One of the strongest ties Jesse Matthew has to Hampton Roads is that he was a student at Christopher Newport University for a short time in 2003.
And in that short time, he was the main suspect of a sexual assault.
Today, we asked CNU’s president Paul Trible simple questions about that assault and with every question, we received the same answer. He kept saying that federal law would prohibit him from providing answers.
President Trible did explain how the university handles cases of sexual abuse and leaves a mark on the student's transcripts that will be there forever.
It was only a month after this sexual assault investigation and Matthew was gone.
After Trible continued to give us the same answers, reporter Nadeen Yanes asked:
“I just feel like the families of these girls he may be linked to want to know. I feel like they want to know as much as they can about someone who has a tie to Hampton Roads and who was a suspect to a sexual assault that happened right here. I feel like they want to know,” says Nadeen Yanes.
"My wife Rosemary at age 25 was raped at gunpoint. There is no one that cares more about doing the right thing than I do in cases of sexual abuse. We did the right thing from the very start to the very end. There is no one that would like to tell you all the facts and circumstances more than I do because you would be convinced that CNU did all the right things,” says Trible.
The federal law President Trible kept referring to is called FERPA -- the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Acts, a law that protects the privacy of student records.
