Att. murder charges in assault case

Separately, a student who assisted the victim refuted several rumors about the Steinberg-Dietrich attack. The 17-year-old Philadelphia boy arrested Thursday in connection with the November 8 attack on a female student in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall has been charged with attempted murder, as well as aggravated assault, robbery and several related counts, police said. The prosecutors' decision to charge the suspect with attempted murder was unexpected, according to University Police officials. Police officials, citing the relatively minor physical injuries the student suffered in the assault, had expected that the suspect would face only aggravated assault and other lesser charges. Because of the suspect's age, University Police have declined to release anything but the most basic information about his arrest. Officials in the Juvenile Unit of the District Attorney's office, which pressed the charges, were not immediately available for comment. In another development, the student who was walking up a nearby stairwell and was the first person to see the victim after the attack refuted nearly all of the accusations made last week against the Division of Public Safety by several people claiming to be close to the victim. E-mails from the people have circulated widely, claiming that many panic alarms in bathrooms do not work and accusing police of misleading the Penn community and treating the victim poorly. The victim, a female sophomore, was attacked by a knife-wielding man inside the basement bathroom of the main Wharton School building just before 3 a.m. last Sunday. Police now believe the assailant gained entry to the building through a side entrance, normally locked at night, that was perhaps propped open by a student so he or she could return later. The front entrance is guarded at night by a SpectaGuard security officer, who is supposed to admit only people with PennCards. Last week, friends of the victim -- who has declined to comment about the incident -- claimed that, among other things, the first panic alarm she pressed did not work, and that security guards did not immediately respond, forcing the victim to seek police assistance herself. But College sophomore Brett Dunn, who said he was the student who first saw the victim when she left the bathroom, disputed those claims in the only firsthand account available thus far of what happened immediately after the attack. Dunn said in a telephone interview Friday that he was walking up a nearby stairwell at about 2:45 a.m. when he heard two distinct alarms. Very quickly after that, the victim ran out of the bathroom toward him, Dunn said. Her hands were a little bloody, Dunn said, and she was "very, very traumatized." "I've never seen someone with so much fear in my life," he said. Almost immediately, Dunn said, a security guard came running down the stairs. He ran into the bathroom to see if the assailant was still there before returning to the victim's side and calling for help. "I don't see how anyone could respond faster than that," Dunn said. While the victim was emotionally shaken, her physical injuries were not that severe -- both Dunn and police officials say her initial treatment consisted of an adhesive bandage supplied by the SpectaGuard. She did, though, have a black eye and several cuts and bruises on her neck and face. By most accounts, University Police officers arrived quickly and took down a description of the suspect. The victim was then taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. "I can understand from her perspective how it could have seemed to take forever," Dunn said. "But I thought everything happened very fast." According to the police account of the attack, the assailant slipped into the bathroom when the victim went into one of the stalls, and grabbed her as she exited it. He wrestled her to the ground, but she managed to escape and hit a panic alarm. The man then grabbed her once again, and she again escaped his grip and hit the second panic alarm, which prompted him to hide in one of the stalls and allowed her to escape, police have said. Prior to the arrest, Public Safety officials came under fire from friends of the victim as well as the Undergraduate Assembly, Penn's main undergraduate student government group. One allegation was that the victim received no support from the University's victim-support network. But Susan Hawkins, who oversees part of Penn's victim-support network as director of special services, has said that she remained with the victim throughout her hospital stay and subsequent trip to the Philadelphia Police Department's 18th District headquarters, and talked with her daily in the days following the attack. Police officials have also maintained that everything was handled correctly and that the rumors floating around campus have no basis in fact. "We know what we're doing here," Penn Det. Commander Tom King said. "We have a wealth of experienced officers and investigators. To criticize without knowing the things that we knew serves no purpose." The department was also hampered by knowing facts they couldn't release during the investigation for fear of tipping the assailant off and now still can't talk about because the suspect is a juvenile. "It's so frustrating because there's so many things we can't say," King said. King also said he doesn't understand why students think the department would want to cover up the attack, saying that doing so would only compromise safety and security. "It does us absolutely no good to try to hide or downplay this," he said. "We're trying to get as much information out as we can." According to Det. Frank DeMeo, who led Penn's investigation into the attack, the District Attorney's office could still choose to try the suspect as an adult. But if he is tried in a special juvenile court, much of the proceedings would be shrouded in secrecy. If convicted of a crime, DeMeo said, the suspect would serve his time in a juvenile facility.