Last Thursday, Troy Graves pleaded guilty to the six sexual assaults and the 1998 murder of Wharton graduate student Shannon Schieber. His confession ends the five year long search for the Center City rapist.
Still, some, including the Schieber family, believe that bungling on the part of the Philadelphia Police allowed Graves to continue his crime spree in Philadelphia and extend it to Colorado, where he confessed to committing seven additional assaults.
The Schiebers have filed a federal lawsuit against the city, claiming that the investigation into the Center City rapist was deeply flawed, and that errors and delays may have led to the death of their daughter.
The lawsuit alleges that the police failed to connect the string of sexual assaults that were later ascribed to the Center City rapist. The Schiebers also claim that delays in processing DNA unnecessarily held up the investigation, and that on the night of Schieber's murder, the police missed Graves while he was in Schieber's apartment when they responded to an emergency call placed by one of her neighbors.
If the Schiebers' claims are in fact true, then the Philadelphia Police's failures may have cost a young woman her life and allowed a notorious rapist to escape and commit a new string of horrendous crimes in Colorado.
That possibility calls for a full and independent investigation into the Schiebers' claims and into how the police handled the case from the start.
These are serious allegations, and, if accurate, they call for serious action of the part of the department.
In instances of failure this extreme, there must be accountability. If careless or malicious error is the cause, those involved must be reprimanded. If it is a sign of deeper, more systemic problems, those must be addressed.
The case of the Center City rapist cannot end with Troy Graves' sentencing.
