A South Carolina Broadcasters Association attorney said Coastal Carolina University broke a Freedom of Information Act law when the school required a written request to view a police report.
The report is from a sexual assault case where a student accused 18-year-old William Chandler of sexually assaulting her inside her dorm.
Chandler is a freshman on the football team.
CCU police charged him after they took a report and found a text message the victim said chandler sent her after the incident that read, “You better keep quiet.”
CCU executive vice president, Eddie Dyer said he made the decision to only release a part of the report because, “We wanted to protect the case fore the prosecution,” Dyer told News13 on Friday.
“Given the circumstances of this crime, it appears the university was going out of its way to minimize the event and perhaps to protect someone who was involved in it because of their connection to the university,” SCBA attorney Jay Bender said in a previous interview with News13.
According to Bender, police reports don’t fall under a written request requirement of the FOIA law.
Dyer said the school was correct in holding the report because the report contained “electronic transmissions” school officials interpreted fell under the guidelines of the FOIA laws.
According to the FOIA law, school officials were correct in withholding the text message aspects, only if those facts would not be used in court.
Bender says with CCU releasing only half the report in the case, from the outside he says, the school was acting in its own interests; Dyer said Bender was a press attorney and was biased in his views of the situation.
Two more CCU students were arrested this week, one on Thursday and another early Friday morning.
CCU Police charged Kyle Wyant and Robert Lee Albert, both non-athletes at the university, in two separate sexual assault incidents that happened in a CCU student housing.
CCU released the incident reports from the Wyant and Albert cases Friday.
News13 asked Dyer if some could mistake the handling of the Wyant and Albert reports as favoritism when compared to the Chandler report, Dyer said the “circumstances were different between the cases” and that Chandler’s case involved the text message aspect, which the others did not.
Chandler’s sexual assault charges remain pending as of this posting, but the Coastal Carolina University’s judicial council has made a decision in the case, Dyer said.
Dyer said the school’s decision is currently under appeal and that CCU president David Decenzo would have to make the ultimate decision on whether Chandler will remain enrolled at the university.
You can count on News13 to continue to follow this story as it develops.
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