Police are investigating sexual assault allegations made against NFL draft hopeful and former Baylor University football player Shawn Oakman, after a woman reported that he raped her over the weekend.
According to a search warrant affidavit obtained by The Daily Beast, the woman, a fellow Baylor student, said that she was with Oakman at the popular Waco bar Scruffy Murphy’s when the defensive end asked her to come back to his apartment—near Baylor’s campus—around 2:30 a.m. He allegedly forced her into the bedroom, tore off her clothing, and sexually assaulted her. She told police that she was able to leave at some point but couldn’t find her underwear or one of her earrings.
Afterward, police were called to a nearby hospital on Sunday morning, where the alleged victim was treated for undisclosed injuries and a sexual assault examination was performed, the affidavit states.
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The search warrant shows that Waco police Detective Sam Key was looking for possible evidence inside Oakman’s apartment based on the victim’s testimony, including “women’s panties, earrings, blood, semen, bodily fluids, hair, skin cells, DNA, bed sheets.”
But search warrant returns indicate that officers only found and seized Oakman’s two comforters, as well as a fitted sheet and flat sheet during the search, which took place around 2:45 p.m. on Sunday.
According to the documents, Oakman admitted to police that the two had sex but said it was consensual. Oakman had not been charged with any crime or arrested as of late Thursday evening.
When Waco Tribune-Herald reporter Tommy Witherspoon asked Oakman about the investigation, he declined to comment except to say: “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Two other former Baylor football players, Tevin Elliott and Sam Ukwuachu, have both been convicted—in 2014 and 2015, respectively—of sexual assaults on female students in separate cases. In his trial, Elliott was convicted on two counts of sexual assault and sentenced to 20 years in prison, and witnesses during his trial claimed that he may have assaulted as many as four women, according to the Waco Tribune. The other women’s cases were not independently reported or tried in court. After Ukwuachu’s conviction, he was controversially only sentenced to six months in jail, with 10 years of probation to follow.
Baylor has also been in the spotlight lately for its reportedly poor handling of sexual assault allegations against athletes and other students. Jasmin Hernandez, the victim in Elliott’s conviction, filed a Title IX suit against the school just last week, alleging Baylor officials showed “indifference” when she reported the assault. The school reached a settlement with Sam Ukwuachu’s victim after his trial, but the contents of the agreement remain undisclosed.
About 200 students and recent graduates held a protest in February condemning Baylor’s perceived lack of action on sexual assault allegations.
“Above all, we are most concerned about the safety of our students and our campus,” Baylor Spokeswoman Lori Fogleman told The Daily Beast at the time. “We are doing all that we can to ensure that we have in place quality processes reflecting best practices nationally so that we might respond effectively and with sensitivity to those impacted by the terrible tragedy of interpersonal violence.”
Baylor has ramped up funding for its Title IX office, and the Baptist university has also hired an independent law firm to evaluate the school’s response to such allegations.
A representative from Philadelphia-based law firm Pepper Hamilton said in February that it was not sure when the results of the evaluation into Baylor’s practices will be completed, “in light of the scope of the engagement, interviews with administrators and former students, and extensive collection and review of relevant documents.”
“We expect the review to continue into the spring semester,” Chief Marketing Officer Daniel Pulka told The Daily Beast. “As in every review, we will follow the facts where they lead us, and are committed to a careful, thorough, and exacting investigative approach.”
Neither the university nor the law firm could say if those results would be made public when the review is complete.
