The Concordian

Robert Curtis Shumate, Jr. was arrested on March 3rd [Click to enlarge]

Athens and Concord community members – particularly female students living in campus dormitories – let out a sigh of relief earlier this month after almost a decade of repeatedly receiving sexually explicit phone calls in their dorm rooms.

Registered sex offender Robert Curtis Shumate was arrested on March 3rd after the Concord University Police Department obtained arrest and search warrants for the registered sex offender and a West Virginia State Trooper arrested Shumate when he reported to their headquarters.

Shumate stands accused of repeatedly calling rooms in Concord’s female dormitories, identifying himself as a police officer, and speaking to the students using sexually explicit rhetoric while evidently performing sexual acts upon himself.

“We’ve had reports of an unidentified caller and we were unable to track those calls for quite a while,” Concord University Police Chief Mark Stella said in an interview with The Concordian. “He was calling over to the dorms calling room by room and floor by floor and saying sexually explicit things to female students.”

Since dorm room phone numbers are numbered in sequence, calls were received in neighboring rooms, from one floor to the next.

“All they had to do was get one number and go one way or the other and keep calling throughout North Tower or Wilson Hall and he would call these females and would identify himself by different names,” Stella said. “He would predominantly stick to two names and start talking in sexual overtones and pretend that he was pleasuring himself.”

Intermittent reports of the calls have been received for several years but have increased recently.

“It’s been happening off and on for years,” said Stella, “but we can document it through the last couple of years.” In lieu of calls that may have gone unreported, the full amount of calls will probably never be known. “Some of the girls would just blow it off and hang up the phone. Some girls don’t report it and some of them do. There is the possibility of more calls, and we may never know how many were made.”

“There may be other victims in other places that we don’t know about. I’m sure he’s called other people in other places in the county,” Stella said. “He has an extensive history.”

One former dormitory resident that graduated in Concord’s class of 1999 said that she and her friends received similar calls while living in the dormitories. It is unknown if Shumate was involved with those calls.

Officer Jamey Coulter was assigned as the primary investigator for the case and exercised his ability to coordinate the reports and work with the phone company in order to track the suspect. Until recently, some there were some bureaucratic barriers that made it difficult to track the suspect, but a recent change in the protocol of Frontier, the campus’s phone company, made the investigation much easier.

Years ago when the phone calls first started, females who reported the calls would have to sign prosecution sheet wherein they would agree with Frontier to prosecute to suspect, which meant they would have to go before a court hearing and possibly have to testify.

“And you know how that sometimes going to court scares people,” Coulter said. “People just don’t like court; it scares them. That was the problem we contended with years ago.”

However, during more recent investigations and efforts to upgrade the phone system, the CUPD found that Frontier had enacted a new protocol wherein the CUPD only needed official reports from the females and a police case number instead of the females’ signatures on a prosecution sheet.

“That means that Frontier could assist us with tracking and tracing these calls, which makes it a little bit easier,” Coulter said. “Then all we needed was someone to officially report it to us so that we could generate a report, get a report number, then call the phone company, and then take measures to do what we needed to do to get this guy.”

After the suspect was identified and search and arrest warrants were obtained, Coulter contacted State Troopers to have Shumate arrested. “As a sex offender, he is required to report to a State Trooper who oversees his case whenever he is called upon,” Coulter said, “and in order to reduce any chance of him destroying evidence or realizing that we were going to search his home, I alerted the Corporal Long in Princeton, who oversees Shumate’s case.” Long then asked Shumate to report to him and arrested him onsite.

“It’s a lot easier to have him come to us than to have to go hunt him down.” Coulter said.

Coulter also wanted to emphasize that the calls were not made from campus phones and that the suspect is not a student and the calls were not made from campus phones.

“We investigated an inkling that he may be on campus or making these calls from campus, and there was no evidence to suggest that whatsoever,” he said. “So I don’t want people to think that he was wondering the grounds around here.”

Shumate’s preliminary is likely to take place sometime in the beginning of April, where evidence will be presented and the magistrate will determine whether the case should go to trial before a jury. Police are still gathering evidence to present at that hearing.

Until then, Chief Stella wants the community to know how Shumate’s arrest is an important step in keeping the campus and community safe.

“We want to make the public aware that the potential of the alleged sexual offender could represent a threat to the community, and not only just to Concord students. The people need to be aware of what we had, what was going on, what took place, and the follow up of it. The community should know that we’re up here doing our job and that we got another possible criminal off of the streets.”

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