Junior Noel Ben Salem had left Bird Library and was about to cross East Adams Street when she saw an idling car turn off. The driver was completely naked and deliberately walking toward her on the opposite side of the street. 

The man said nothing to her, but kept advancing, Ben Salem said. When she pointed her phone at the naked man, he leapt into his car and sped off. 

“And as he was driving away, that’s when I began screaming as loud as I could, and he then turned back around towards the other end of the street,” she said. “I thought he was coming back towards me, so that’s when I started to scream even more and start running as fast as I could toward the other direction of the park.”

Ben Salem did not take any photographs of the man, but she was able to get a few shots of his car. From the timestamps on the photographs she took, Ben Salem said the incident occurred within the span of two minutes, 1:09 to 1:11 a.m.

DPS released a statement at 8:22 p.m., almost 20 hours following the incident, stating that two students reported separate incidents of a man in his early 20s leaving his vehicle naked at around 1 a.m. on Tuesday.

“This guy is still out on the loose, so the longer the university waits to inform other girls about this, then there is a higher risk that this is going to happen to somebody else,” Ben Salem said.

After the man approached her, Ben Salem ran into DPS, who had patrol units a block away from the incident. She was traumatized and in shock. 

“I was in a hysteria, I was very traumatized and (DPS) didn’t comfort me at all. They didn’t hug me, and because I was in a hysteria, it looked like they weren’t taking me seriously,” she said.

Ben Salem gave a statement to DPS, and one officer walked her home. Immediately after, she called SPD to file a separate report. The call to SPD was made at 1:30 a.m., but police did not arrive until 2:30 a.m. Ben Salem said the dispatcher she talked to accused her of not complying with DPS and walking away without finishing her report.

After the DPS officer walked her home, Salem soon discovered she had dozens of phone calls, texts and direct messages, ultimately leading her to post about the incident on Instagram and Twitter.

As of 5:30 p.m. today, Ben Salem said her Instagram post alone had more than 14,000 engagements, including likes, reposts, comments and saves. It was not her initial intention to post anything on social media, but she decided to because of all the people who were reaching out to her.

Ben Salem is most upset and confused that no one came outside of their homes as she screamed. She said she received plenty of direct messages saying that someone had called the police, but no one who went outside to investigate.

Before encountering the man, Ben Salem was at Bird Library, where a white supremacist manifesto connected to the Christchurch mosque shooter was AirDropped to students’ cellphones. 

She was not directly sent the manifesto, but was surrounded by students who were becoming increasingly worried about the document appearing on their phones. In fact, it was for this reason that Ben Salem left the library.

At least 12 hate crimes and bias-related incidents on or near SU’s campus have been reported to DPS since Nov. 7. Ben Salem said that because of these incidents, she has been afraid to leave her apartment.

“I haven’t gotten any updates, I haven’t left my apartment at all because I have been crying all day, so I feel very traumatized,” Ben Salem said.

Published on November 19, 2019 at 11:52 pm