Wahoo police are investigating allegations of sexual assaults of students at the hands of fellow students at Bishop Neumann High School, which the police chief called hazing incidents that had "gone too far."
Last week, police obtained search warrants to seize cellphones alleged to contain recordings of two separate assaults involving different victims, according to court records filed in Saunders County District Court.
On Tuesday, Chief Joseph Baudler said investigators are still in the "information gathering" stage and are working to interview more students.
Once they have all the facts, he said, they would turn everything over to the Saunders County Attorney.
"Our goal is to make sure everyone is safe, both physically and emotionally," Baudler told the Journal Star.
According to the affidavit for a search warrant, on April 19 Wahoo police were called to Bishop Neumann on a report by the assistant principal about a rumor going around the school about a possible sexual assault of a student at a home in Wahoo.
Baudler met with the student who said he had been hanging out at a classmate's home in late March when one of the boys pinned him down, pulled down his pants and assaulted him with a plastic Gatorade bottle while another boy made a video and sent it to friends.
"At which point it spread throughout the school," the police chief said in the search warrant.
Police said in the court document that they cited both of the boys on suspicion of first-degree sexual assault and one for making child pornography. Neither had been charged as of Tuesday, but they are believed to have been expelled from the school.
In a separate incident, Wahoo police were contacted April 23 by the father of another boy, who had a video of three students holding down his son and attempting to strip him of his gym shorts and roll him onto his stomach.
The incident was alleged to have happened on Bishop Neumann school grounds during religion class on April 5.
During the investigation, Baudler was "made aware of other incidents where male students ... at Bishop Neumann High School have been sodomized by their classmates," according to the search warrant.
The Journal Star has chosen not to include the grades of the students in order to protect the victims.
In a forensic interview in Lincoln late last month, one of the boys said he had been tackled and that classmates had tried to take off his shorts while another boy recorded on his cellphone.
The video was shared on Snapchat.
The boy's father told investigators it looked as though students were trying to sodomize his son and he fears something more happened after the video cut off.
A physician assistant who spoke with him and his son said the boy's behavior presented as a textbook example of "trauma response" to a traumatic experience.
The same day, another Wahoo officer talked to a confidential witness who said one of the three boys had tried to digitally penetrate him while he was held down against his will and that similar incidents had happened to others in the class.
Baudler spoke with one boy who described "other incidents of a TV remote control device and golf club being used to sodomize classmates."