New tension cloaks team

A shoe yet to drop in lacrosse case

DURHAM -- With the threat of a third indictment in the gang rape investigation of the Duke University lacrosse team, those who know the players who haven't been charged feel a corrosive worry that one of their own could still face formal accusations.

There's also rising anger at Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, who has vowed to identify one more suspect, renewing a sense of uncertainty for 44 of the team's players and the community.

"This has upset a lot of people's lives, and it will continue to do so," said Chuck Sherwood, father of freshman goalie Devon Sherwood, the only member of the squad not under suspicion. "This is a bad thing, one way or another, whether the players are telling a lie or the accuser is telling a lie. This has turned everything upside down."

At first blush, Tuesday's arrest of sophomores Collin Finnerty, 19, of Garden City, N.Y., and Reade Seligmann, 20, of Essex Fells, N.J., appeared to leave the rest of the squad in the clear of accusations by a woman who said she was raped and sodomized by three white men during a March 13 team party.

But Nifong's written statement made it clear that the hunt for a third suspect would continue, erasing any relief felt by parents and supporters. Nifong has said that he thinks the woman, who was hired to dance at the party, was raped there and that a medical exam shows she had injuries consistent with her account.

"They're picking at straws and looking for a needle in a haystack," said Chris Gumiela, a Garden City High School lacrosse and football teammate of Duke co-captain Dan Flannery. Flannery is one of three senior co-captains who lived in the white rental house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. where the dancer said the attack took place.

Gumiela, who said he doesn't believe the dancer's allegations, thinks Nifong is trying to revive a faltering investigation.

"He's got to get three; otherwise there's a big hole in his case," said Gumiela, 21, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. "It doesn't look good for the case; it doesn't look good for him to charge only two players."

Gumiela is angry about the wreckage caused by this high-profile case -- reputations ruined, a season canceled and a friend's athletic career and quest for a national championship at an end.

"The whole team's a casualty," he said. "If the actions of a couple of guys ruined it for the whole team, that's a terrible weight. The season's gone, the coach is gone, the whole program is decimated."

Gumiela has never lost faith in Flannery, whom he saw in Garden City during the Easter holiday weekend. But he said his faith in justice is shaken.

"You kind of get a sense that the whole American ideal of being innocent until being proven guilty got thrown out the window," he said. "It got caught up in the racial tension down there and the high-profile nature of the case."

The rejuvenated sense of uncertainty also touches the cadre of defense lawyers representing the players, said Bill Cotter, Finnerty's attorney.

"I can't tell you the pressure and the anxiety and the fear and the terror that all these families have lived under for the last several weeks," he said.

With the hunt for a third suspect, even lawyers representing players who haven't been charged continue to argue the team's innocence before the television cameras, he said.

The stress of Nifong's investigation and the prospects of a high-profile criminal trial will have a lasting effect on players, the school and the sport, said Sherwood, whose son is the squad's only black player and was therefore free of suspicion. The dancer said her three attackers were white, so the younger Sherwood did not have to give a DNA sample as 46 of his teammates were ordered to do.

'Part of that team'

"Even though my son was never implicated, he's a part of that team and feels the stress and strain as well," said Sherwood, 52, an elementary school teacher who lives in Freeport, N.Y.

Sherwood, who played goalie for the Duke lacrosse team from 1972 to 1975 and thinks he was the school's first black lacrosse player and assistant coach, has declined to say whether his son was at the March 13 team party. He said his son has felt unique pressure because both he and the accuser are black.

"He's feeling a lot of a different kind of pressure than the rest of the team," said Sherwood. "There's a feeling that because he is an African-American, he should have stepped forward and told what he knows or stepped in and stopped this."

Robinson "Rob" Bordley, lacrosse coach at Landon School, an exclusive all-boys academy in Bethesda, Md., has walked the line between having faith in his five former players on the Duke lacrosse roster and making sure they're telling him the truth.

Bordley has talked to four players and their parents, but not to Dave Evans, senior co-captain of the Duke squad and one of the team leaders living at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd.

He buttonholed one player last weekend.

" 'Look me in the eye,' I said. 'Could there have been a conspiracy of silence?' He said, 'No way.' "

(News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.)