College student works to move past false sexual abuse accusation

Story here. Excerpt:

'Going away for college is a dream for most young people, but for a local teen it turned into a nightmare.

Instead of starting fall semester, he spent the first day of school in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

“It’s just I was the wrong guy,” Elijah Bethel said. “That’s all that really happened. They just picked the wrong person.”

Bethel was a star in the classroom and on the football field. But the hit he didn’t see coming happened last Fall when he enrolled at SUNY Buffalo State.

At 3:21 a.m. on August 28, 2015, campus police were called to Porter Hall where a young woman had been groped in her sleep. The attacker fled and dropped cigarettes and a lighter.

“She was sleeping, and it was very difficult for her to make an identification,” attorney Paul Michalek said.

She said it was a short, black man in black shorts.

Nineteen minutes later at 3:40 a.m., police see Bethel in black shorts with three friends on the other side of campus.

“He was interviewed, the other gentlemen were interviewed,” Michalek said. “They told the officer where they were, and they were let go.”

The four said they were together all night and just came from an off-campus restaurant, Jim’s Steakout. According to documents obtained by NEWS10 ABC, three of the men are carrying food with them from the restaurant. Bethel also had a receipt for what he ate still in this pocket.

Police let them go.

But 20 minutes later at 4 a.m., police knocked on Bethel’s door and asked him to come downtown.'