A police investigation has found no evidence that a fan who Brigham Young University permanently banned for calling an opposing player the n-word had actually used the slur.
The banning of the fan occurred after Duke volleyball player Rachel Richardson, who is black, claimed that a white man yelled at her to “watch her back” when returning to the team bus after the game. She and other Duke team members also identified the same man as yelling the racial slur repeatedly during the game, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Richardson’s camp insisted that the man yelled out the n-word “every time Richardson served.”
The school acted quickly to ban the fan for life. But others persisted in their claim that the man did not engage in the accused behavior. In addition, fans in the stands told officials that they did not hear racial slurs during the game.
Duke players celebrate winning the match during the Duke Blue Devils game versus the North Carolina Tar Heels on November 24, 2017, at Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham, NC in a Division I women’s college volleyball match. Duke won 3-0 (25-21, 25-22, 25-20). (Andy Mead/YCJ/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Witnesses also said that the Duke accusers never actually saw the man yell the n-word but only identified his voice.
The claims and counterclaims sent the BYU Police Department to search through video of the game to verify the man’s behavior. But, according to the department, they see no evidence that the man banned by the school acted out in the way he was accused.
“When we watched the video, we did not observe that behavior from him,” BYU Police Lt. George Besendorfer told the Tribune.
A BYU officer also agreed. “There was nothing seen on the game film that led me to believe” that the man “was the person who was making comments to the player who complained about being called the N-word,” the officer said.
The timeline surrounding the accusations also seems problematic, the police dept. said. The allegations do not match up to reality.
Indeed, a BYU officer even reported that during the match’s second set, the man was not even in the stands during some of the times when Richardson was serving. So, claims that he was yelling a slur “every time” Richardson served were false. And during another time the 19-year-old Duke player was serving, the game video showed the man paying attention to his cell phone and was clearly not yelling anything.
The fan who was banned, though, was identified by members of the Duke team after the game, and officials removed him from the school and told him he was not allowed to return. It is unclear where the accusations and investigation will go from here or if the school will issue an apology to the banned fan.
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