The shocking allegations of a racially tinged assault at the University at Albany appeared to unravel Thursday as police accused three black students of making the story up and charged the women with assaulting a fellow bus passenger.
The women grabbed national attention after claiming to have been attacked on a CDTA bus around 1 a.m. Jan. 30 by a large group that included white men while others stood by and did nothing.
In social media posts that spread like wildfire far beyond campus, the women claimed to have been the target of racial slurs and to have been assaulted while on the bus floor.
But authorities now say there’s no evidence any of that happened and that the women were the aggressors in the fracas, which was captured by cameras on the bus and other cameras in the hands of bus riders. All three defendants are charged with misdemeanor assault and are facing campus disciplinary proceedings.
The actual victim, police said, was a 19-year-old white woman from Congers, Rockland County, who also was a passenger on the late-night route known to students as the “drunk bus.”
“The evidence shows that, contrary to how the defendants originally portrayed things, these three individuals were not the victims of a crime,” University Police Chief Frank Wiley said in a statement. “Rather, we allege that they are the perpetrators.”
“I especially want to point out that what happened on the bus was not a ‘hate crime,’ ” Wiley said.
Ariel Agudio, 20, of Huntington, Suffolk County; Alexis Briggs, 20, of Elmira Heights, Chemung County; and Asha Burwell, 20, of Huntington Station, Suffolk County, were all charged with misdemeanor assault, punishable by up to one year in jail.
Burwell and Agudio are also charged with misdemeanor falsely reporting an incident in connection with 911 calls they made to police immediately after the confrontation.
The allegations of the three women, including claims that bystanders ignored their cries for help, sparked a large on-campus rally and were held up by some as emblematic of a broader cultural failure to stick up for women of color.