Settlement ends federal lawsuit over rape of student in Allegheny College dorm room

The rape of an Allegheny College student in her dorm room in 2019 led to an arrest and a lawsuit.

The arrest ended with a state prison sentence of up to 40 years in 2022 for the Meadville resident who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the woman at gunpoint.

The woman sued Allegheny for negligence and other claims, and the lawsuit has ended with a settlement.

Sentence: Meadville man sentenced to 13 to 40 years in prison in rape of Allegheny College student

The deal ends nearly three years of litigation in U.S. District Court in Erie. The plaintiff sued in July 2020, claiming inadequate security measures allowed her attacker to get into her room at Ravine-Narvik Hall on Allegheny's campus in Meadville during the early morning of Dec. 10, 2019. Allegheny denied the claims.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter signaled the case had settled by signing an order that dismissed the lawsuit at the request of the lawyers for Allegheny and the plaintiff, identified only as Jane Doe in the civil case. She is living in Maryland and is no longer a student at the 1,400-student Allegheny, a private liberal arts college, according to court records.

After years of litigation, "we reached a confidential settlement with Allegheny College, which provides compensation and closure to our client," the plaintiff's lead lawyer, Tom Kline, of Kline & Specter in Philadelphia, said in a statement to the Erie Times-News.

A lawyer representing Allegheny did not respond to an email seeking comment. The Philadelphia firm of Tucker Law Group represented the college.

The suit was filed in federal court because the parties are from different states — Allegheny in Pennsylvania and the plaintiff in Maryland.

Case over rape on campus had been set for trial in September

The settlement came just as the lawyers were running up against deadlines to file what are known as motions for summary judgment, in which the plaintiff and the defendant typically ask a judge to rule in their favor without a trial. The lawyers often present detailed summaries of their respective cases in the motions for summary judgment.

If the case had survived summary judgment, it was scheduled to go to trial at the federal courthouse in Erie in September, according to an order Baxter signed March 1.

Lawsuit filed: Ex-Allegheny student sues over rape on campus

The settlement also came after the lawyers spent years gathering evidence in a process known as discovery. The plaintiff was among those deposed in the case, according to court records. Baxter also gave permission to Allegheny's lawyers to depose the plaintiff's attacker, Montelle Brown, via videoconference from state prison.

Brown, 30, is at the State Correctional Institution at Chester, near Philadelphia. He was sentenced in the Crawford County Court of Common Pleas to 13 to 40 years in state prison in February 2022 after pleading guilty to two first-degree felony counts of rape in November 2021. Brown was also designated a sexually violent predator, according to court records.

He lost on appeal before the state Superior Court in October. He wanted his sentenced overturned.

Meadville police used DNA evidence to link Brown to the assault. The police and the Crawford County District Attorney's Office charged him in February 2021.

The victim reported the assault immediately, authorities said, but Brown's DNA was initially not in the database for law enforcement. His DNA was later collected when he was charged in another crime, and police made the match.

Break in case: Crawford DA: DNA match links Meadville man to rape of student at Allegheny College in 2019

Brown pleaded guilty to entering the Ravine-Narvik residence hall, entering the victim's room, threatening her with a handgun and assaulting her before he fled. Brown said at his plea hearing that he was able to get into the dorm because one of its outside doors had been propped open by a rock, according to the Meadville Tribune.

Lawsuit claimed Allegheny College was 'negligent and reckless'

The lawsuit over the rape focused on what the plaintiff's lawyers claimed were flawed security measures in the dorm and elsewhere. The suit claimed premises liability in addition to negligence.

The claims were based on "Allegheny College's negligent and reckless undertaking to provide on-campus housing and security services to its students," according to the suit.

Preliminary hearing: Man held for court in Allegheny College rape case, with DNA as key evidence

According to the suit, the night of the attack, the plaintiff had gone to bed, alone, in her third-floor dorm room when she heard a knock on her door and went to it. The door had no "peephole, peek hole, spyhole, door hole, door viewer or other mechanism to allow the room occupant to observe who was on the other side of the door," the suit said.

The suit also claimed the exterior entrances to Ravine-Narvik Hall were accessible through proximity access cards or student identification cards, but that the card-entry systems regularly failed to operate or function, causing students to prop or hold open the exterior doors for access.

"As a result of unsecured entrances to Ravine-Narvik Hall and Jane Doe’s inability to identify the individual on the other side of the door," the assailant, later identified as Brown, entered her room and attacked her, according to the suit.

It claimed that Ravine-Narvik Hall at the time had no exterior video cameras on its facade; had no one assigned to verify the identities of residents or visitors; had no internal video cameras, and had no security personnel posted in the building.

The suit claimed that, in addition to failing to fix malfunctioning entry systems and to address other security measures at its residence halls, Allegheny College failed to change security procedures to protect students living on campus despite awareness of “on-campus forcible sex offenses, and suspicious persons and trespassers on campus" prior to the attack on Dec. 10, 2019.

According to the suit, the school's daily crime and fire log reported multiple suspicious persons, including trespassers, on campus and multiple forcible sex offenses at Ravine-Narvik Hall from 2016 to 2019.

After the assault, Allegheny College pledged to considerably increase the public safety presence around campus and take additional measures, such as bringing more security personnel to campus.

Allegheny College failed to get lawsuit over rape dismissed

In denying all of the claims in the suit, Allegheny raised several defenses. One defense was that, at the times relevant to the incident, "Allegheny College was without notice, whether actual or constructive, of similar acts of violence or criminal activity occurring on its campus," according to the response Allegheny's lawyers filed in court.

Sexual assault on campus: Biden administration will release new Title IX rules in May. What to expect.

Another defense was that the lawsuit "is barred by the superseding intervening criminal conduct of a third party." Allegheny also said it "is not vicariously liable" in the case.

Allegheny's lawyers tried to get the suit dismissed based on the argument that the plaintiff "has failed to establish either that Allegheny had a duty to protect Plaintiff from the spontaneous criminal act of a third party or that its alleged breach of any such duty caused Plaintiff's assault to occur," according to a written opinion Judge Baxter issued in September 2021, about two months before Brown pleaded guilty in Crawford County Common Pleas Court.

Baxter in the opinion rejected Allegheny's argument. She said she recognized that the plaintiff's lawyers, at that point, had made a "tenuous casual connection" between the attack and Allegheny's "alleged negligence."

But she also said in the opinion: "The Court is unable to conclude, as a matter of law, that Allegheny’s alleged negligence in upholding and maintaining its security services is so remote that Allegheny cannot be held legally responsible for Plaintiff’s harm, particularly in view of its knowledge of the foreseeable risk of such harm evidenced by Allegheny’s recent history of sexual assaults on its premises and within its residence halls.

"Plaintiff should be given the opportunity, through discovery, to determine the facts surrounding how the assailant entered her resident hall and the role, if any, that Allegheny’s alleged negligence played in facilitating the sexual assault at issue."

Baxter ordered the case to proceed.

Contact Ed Palattella at epalattella@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNpalattella.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Settlement ends federal lawsuit over rape in Allegheny College dorm