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http://www.cstv.com/sports/m-lacros/uwire/072006aaa.html

Living A Nightmare: Lax players speak out

By John Taddei The Chronicle

July 20, 2006

Durham, NC (CSTV U-WIRE) -- Bo Carrington wanted to say something, anything. Surrounded on the quad in the middle of Duke's West Campus, the lacrosse player wanted to convince protesters that neither he nor any of his teammates were rapists. But Carrington, a sophomore, couldn't muster a word.

"You know what happened that night!" shouted one member of the crowd. "Why aren't you saying anything?"

They had known who he was right away--that he was one of them, even as he walked across campus without a single piece of Duke lacrosse gear adorning his formidable 6-foot-4, 220-pound frame.

Carrington began to speak up in response but the words eluded him. It was maddening, but he was speechless.

"It's awful because you want people to know the truth, you want people to know what really happened, but they don't want to hear that," Carrington explained more than three months after that day on the quad.

During those weeks in early April, Carrington and his teammates encountered pictures of themselves plastered around campus like WANTED posters. Posters that, in their minds, conveyed a predetermined judgment: guilty.

"If nobody's guilty then you can't tell them who's guilty," the junior continued.

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From the link at #213:

Then a sophomore, Carrington said he had nothing to hide and was eager to divulge his open and honest account to the police about the events surrounding the night of March 13. But there was something about the investigators that made Carrington uneasy.

"We're on your side," he recalled one investigator saying. "We're fighting for you guys. Can you tell us what happened that night?"

As the two officers quizzed Carrington, a polite, soft-spoken Virginian with a slow drawl, the sophomore began to realize why his lawyer had warned him to be careful when speaking to the police.

"They try to be your friend at first and then you realize that they're trying to get you to say something about the case that is not true," Carrington said. "There were absolutely some law enforcement that we felt were deceitful."

"If you're innocent, then the justice system should be your friend, and I don't know, I don't really feel like that's been the case."

(snip)

Once in the teacher's office, Walsh said his professor lashed out about how his team "wasn't right" and that sophomore Ryan McFadyen was "sick in the mind" for sending an e-mail she believed to be entirely inexplicable, in which the sophomore joked about killing and skinning strippers.

Upset with the teacher's inability to empathize with his personal situation, Walsh recalled that he said, "Well, I'd just hoped you'd have some sympathy, it's not the easiest time in the world right now."

"Yeah, well if you guys really were innocent, I would feel sorry for you," he remembered the teacher telling him.

"I couldn't look the teacher in the eyes again," Walsh said. "I never want to see her again."

(snip)