Sunday night was their “ritual.”

“We went out every Sunday to [that bar]. It was just something — it was our night to go out,” said a female Northeastern undergraduate student.

On Sunday, Feb. 9, she went with her roommate to the same bar they have gone to every Sunday since the beginning of last September — same bartender, same bouncer, same manager, who all know them by name and by drink.

After the girls finished their drinks and left the bar, the ritual of their Sundays shifted. Later that night, at around 2 a.m. — typically a very deep sleeper — she was woken up.

“The next thing I know I got woken up with him on top of me, and inside of me,” she said, with tears hugging the corners of her eyes.

Broken tradition

Their ritual started in September. She and her roommate, both of legal drinking age, decided to go out Sunday night. They started out at bars by the FleetCenter, Coyote Ugly and The Harp. After awhile they decided to look for “a better place,” she said.

The two Northeastern students, living in a leased property near campus, made their way to Faneuil Hall to revisit a bar they had been going to for “a long time.”

“We immediately just hit it off with the bartender, he knew us by our first names and we knew him,” she said. “It became a safe place for us, for two girls being out on a Sunday night with not a lot of people around.”

On that night in February two men who they had never seen before entered the bar.

“[The men] just kind of started talking to us because we were sitting there because generally there were like five people there on a Sunday night,” she said. “The only time there was more than that was on nights if we brought some of our friends to meet us. It wasn’t very often to get other people to go out on Sunday nights, especially if you have an 8 a.m. class on Monday morning.”

Her roommate started talking to them, but she continued her conversation with the bartender about her new boyfriend — official for about a week and a half, she said.

When the girls left the bar at about 12:30 a.m., the men watched them walk to their car, which was parked on the street. The men pulled up behind them and asked where they were going and what they were doing for the rest of the night. The men followed the girls, as they drove away.

Not wanting to continue socializing with them, she said they deliberately tried to dodge them by driving out of Boston and into the Medford and Malden area — where her new boyfriend lives.

“I didn’t feel comfortable and she didn’t feel comfortable,” she said.

She had called her boyfriend about 15 times, she said, but his phone wasn’t turned on because he wakes up at 4 a.m. to go to work. She said they eventually turned around to go back to the apartment, and the two men continued to follow them.

“By that time, my friend was kind of like, ‘Fine, come up for a drink,'” she said. “I was so tired I was like, ‘I’m going to bed.’ So that’s what I did, I went into my room and I went to bed.”

She told her roommate before she went to bed to “be careful.”

At 2 a.m., she woke up to one of the men having sex with her.

The aftermath

“All I know is that his name is Joe,” she said. “I tried to push him off me, and thank God my roommate actually opened my bedroom door,” she said. “She freaked. At first, she thought I was just having fun.”

When her roommate burst through the door, Joe ran off.

She called 9-1-1, and her roommate didn’t know she had been raped until the ambulance and a police officer showed up.

“I was sitting outside just waiting for [the ambulance], shaking and basically chain smoking. I probably smoked a pack of cigarettes in the 20 minutes it took for them to get there,” she said.

The medics took her to a hospital in the Longwood area. Her roommate followed in a Boston Police cruiser, where they told her what had happened.

After a rape kit was administered, she sat down with a BPD detective. She said that night, she wanted to press charges if the man who raped her was caught.

“[The detective] took my statement, she took my friend’s statement, and then like a month and half later she called and was like, ‘Do you want to start the investigation?’ I freaked, not on her, because I just got the message,” she said. “I just basically said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe that this happened and a month and half later they still haven’t started [the investigation].’ I didn’t know what to do — I didn’t know if I wanted to re-hash everything.”

Learning how to cope

The next day, the student and her roommate walked home from the hospital at about 9 a.m.. The professor she had a class with that morning had a “strict attendance policy.” He asked that if a student was going to miss the course for a day, to please call him and give him a reason for the absence.

Still crying, the student called her professor to tell him she wouldn’t be able to make class that day, maybe not for a few sessions.

From there, the professor began helping her.

“He offered to call my other professors, he offered to help me find a place for me to live and he offered to find me counseling,” she said. She had only known this professor for a few months; he taught two of her classes.

She said due to the professor’s efforts, within a week, she had moved to another residence on campus, a studio. After playing phone tag for awhile, around Feb. 15 she saw Laura Weiss, the sexual assault coordinator on campus at the University Health and Counseling Services-Forsyth, formerly the Lane Health Center.

Before her one-on-one began, she filled out a “long questionnaire,” she said. The questionnaire made her feel “uncomfortable,” but once she met with Weiss face-to-face, she felt more at ease, she said.

“Once I sat down with her I felt very comfortable. She’s very sensitive and she wasn’t being statistical about it, like she was really looking at me and what I was dealing with,” she said.

For their first meeting, they talked about how she would tell her parents and brother about what had happened — something she knew would be “one of the hardest things to do.”

“I didn’t want to hurt my parents the way I had been hurt,” she said.

Moving on

The student said she remained friends with the roommate who at times blames herself for what happened.

“We didn’t talk for probably two to three weeks, it was just too hard. Both of us didn’t know what the other one was feeling. I refused to blame her.”

They still go out together, but make sure it is a more public place.

The student currently lives with her boyfriend in Medford, and still has nights when she wakes up disturbed by the incident, but they are not as frequent.

“I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming and I would be punching [my boyfriend] because he would roll over and touch me in the wrong way and I would forget where I was and think he was attacking me, even though he wasn’t,” she said.

When she finally told her immediate family, she said, “[My mom] was upset; she cried. She couldn’t believe someone hurt her baby in the way that I had been hurt.”

She said her older brother, who lived with their parents at the time, wanted to “kill the guy.”

Her father blamed Northeastern, she said, because Residential Life told her she couldn’t put a lock on her bedroom door, living in a leased property. Also, in leased properties, there isn’t a secured entrance to the building, only the front door is locked, she said.

What happened to her, she said, “affected my family life, it affected my social life, it affected my relationship, it affected school, it affected my sleep, it affected my eating … the more that I thought about it, the less lively I was. I felt like he took a part of my life away.”

She said for now, she is shelving the investigation to get her grades back up this semester, to prove she deserves the GPA she used to have.

“A lot of the time for me, not having to talk to prosecutors or anyone except for the people I care about and trust; it’s a way to get it out of my head and move on with my life.”