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woman he is accused of raping, a police report says, but he said the oral sex was consensual and they never had intercourse.

Tarrant and the alleged victim had met at a party the night of April 24 and went to his on-campus dorm room, where the incident occurred sometime after 1:30 a.m. Dominique Reese, one of Tarrant's teammates, told police the woman victim was happy when she left the party but was upset when she returned.

Fulton County Sheriff's Office
Jerrard Tarrant has been released on $40,000 bond.

"[Reese] stated that it was obvious that something was wrong with the victim, but he did not know what," Tech police officer Marcus Walton wrote in his report.

Two of the woman's friends told police she was so upset when she returned to the party that she soon left again and hid behind a staircase. When they found her, they told police, she started crying and said, "He raped me."

At first, though, she didn't want to go to the police. She told one of her friends she didn't want to press charges because she was afraid if she did Tarrant would get kicked off the Tech football team, the friend said in a statement to police. Instead, the woman asked her friends to take her back to Oglethorpe University, where she and they were students. When she got there she changed her mind about pressing charges and called DeKalb County police, who brought her back to the Tech campus at about 4:30 a.m.

Tarrant, 19, of Carrollton, was arrested Friday on charges of rape and sodomy. He was released Saturday on $40,000 bond. Tech football coach Paul Johnson suspended Tarrant from the team pending the outcome of the legal proceedings. Tarrant, a redshirt freshman, emerged from spring practice as one of two top contenders for a starting cornerback job this fall.

A doctor who examined the alleged victim at Grady Hospital on April 25 found internal vaginal bruising. Two Georgia Bureau of Investigation reports showed no evidence of semen or male DNA in the rape kit or the woman's panties.

Tarrant and the woman both told police she told him to stop performing oral sex on her. He stated that he stopped. She stated that he didn't.

The woman made two statements to police, the first on the morning of the incident and the second, more detailed statement almost a month later, on May 20, after she returned from her home in Tennessee. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution does not identify victims of sexual assault.

She said she had her guard down that night.

"I drank alcohol at the party so it wasn't hard for him to get me to go to his room," she wrote in her first statement.

But once she got to Tarrant's room and he began touching her, she told him to stop because she had a boyfriend. He said that's when the oral sex ended. She said he soon started again and continued despite her continued pleas to stop.

Neither Tarrant's lawyer, Charles Lea, nor Fulton County assistant district attorney Phyllis Clerk returned phone calls to their offices Tuesday afternoon.