Students received their first Campus Safety crime alert of the semester on Oct. 20, notifying them of an aggravated assault near the intersection of Lakewood and Devon avenues. The email stated a man in a vehicle displayed a gun to a student who was walking down the street after passengers “tried to engage the student in conversation.”
But the student who reported the incident, which has since been referred to Loyola’s gender-based crime department, said Campus Safety left key details out of the email alert.
Lian Lucansky, a 21-year-old environmental science major, was walking home after her workout Friday around 1:30 p.m. Several men in a black SUV stopped to let her cross the road, but began to follow her as the driver and passengers inside catcalled her and made inappropriate remarks, she said.
“They kept catcalling me. They kept yelling sexual things at me, and then I yelled back at them ‘Do you guys want to talk?’” the Loyola senior said.
Lucansky said she was 10 feet from the vehicle when the front passenger flashed his gun.
“It was pointed at me for about five seconds before the driver drove away,” Lucansky said. “It didn’t even feel real … I didn’t even know how to react in the moment. I wasn’t fearful. It was disbelief.”
After she made it home safely, friends convinced her to call Campus Safety. She eventually decided to file a report — detailing the incident to an officer who stopped by her apartment — but was surprised when the email alert was sent that evening, around 6:13 p.m.
“The email … didn’t mention the sexual harassment at all,” Lucansky said.
Lucansky also said she was surprised that her gender, and the genders of the offenders, weren’t mentioned.
Lucansky said she reconfirmed the details of her statement with the Campus Safety officer while he was present but said she thought the omission of the catcalling and sexual harassment in the crime alert email — as well as the fact that the gun was pointed at her — left important context out of the story.
“They said [the gun] was displayed,” Lucansky said.
“It wasn’t ‘Oh, hey, look at my gun.’ It was a threat.”
Around 7 p.m. Friday evening, Lucansky said she was notified that her incident had been referred to Title IX. Loyola’s Title IX Office handles all reports of gender-based crime involving Loyola students — including stalking, domestic violence, dating violence, sexual abuse, sexual harassment and rape.
Campus Safety email alerts don’t name the gender of students who report crimes but also only work with information available at the time the alert is sent, according to Campus Safety Command Sergeant Tim Cunningham.
“We do not include gender in the crime alerts to describe complainants,” Cunningham wrote in an email to The Phoenix.
However, many Campus Safety email alerts following criminal sexual abuses and batteries did mention the gender of male offenders and used variations of the word “harassment” when describing physical and verbal abuse incidents.
Although Lucansky said she won’t be pursuing the case within Loyola’s Title IX Office, she was frustrated the email left out what she saw as integral parts of her story.
“If I wasn’t female and the people in the car weren’t male, then I don’t think this incident would’ve happened,” Lucansky said.
Clarification: An earlier version of this story said Lucansky’s case had been reclassified as a Title IX case, however the wording has been changed to reflect it was referred to the Title IX Office while remaining under investigation by Campus Safety and the Chicago Police Department.
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