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Columbia PD Fails to Find Suspects in Sasha Menu Courey Case

sasha menu courey
MU file photo

Police in Columbia say they've failed to identify a suspect in a case involving a former University of Missouri swimmer who said she was raped by several football players, months before she committed suicide. 

Police said Wednesday that they have closed their investigation into the case Sasha Menu-Courey. Detectives from the Columbia Police Department started working on the case starting in 2014 and have found no evidence linking a suspect to Menu-Courey’s assault. 

CPD Public Information Officer, Bryana Maupin, said detectives closed the case after confronting multiple barriers to their investigation, including a lack of firsthand testimony from Menu-Courey.

“I think all of them were difficult to overcome.  One of the biggest ones being our victim is deceased so we didn’t have a firsthand statement of what actually occurred,” Maupin said.

According to Maupin, CPD examined information on Menu-Courey’s laptop and phone, but there was no evidence on either of these that pointed to a suspect. 

“There was a lack of evidence, of forensic evidence, of video evidence.  Then as far as chain of custody issues with ESPN possessing some of the materials we needed to conclude the investigation.”

Maupin said ESPN had custody of Menu-Courey’s phone and were using her contacts while reporting on the story of her assault.  She said that when CPD tried reaching out to the media organization to get contact information for some of the sources used in the story, no information was shared.

Maupin also said detectives struggled to find a suspect due to a series of unreliable witness testimonies which were nothing more than hearsay. 

Menu Courey killed herself in 2011 at a Boston psychiatric hospital after withdrawing from classes at Missouri at midsemester and being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Before her death, she told health professionals bound by confidentiality that she had been sexually assaulted as a freshman in 2010. An outside review found the university fell short of federal standards under the Title IX law, for the reporting and investigation of sexual assault on campus.

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