Crash Into Me_ A Survivor's Search for Justice - Liz Seccuro [33]
Walking over to me, the man introduced himself as Mike Seccuro. He explained that he was waiting to take a train home to Baltimore, after spending the day in long meetings. He worked as an investment banker and traveled to Washington a great deal. He had a wonderful way about him, a quick smile and deep brown eyes that hinted at his clever but sensitive nature. He was quick-witted, hilarious, and insightful. We exchanged business cards and promised, after chatting briefly, to get together. I didn’t let myself get my hopes up, though.
Two days later there was a voice mail on my work phone. Mike was coming back to Washington the following week for three days, and would I like to have dinner? He was scheduled to stay at the Hay-Adams, so I had him upgraded to a suite and sent him some fresh fruit and bottled water. To this day he insists that it was purely coincidental that he was booked into the hotel where I worked.
We met on a Monday evening for dinner back at Union Station and fell in love on the spot. As we talked about our pasts, he mentioned that he had gone to the University of Virginia. Fear struck at my heart. Please, God, please let him not know about me. Please let him not be a Phi Kappa Psi. But no, he was a Chi Phi, and he had graduated in 1995, seven years behind me. I hadn’t realized he was so young. After that first night, we became inseparable, traveling weeknights to see each other and spending together every moment we could spare from work, going to the zoo, the movies, dinners, and the opera. I loved him in a way I had never loved anyone in my life.
About one month into our relationship, I knew that I had to tell him my story. If I believed in this relationship, I needed to be fully honest about my past and tell him what had happened at our alma mater. On a quiet date, fingers intertwined, I told him everything. He listened intently, and then reached over to hug me. I was sobbing, and scared he might reject me, thinking I was “damaged.” Instead, he told me he loved me. I had indeed come home.
Through ups and downs, panic attacks, relocations, and separations, our love grew stronger. On November 13, 1999, we married in a church in Atlanta, Georgia. I had found my partner, my rock.
When Mike got a job on Wall Street, we moved to New York, and I found work as an event planner. On Christmas Day, 2002, we welcomed our first child, Ava Noelle. Holding her that day, I realized how far we had come. How far I had come. We moved to Greenwich when Ava was one year old and I began my own event-planning company, which flourished. Life was a miracle, and when I looked at my family with such joy and pride, the nightmares of the past seemed very far behind me.
And then, that September day in 2005, the letter arrived. And the nightmare was back.
CHAPTER 6
The Charges, the Arrest,
and the System
On January 5, 2006, Police Chief Timothy Longo of Charlottesville stood on the steps of City Hall in front of a smattering of reporters and other local media and read the following statement:
In mid December 2005, a thirty-eight-year-old Connecticut woman came forward to report a sexual assault that had occurred some twenty-one years ago.
According to the victim, the incident occurred in October 1984 while visiting the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, located in the one hundred block of Madison Lane in Charlottesville, Virginia. Both she and her assailant were students at the University of Virginia at the time. This was not a “date rape.” The assailant was a stranger to the victim at the time of the assault.
In the months prior to reporting this incident, the victim reports having been contacted by her assailant. She has not seen or otherwise had contact with this person since approximately two years after her attack, sometime in 1986.
During the course of these most