Today’s Durham Herald Sun includes a report on apparent inconsistencies in a 911 call to police the night of the alleged Duke lacrosse rape:
A defense attorney is questioning the phone call from an anonymous woman to 911 dispatchers in which she claimed someone yelled racial epithets at her and her friend outside the house where the alleged gang rape by members of the Duke lacrosse team occurred.
The call was placed at 12:53 a.m. on March 14, 29 minutes before the alleged rape itself was reported. In it, the woman says a man yelled "nigger" at her and her friend.
The existence of the call was revealed by Durham police Tuesday afternoon. It prompted Duke President Richard Brodhead to issue a statement Wednesday calling the slur "disgusting."
"I am sorry the woman and her friend were subjected to such abuse," Brodhead said.
But Butch Williams, an attorney representing one of the lacrosse team members — none of whom has been charged with a crime — is questioning the validity of the woman’s statements in the call.
He said inconsistencies are part of a pattern that lead him to believe "that a lot of these allegations that have been made never happened."
Initially, the woman described the event this way:
"I was driving down near Duke’s campus and it’s me and my black girlfriend and the guy, there’s like a white guy by the Duke wall and he just hollered out nigger to me."
After the dispatcher asked the woman for her location, she described the incident a second time. In the second description, she was walking rather than driving, and more than one person had used the slur:
"It’s right in front of 610 Buchanan [Blvd.] and they came — I saw them all come out like a big frat house and me and my black girlfriend are walking by and they called us niggers."
Williams said another inconsistency lies in the three times the woman on the tape states the address of the house.
"I’ve been out there," he said, "And [the house number] doesn’t show from the street."
A reporter from The Herald-Sun went to the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. on Wednesday and there were no numbers on the house. The faded imprint of the numbers is halfway down the front door of the house, a location obscured by the porch railings.
Williams said he believes that the woman on the first 911 call was more involved with the events of that night than she stated on the tape.
"She’s part of the situation," Williams said.
How did she know the number, and why did her story change? Is this just normal eyewitness inconsistency, or a sign of something more serious?
Update 3/31 1:26 PM: A reader points out that the search warrant for the house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. states that “[t]he numbers 610 are black and are on the front door of the residence.” So was the warrant wrong, or were the numbers removed after the fact?