ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601220066
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: FAIRFAX
SOURCE: BETTY HAYDEN STAFF WRITER
FOR A LONG TIME, Christy Brzonkala didn't know why she'd lost interest in life.
Things were going fine for Christy Brzonkala in her first weeks as a freshman at Virginia Tech.
She had been accepted to Tech early in her senior year of high school; it was her university of choice.
She and her roommate got along, they liked the other women in their suite, and she had met some other students through an old high school friend.
Brzonkala lived in Cochrane Hall, a coed dorm, where most of Tech's varsity athletes live.
She liked Cochrane because she played basketball and softball in high school and had always hung around with other athletes.
But the good times ended just a month into her freshman year, she said.
On the night of Sept. 21, a Wednesday, Brzonkala walked to a small party at a house near campus. About 10 people were there, she recalled, and she drank about four beers in two or three hours.
She and an acquaintance, Hope Handley, walked back to their dorm about 1 a.m. Brzonkala said they were "sober, pretty much."
Two men whistled at them from a third-floor window. Handley lived on that floor, so the women decided to find out who the men were.
They didn't think they had any reason to worry, but Brzonkala said she never would have gone up to the room alone.
"You don't know that you're going to be a victim," Brzonkala said. "Especially me. I've always been a trusting person."
The two men introduced themselves as Tony Morrison and James Crawford and told the women they played football.
"A lot of those guys think that girls worship them because they're football players," Brzonkala said. But because she is an athlete, too, she wasn't impressed.
Shortly after she and Handley got to the men's room, Brzonkala said, the players started asking them about their sexual experiences with black men.
Handley left the room and Brzonkala began to feel uncomfortable. But she thought Handley had just gone to the bathroom, she said, so she waited.
"I didn't know she was leaving, because I wouldn't have stayed ... not with somebody I'd just known for 10 minutes," Brzonkala said. Crawford left about five minutes after Handley did, leaving Morrison and her alone, she said.
"A minute later," she tried to leave, but Morrison wouldn't let her, she said.
The details of what happened next are hard for her to remember, Brzonkala said.
In an $8.3 million civil suit she filed against the players and Tech in federal court, she says that Morrison asked her to have sex.
She said she told him "no" twice but did not scream or try to fight him. Though she's 6 feet 1 inch tall, she said Morrison was much stronger. The suit says Morrison held her down on the bed, removed her clothing and forced her to have sex.
Then, the suit says, Crawford came back, exchanged places with Morrison, and forced Brzonkala to have sex with him.
According to the suit, Morrison assaulted her a second time and said to her, "You better not have any diseases."
Brzonkala said she doesn't remember how she got dressed afterward. She said she went into shock and that she couldn't believe what was happening to her.
She thinks that, before she left, she asked Morrison, "Are you satisfied?''
She returned to her room on the second floor and didn't say anything to her roommate, who was half asleep. Then, Brzonkala said, she retreated to the suite's bathroom and spent several hours in the bathtub.
Asked what she was thinking during that time, she replied, "I wasn't, obviously, or I would have gone to the police."
By the next day, she said, "I had washed it out of my mind."
Morrison and Crawford tell a different story. Through his attorney, Morrison has said that whatever happened that night was consensual. He eventually was found guilty in the University Judicial System of using abusive language and was put on probation for two semesters and ordered to attend an hour-long counseling session.
Crawford was cleared of charges by a university judicial panel, which found there wasn't enough evidence against him.
Neither man was charged in criminal court.
Morrison and Crawford could not be reached for further comment. Morrison's attorney did not return several phone calls seeking comment for this story.
Tech, in its answer to Brzonkala's suit filed in federal court Friday, states that her version of what happened differs from her testimony in the two judicial hearings.
In an interview this month, Brzonkala said she didn't go to police immediately because she couldn't believe what had happened.
"It couldn't happen to me because I'm me," Brzonkala said. "It was like a dream - a nightmare."
Two to three weeks later, she took an overdose of prescription medication in her dorm room. She was treated at a local hospital and released. But she didn't immediately connect the suicide attempt to what she said happened that night in September.
She wasn't sure why she tried to kill herself, and in subsequent counseling sessions, she said she didn't talk, just cried.
In the months following the suicide attempt, Brzonkala said her lifestyle changed radically. She no longer went out with her friends, preferring to stay in her dorm room instead. She said she never had drunk much alcohol, but started getting "wasted" in her room all the time.
Missing classes became routine, as did staying up all night and sleeping during the day. Brzonkala said she rarely left her room, except to buy cigarettes and eat dinner at the dining hall in her dorm.
When she went out, she said she dressed like a slob, wearing slippers and sweats. She earned an 0.7 grade-point average - roughly a D-minus - that first semester.
In January, she told her roommate what had happened in the early morning of Sept. 22. She said her roommate offered support but didn't encourage her to take action.
Brzonkala said she had blocked the incident out of her mind until the spring semester, when she started seeing the two football players - whose names she had forgotten - around the dorm more often.
In March, she got a program from a football game and had no problem identifying Morrison and Crawford, she said.
She told her resident adviser about the incident and was sent to the Women's Center on campus. She then went to Tech's judicial system. She didn't go to police, she said, because there was no physical evidence to support her claims, and she had waited so long she doubted authorities would believe her.
She finally told her parents everything after one of her friends threatened to do it for her. She didn't want to tell them because, she said, "I knew how much it would hurt them." The family still grieves for a sister who died at the age of 17, when Brzonkala was 5.
With the support of her parents and three siblings, Brzonkala said she had to do something. She said the suit has never been about money. Instead, she said, it's about knowing people believe her and making sure what happened to her doesn't happen to someone else.
Brzonkala has only to gaze in a mirror to remind herself how her life has changed in 16 months. Six weeks after the incident, Brzonkala cut her long hair to chin length. On a recent Friday afternoon, she looked at old pictures of herself, and tears came to her eyes.
She modeled clothes at Northern Virginia malls in high school, but she's "not really confident enough" to get up on a runway now.
She's trying to get on with her life. She didn't return to Tech after she found out Morrison would be back on campus this fall, but she's looking forward to attending nearby George Mason University this semester.
Most of all, she's ready for the case to be finished - but she's prepared to stick with it for the year to 18 months it might take to get to trial.
"I've gone this far; how can I give up?''
LENGTH: Long : 142 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Brzonkala (photo from her high school yearbook when sheby CNBwas a senior) left the university in May 1995.