Iowa City police have renewed their call for help after three more assaults on women the past weekend. The beginning of fall semester in the college town saw a string of cases in which a lone man came up to women walking alone and groped them, threw them down or tried to rip of their clothing.
Sergeant Doug Hart says another string of reports came in after two AM on Saturday morning. Between two and three A.M. Saturday morning, he says the officers responded to no fewer than three calls reporting assaults or attempted sexual assaults. There have been five cases before this in recent weeks about attacks on single women in Iowa City, though Sergeant Hart says they don’t think it’s all one man.
He says it’s difficult to tell but they happened too close to the same time, in locations too far apart, to have been the doing of one suspect. While there have been a few similar cases, he says police don’t know enough to make out a pattern.
Hart says the reporting of recent cases might be encouraging women to come forward and report attacks they might not have told police about before. He says “We’re perfectly fine with that,” adding police want to know about any case of assault so they can investigate and figure out who’s responsible. In each case, the college-age woman assaulted were alone, and on one of this past weekend’s attacks the woman needed medical treatment for injuries.