A former University of Colorado football player at the center of a sex and drugs scandal that erupted at the school in 2002 faces prosecution for an alleged assault that happened before he joined the team.
Clyde Surrell appears likely to be charged in an alleged sexual assault that happened after a party in 2000.
An Arapahoe County judge has ordered District Attorney Carol Chambers to suggest a special prosecutor by July 6 to bring charges against Surrell and another man.
District Judge Carlos Samour Jr. ordered charges be filed by Oct. 5.
Chambers’ spokeswoman, Kathleen Walsh, said the office would review Samour’s order.
Surrell played cornerback and on special teams for CU in 2000-03.
Surrell was at the off-campus apartments of two women the night they claimed they were gang-raped by football players and recruits in December 2001, according to court documents. He also was in a hotel room where a student trainer said she was coerced into performing oral sex on a recruit on Nov. 23, 2001.
Julie Stene contacted Aurora police in June 2000, about 18 months before the alleged assaults that led to the CU scandal.
The Associated Press does not normally identify victims of sexual assault, but Stene is speaking publicly about her case.
After DNA tied Surrell to Stene’s alleged assault, Stene declined to pursue charges because her father was dying of leukemia and her parents were getting a divorce. She contacted prosecutors in 2004 after hearing about the CU scandal.
In court documents, the new men said they had consensual sex with Stene. Surrell denied having sex with Stene but changed his story when confronted with the DNA, according to Samour’s order.
“I had a bad feeling in my stomach that Clyde was involved with it, and it turns out that he was,” Stene said in a telephone interview with the AP on Saturday. “At that point I felt really, really bad that I had not gone through with the prosecution in 2001.”
The DA’s office in 2004 refused to bring charges, citing concern about “jumping on the CU bandwagon,” according to court testimony.
Walsh said the DA’s office examined the case after Chambers took office in 2005 and decided there was insufficient evidence. The Larimer County District Attorney’s Office reviewed the case in 2007 at Chambers’ request and agreed.
But Samour ruled that her decision to not pursue charges is “unjustifiable, arbitrary, capricious and without reasonable excuse.”
He ordered that the men be charged with first-degree sexual assault on a helpless victim, or second-degree assault on a victim incapable of knowing the nature of her conduct, because Stene had been drunk.
Such an order to compel prosecution is extremely rare.
“In my 21 years as a prosecutor, I’ve been once before a court arguing such a motion and never had any one of those granted,” said Adams County District Attorney Don Quick, whose office has served as special prosecutor in other cases.
This story has been updated to remove the name of one of the men accused of sexual assault because he was never charged. Surrell is deceased.
