Despite the fact that he took a leave of absence at some point last semester after the incident, Mercedes repeatedly appeared on campus, according to Reyes.

“I kept running into Ayacx at school,” she wrote in a document submitted to the court yesterday. “Every time I saw him, I was overwhelmed with anxiety and memories of what he had done to me.”

According to Reyes, KSG’s Senior Associate Dean Joseph McCarthy told her she should take out a restraining order if she wanted to avoid seeing Mercedes.

“I told him how uncomfortable I was that he was still on campus. His response was, ‘It sounds like you should get a restraining order,’ which was again frustrating because the Kennedy School had the authority to make sure he wasn’t allowed on campus,” she says.

On Dec. 17, Reyes took out a restraining order in the Waltham District Court that prevents Mercedes from coming to her Watertown home, the Kennedy School and St. Paul’s Church—which Mercedes also attended—on Sundays and holidays.

Reyes said that McCarthy, who directs all degree-granting programs at the KSG, has seen the publicly-available police report describing Mercedes’ on-site admission.

McCarthy has the discretion to put students on leave and to prohibit them from coming on campus, but he declined to comment on whether he took either of those actions in Mercedes’ case. He declined to comment on any details related to the case.

According to Reyes, the Kennedy School administration allowed Mercedes to take a “medical leave”—as opposed to an explicitly mandatory leave.

While McCarthy confirmed that Mercedes is currently on leave, he would not say whether the leave was voluntary or involuntary.

“If a student committed a violent act and I was afraid that the student or felt the student might a) either commit another violent act or b) intimidate a student who was the alleged victim, I would put the student on leave immediately,” he says.

Since she took out the restraining order, Reyes has been pushing KSG to convene an administrative review board on the case that would decide whether to expel Mercedes or to otherwise discipline him.

But McCarthy and Kimberly S. Budd, an attorney in the University’s General Counsel’s Office, said University-wide policy requires schools to wait for the results of pending court cases before taking disciplinary action beyond putting accused students on leave.

“No matter what the quality of the evidence is, if it is still a matter being adjudicated in the courts, we are under instruction from Harvard not to take it up administratively—for fear, I believe, that we might prejudice the matter one way,” McCarthy says.

“What we found is that [this policy] allowed the accused to have his day in court and go through the criminal process without having been forced to make statements for the disciplinary process here,” Budd says.

But Reyes, who has also spoken with Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye about the issue, said she thought the concerns about due process were misguided, given that Mercedes admitted to hitting her, according to police records.