Two men charged after sexual assault of trans woman at UW-Madison

This story originally appeared on Them and describes charges of violence and sexual assault against a transgender woman. Details are graphic.

Two men were charged on September 1 for allegedly strangling and sexually assaulting a transgender woman on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus over the weekend, in the early morning of August 29.

In a statement to the UW-Madison Police Department obtained by local ABC affiliate WKOW, the woman — unnamed for her protection but identified as trans by the Wisconsin State Journal — alleged that the men, Yorfred H. Marcano Gutierrez, 31, and Arturo R. Santos Albujas, 27, asked her to accompany them to their boat on a university campus pier on Lake Mendota. She says she met the pair on State Street somewhere around 3 a.m. to 4 a.m. on Saturday, August 29, a pedestrian corridor frequented by university students in downtown Madison that leads straight into UW-Madison’s campus, when they approached her.

Per the UW-Madison Police Department, neither the woman nor the men are affiliated with the university.

The woman told police that she was reluctant but went with the men to Goodspeed Family Pier near Alumni Park, a docking access point opened in 2013 that is frequented by students. Once they arrived, she says she saw there was no boat and became concerned and tried to leave. She said that the men then pushed her to the ground, per the report, and that Albujas grabbed her by the neck, ripped out her hair extensions, and threw them into the lake. Then, she alleges the pair tore off her clothes before they began hitting her.

The woman says in the report that Gutierrez then began strangling her to the point that she thought she would die, before dragging her towards Albujas to try to force her to perform sexual acts on him, leaving scratches across her arms and legs. “We could literally kill you, throw you in the lake and just leave,” she says they told her.

One eyewitness to the incident called the police and said she saw the pair “being very handsy towards and with other females on State Street” about 45 to 60 minutes before the assault at the pier, per the report. She also said she witnessed the men grabbing the woman by her clothes and dragging her by her hair. At 4:10 am, the UW-Madison Police Department received another call from a concerned bystander who reported a disturbance near Alumni Park, saying he heard the men hitting the woman, and specifically saw Albujas hit her five or six times.

Surveillance video also captured the incident from several angles between 3:57 a.m. and 4:13 a.m. The pair were arrested by police soon after.

“These guys raped me, they tried to f*****g kill me,” the woman told police when they arrived at the scene of the assault on Saturday, according to a complaint report cited in court at a hearing on September 1.

At that hearing, the men were charged with attempted second degree sexual assault/use of force, with strangulation and suffocation as party to to a crime, false imprisonment as party to a crime, and battery. Their preliminary hearings are both scheduled to take place September 8. They are both being held at the Dane County Jail; Albuja’s bail is set at $100,000 and Gutierrez’s is set at $75,000.

Them has reached out to the UW-Madison Police Department and to the UW-Madison administration, and will update the story as it develops.

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