Free Missoula by Jon Krakauer Page B

“I woke up to him completely naked, and my pants—which are very tight and not easy to pull off—were down by my ankles.” Adams was spooning her from behind, rubbing his penis against her back, and then he tried to insert it into her vagina. Adams was six feet, three inches tall and weighed 170 pounds; Barrett stood five feet, seven inches and weighed 135 pounds. “Waking up to a big guy like that trying to rape me,” she said, “was terrifying.” Barrett frantically pushed him away and tugged her pants up, but Adams yanked them back down and attempted to penetrate her vagina a second time.
    “I pushed him off again,” Barrett said, “and at that point I got up, turned the light on, and got my stuff. He was just sitting there, staring at me. He didn’t say anything. I’ll never forget that stare.” Barrett fled Adams’s apartment in shock, crying, and walked the two blocks to Higgins Avenue, where she called one of the girlfriends who’d been at Sean Kelly’s earlier in the evening. When the friend arrived and found Barrett sobbing inconsolably, she asked what had happened. “I choked out, ‘He tried to rape me!’ ” Barrett remembered. “And then we just sat there and cried hysterically together. Neither of us knew what to do.”
    They picked up another friend, who lived in a dorm on the UM campus, and the three women discussed whether to report the assault to the police. Around 4:00 a.m., Barrett called her parents in New Jersey, and her father—a retired police lieutenant—convinced her to go to the Missoula police station, where she was interviewed by an officer named Brian Vreeland on a bench in the entrance to the police department. According to Barrett, Vreeland asked her, “What do you want to come of this?”
    Taken aback by the question, Barrett replied that she didn’t know. “I’m not a lawyer or anything,” Vreeland said, “but since no one saw you, and you were fooling around before it happened, it’s hard to really prove anything.”
    Officer Vreeland finished taking her statement, then asked Barrett to get in his patrol car and guide him and another officer, Kurt Trowbridge, to Adams’s apartment. “I didn’t know the exact address,” Barrett said, “but I knew I could identify it. By then it was probablyclose to five in the morning. It was still dark. Before we got into his car, Vreeland said to me, ‘Oh, and one more thing: Do you have a boyfriend?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. Why?’ And he said something to the effect of ‘Well, sometimes girls cheat on their boyfriends, and regret it, and then claim they were raped.’ ” Although this struck Barrett as a strange and inappropriate thing for a police officer to tell a woman who had just been sexually assaulted, she wasn’t thinking clearly, because she was still in shock. “So I just said, ‘Oh, okay,’ ” she explained, “and let it go.”
    Kerry Barrett directed Officers Vreeland and Trowbridge to Zeke Adams’s apartment, then waited in the back of the police car. While Vreeland and a third officer, Michael Kamerer, tried to make contact with Adams, Barrett recalled, “Officer Trowbridge gave me a little Post-it sticky note with my report number, said I could pick up the report in a couple of days, and sent me on my way.”
    After Barrett departed, Officer Vreeland rang Adams’s doorbell and banged on the door, but failed to rouse anyone inside. So he walked around to the side of the apartment, noticed an open window, peered inside, and saw Adams asleep in his bed. When Vreeland shined his flashlight in Adams’s eyes, he woke up and came to the front door. According to the police report filed by Vreeland,
After identifying myself and Officer Kamerer, I asked Zeke if I could speak with him. He was still very intoxicated and seemed to have difficulty making a decision or even a coherent and understandable sentence. He finally admitted he was Zeke Adams and he invited us in to talk to him….After he