Part II: The Page That Closed My Case - “Cleared by Exception”: What That Really Means

In Part I, I talked about the silence that followed my reporting in December 2025.

That silence didn’t start then.

It started years earlier — and it has a paper trail.

There is a document in my San Antonio Police Department file from 2008. It’s the very first page of the report. It’s titled “Cleared by Exception.”

That phrase sounds technical. Neutral. Administrative.

It isn’t.

That page acknowledges the crime as sexual assault. It lists the case number. It reflects that a report was made and taken seriously enough to be categorized.

And then it explains why the case was closed.

Not because the assault didn’t happen. Not because it was false. Not because there was no suspect.

The case was closed because I reported with delay — and later went quiet.

Silence.

Not a recantation. Not a refusal to cooperate. Not a denial of what happened.

Silence — something every trauma-informed system knows is common after sexual assault — was treated as consent to close the case.

The report reflects that after I gave a statement and sought “closure,” my silence was assumed to mean I no longer wanted the case pursued.

Assumed.

That word matters.

In my case, silence after trauma was treated as consent to close the case.

What “Cleared by Exception” meant in my case was this:

The system made a decision about me without me — and then moved on.

That decision didn’t just close a file. It shaped everything that came after.

It taught me that speaking came with consequences. It taught me that going quiet would be interpreted against me. It taught me that the system would protect itself first.

So when I reported again decades later — carefully, deliberately, with documentation — and was met with silence from the Special Victims Unit, it wasn’t new.

It was consistent.

This is why “Cleared by Exception” matters beyond my case.

Because it isn’t just a label. It’s a pattern.

It allows institutions to say a crime was acknowledged while quietly ensuring no one is held accountable. It shifts the cost of crime away from the system and onto the survivor. And it does all of this without confrontation, without explanation, and without appeal.

Under the Sword & Shield Acts, this is exactly what is prohibited.

Silence after trauma cannot be treated as withdrawal.

Delay cannot be treated as deception.

And administrative convenience cannot replace accountability.

This page didn’t just close my case.

It explains how survivors are quietly written out of the system — not through force, but through assumption and procedure.

In Part III, I’ll explain how courts and institutions take that first failure and turn it into a second injury — and why procedure is never as neutral as it claims to be.