The woman, identified only as Ashley to protect her privacy, told reporters she remembers little of the early hours of March 9, 2025, after several rounds of shots at a club. She said her last clear memory is accepting a ride home from Derek, her best friend's boyfriend of more than a decade, whom she trusted.

At her apartment, she said, she was sick in the bathroom and recalled pushing him away when he tried to touch her. The rest of the night, she said, is blank.

The next morning, her boyfriend told her she had called him hours earlier and said she had sex with Derek. When she confronted Derek, she said, he denied any sexual contact.

Seeking answers, Ashley reviewed her doorbell camera. One clip, timestamped 4:04 a.m., shows her stumbling and appearing heavily intoxicated as she and Derek approach her door. About 32 minutes later, the camera activated again as Derek left. Five minutes after that, it captured Ashley leaving her apartment and walking down the hall nude from the waist down.

She said she spent the following week consumed by the feeling that something had happened. That Thursday, she told her older brother, who urged her to press charges, and she said even her best friend — Derek's girlfriend — encouraged her to file a police report.

Ashley contacted Balch Springs police, and Officer Daniel Edwards responded to her apartment to take the report. According to the police report, Edwards wrote that while Ashley "did not feel like there was any type of penetration to her vagina," she "believed something sexual happened" between her and Derek, something to which she "never" would have consented.

Ashley said Edwards told her a detective would follow up. No detective ever contacted her. She later learned why: Edwards had classified her sexual assault report as an information call, meaning it did not meet the legal elements of a crime, and no detective was assigned.

"The point of me calling police was for them to do an investigation," Ashley said. "I thought they would get my story, get his story, and see what didn't add up. But they never did that. So, it's like, what did I even call the police for?"

Demetrice Lopez-Loftis, a law professor and former Tarrant County prosecutor who helps lead Southern Methodist University's legal center for victims of crimes against women, said survivors often struggle to be taken seriously. She said a survivor's account may arrive in fragments as they process trauma, and that investigators need training to recognize that.

"I know that I can't have one conversation with a survivor and expect to get all the information in that one conversation," Lopez-Loftis said. "It's more like a flash of memory here, a little piece of information over here, some addition and division here, to try to get to what actually happened."

Without that understanding, she said, police and prosecutors may wrongly question a victim's credibility.

Texas requires officers to complete a course called Trauma-Informed Approach to Sexual Assault Investigations. The requirement was eight hours online when it was created, and a 2025 law doubled it to 16 hours. State records show Edwards completed the eight-hour course in May 2024.

As Ashley pressed for answers, she faced another complication: she was pregnant.

The account raises questions about how North Texas departments screen sexual assault reports at the front door — and whether the state's training mandate is translating into investigations. Ashley's story is scheduled to continue in a second part of the reporting.