Missoula by Jon Krakauer Page A

her.
    Adams phoned Merifield the next day. When Officer Vreeland had tried to talk to Adams on September 23, two hours after the alleged assault, Adams was belligerent and uncooperative. According to the report Detective Merifield filed, however, his manner was quite different five weeks later, when she talked to him on the phone:
Zeke became very emotional….He seemed genuinely shocked that he was being accused of assaulting Kerry Barrett. During the course of our phone call it sounded as though he was crying several different times….He said that he felt bad if she felt uncomfortable but maintained that he never assaulted her. Zeke said he would come in as soon as possible to give a statement because he wanted this cleared up….Due to Zeke’s emotional state and apparent inability to process what was happening, I asked him if he was going to be okay over the weekend. I also asked Zeke if he was suicidal. He assured me he was not suicidal.
    Zeke Adams came to the police station and gave a recorded statement to Detective Merifield on October 31. She began by assuring him, “I think this is just a big misunderstanding….If there werecharges, I would only recommend misdemeanor charges.” Merifield inquired, “Have you ever been arrested before?”
    Adams replied, “I have not.” This was not true. He had been arrested in December 2008 for petty theft. Merifield didn’t check his criminal history, however, and accepted his statement at face value.
    Merifield asked how many drinks Adams had consumed before he met Barrett at Sean Kelly’s, but Adams declined to answer. “I feel like these questions are just going to get me in trouble,” he explained.
    “When the officers came and talked to you that night you seemed pretty intoxicated,” she reminded him. “What I need to know is if you had a lot to drink and your memory is affected. Do you think you had a good memory of everything that happened?”
    “Yes,” Adams asserted. “I could, for example, tell you specific things about what happened. Like I remember she was from New Jersey….I believe she was, like, a biology major.” (Barrett’s major was psychology.) “My memory is pretty clear.”
    Clear or not, Adams’s recollections of the evening closely matched Barrett’s account up to the point where she became uncomfortable with the escalating sexual activity, announced she was leaving, and then changed her mind after Adams promised “nothing would happen” and urged her to spend the night. But Adams steadfastly denied Barrett’s claim that he subsequently attempted to have intercourse with her while she was asleep.
    “I did not try to have sex with her,” he told Detective Merifield. “When she laid back down on my bed, I kissed her some more, and then she said, ‘No I have to go.’…She grabbed the remainder of her things and left my house….I can say with one hundred percent confidence that I did not intend to hurt her, harm her, do anything to her that she did not want to be done to her.” At this point, Adams broke down and started to cry. “She didn’t express to me in any way that I had done any of those things,” he insisted through his tears. “When she left my house, if anything, I thought, you know, it just appeared to me like she felt like, uh— She didn’t, you know, she was in a situation, she was like, ‘OK, this might not morally be the right thing to do.’ ”
    “Did she seem mad, Zeke?” Merifield asked. “Did she slam the door?”
    “I mean, she left, like, in a manner— She kind of said, ‘No, I need to go,’ ” Adams replied. “And I mean that honestly! I am not lying to you!”
    “I believe you,” Merifield said sympathetically. “At any point after you kissed her and she laid back down did she say no?”
    “She told me, ‘I don’t and can’t have sex with you.’ And I did not try to have sex with her. I absolutely did not.”
    “Did you ever rub your penis on her back?”
    “No,” Adams