehicle traffic, and two much smaller bridges for pedestrians and cyclists. Within the eight-by-four-block downtown core are a dozen pubs and bars that fill with UM students every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evening when school is in session.
    On September 22, 2011, Kerry Barrett, a UM senior from New Jersey, went to a pub called Sean Kelly’s with four friends. It was a Thursday night, and the weekly bacchanal known as “Thirsty Thursday” was in full swing—a tradition that has become so prevalent on campuses nationwide that a great many students now avoid enrolling in classes that meet on Friday mornings. Missoula was rocking.
    At Sean Kelly’s, Barrett made the acquaintance of a tall, athletic student named Zeke Adams, * who socialized with Barrett and her friends for much of the evening. Barrett says she and Adams were attracted to each other, and when he started kissing her she reciprocated. Around 1:30 Friday morning, by which time Barrett and Adams were both intoxicated, they headed to another bar, the Badlander, with one of Barrett’s girlfriends, who departed for home a little later. “Zeke seemed trustworthy,” Barrett told me, “so I felt okay withmy friends leaving us.” Both Barrett and Adams lived near Higgins Avenue, a major north-south arterial that bisects the downtown grid, and after last call at the Badlander, at 2:00 a.m., they started walking together down Higgins toward their respective apartments.
    Zeke Adams lived just across the bridge that spanned the Clark Fork; Kerry Barrett lived a mile farther south. “When we got to Zeke’s place,” she remembered, “he was like, ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ So I said okay. But before I even went in the door, I told him, ‘I’m not sleeping with you. If that’s what you’re expecting, I’m just going to go home.’ He said, ‘No, no. I don’t expect that at all. Just come in. We can hang out.’ So we went inside.” Instead of sitting in the living room of the small apartment, however, Adams suggested that they go to his bedroom to avoid waking his roommate.
    Barrett followed Adams into his bedroom, where they talked about an abstract painting a friend had painted for him. Then Adams turned down the lights, they reclined on the bed, and started making out. “This was consensual,” Barrett explained. “I really did like him, what I’d known of him at that point.” Eventually, Adams pulled her pants and underwear down to the middle of her thighs and inserted his fingers into her vagina. This, too, was consensual, Barrett made clear, “but then he started getting a little aggressive, which made me feel uncomfortable.” So she told him to stop, put all of her clothing back on, reiterated that she didn’t want to have sex with him, and said she was leaving.
    Adams urged her not to go, because it was 3:00 in the morning. As Barrett remembered it, he said, “You’re wasted. Stay over and I’ll drive you home in the morning. You know I’m a nice guy and nothing is going to happen.”
    “I actually wasn’t that drunk—not nearly as wasted as he was,” Barrett said, “but before you learn the realities of sexual assault, you’re taught that it’s dangerous to walk alone at night, because strangers are out to get you. The safer option seemed to be to stay at his place. So that’s what I did.”
    In a recorded statement Adams later gave to the police, he confirmed Barrett’s account: “I said, ‘Well, you don’t have to go.’…She laid back down in my bed. She told me she didn’t want to have sex with me—and that was fine with me, and I said okay.”
    Fully clothed, with her skinny jeans now securely zipped up and buttoned, she fell asleep in his bed. Approximately thirty minutes later, she said,