Suspect remains at large

A day after the attempted assault of a female undergraduate student in a Frist Campus Center bathroom Sunday night, little new information about the attack has been made available and the assailant is still at large.

The Department of Public Safety continued to search for the assailant on and around campus Monday. "We haven't found the individual but we're working to apprehend him," Public Safety director and chief of police Steven Healy said.

State and Borough police are working with Public Safety to generate a composite sketch of the suspect, which should be released today, Healy said.

All Public Safety officers "know the description of the individual and what to look out for as they're patrolling," he added.

Public Safety is also interviewing eyewitnesses and working to review surveillance videos from the ATM machines in Frist.

About 20 minutes before the attempted assault, a woman reported a suspicious Spanish-speaking man near the ATMs.

Last night, a Public Safety officer was posted at Frist Campus Center, where the attempted assault occurred, from 7 p.m. until 2 a.m. Public Safety will patrol Frist every evening from 7 p.m. to close "until further notice," University spokesperson Cass Cliatt '96 said.

The purpose of the nightly building patrol is to "enhance the sense of security," she said. "It's a matter of security for whatever might happen."

Cliatt said she wasn't sure whether similar patrols had been instated after past incidents on campus.

Public Safety closed the bathroom Monday morning and dusted for fingerprints. Healy said there were places the assailant would have touched where others using the bathroom would not normally have placed their hands.

"Because of the specific places that the man touched that no one else would have been in contact with, we should be able to get some prints," Healy said, declining to comment on where.

The attempted assault, which was reported as a "forcible fondling" in the proctor blotter, occurred Sunday night when an unidentified Spanish-speaking individual attempted to assault a female student in a bathroom in Frist. The student screamed and escaped the bathroom, but the perpetrator fled the scene.

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The student did not appear to be injured, according to witnesses who saw her immediately after the attack, but she was taken to McCosh Health Center.

One student, who was in another stall in the bathroom at the time of the incident, agreed to talk to The Daily Princetonian on the condition of anonymity. She said she first noticed the man in the bathroom and asked him if he knew he was in a women's bathroom. The man didn't respond in a way that made the witness think he understood her, so she asked what language he spoke and he said Spanish.

She asked the question again in Spanish. "He said, 'O.K., thank you,' but didn't leave the bathroom," the student said. She didn't know what to do, or if the man had a weapon, so she stayed in the stall and hoped other people in the bathroom would be equally cautious.

Then, the woman said, she heard a toilet flush. For an instant she didn't know what was going to happen but then she heard the woman in the other stall screaming. "The screams sounded like they were being muffled by a hand or something," the witness said.

She ran out of the stall to the Welcome Desk, screaming that a student was being attacked in the bathroom. A student working at the desk called Public Safety and officers arrived on the scene within a few minutes.

The witness said the man "seemed to be very disturbed ... he definitely didn't seem like he had a clear mind."

Within half an hour of the attack — which took place between 10:20 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Sunday — the women's bathroom at the northeast corner of Frist's 100-level had reopened.

— Includes reporting by Princetonian Senior Writer Chanakya Sethi.