School Officials Interfere With Rape Investigation

I included this story in my news post yesterday morning, but I’m not sure if anyone saw it. I’m going to repost it, because there have been new developments in the case.

I know this happened in flyover country–not CA or NY, but I still think it’s important. This crime story has really hit home for me because it took place in the high school I attended (although not the same building) in the town I grew up in, Muncie, IN.

Here is what I wrote yesterday:

A girl reported being raped at a local high school, and school administrators refused to report the crime to police.

When a Central High School student went to the principal’s office about noon Tuesday to report she had just been raped in a school restroom, administrators didn’t notify police — not even the Muncie Police Department detective working in the school that day as a security officer.

Instead, the 16-year-old girl was asked to provide a written account of the assault, then apparently sat in the office for 21/2 hours until a Youth Opportunity Center staff member arrived to take the teen back to that westside facility.

That woman said she wasn’t informed of the rape allegation until she arrived at Central to pick the girl up. The YOC employee responded by taking the girl to Ball Memorial Hospital.

At that point, city police finally became involved — about four hours after the girl initially reported she had been assaulted.

A veteran Muncie Police Department detective said Wednesday that the delay had created “too big a chance of losing critical evidence” and could hamper his department’s investigation.

The school Superintendent, Eric King, claimed the rape report was “vague” and the story needed to be “validated” before he could report it to authorities.

WTF?! Aren’t school teachers and administrators required to report any abuse of a minor immediately? Here’s what local victims’ advocates had to say: “Rape claims should prompt immediate calls to police.”

Your friend, your daughter, co-worker or employee comes to you — someone they trust — and tells you they’ve been raped.

You might be taken aback, surprised by what they’re saying, perhaps even wondering what they’re talking about and what you’re supposed to do.

But, according to victim’s advocates, your role is actually quite simple.

“Call the police,” said Teresa Clemmons, executive director of A Better Way, a local agency that handles sexual assault and domestic violence issues in the area. “If the person is an adult, you ask them what they want to do, let them make the choice. Otherwise, you call the police. And more importantly, you get in contact with someone trained to handle this situation as soon as possible.”

Believe it or not, school authorities are still claiming to be “investigating” this situation, even though it is now a police matter. The School Superintendent and the principal of Central High School should be fired!

END OF REPOST
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As I said, there have been new developments. The boy who raped the girl in a school restroom stall has now been arrested and charged as an adult (that is automatic for 16 or 17 year-olds charged with rape in Indiana). In addition, three school administrators are being investigated for failing to report the crime and cooperate with police.

In the meantime, [Deputy Prosecutor Eric] Hoffman and Muncie police detectives expressed growing frustration with how Muncie Community School officials responded to the initial rape report and the resulting police investigation.

Sgt. Mike Engle issued a news release Tuesday announcing that police were conducting a secondary investigation into “why school officials failed to contact the Muncie Police.”

Engle added that the investigation was being conducted without the cooperation of school officials, especially the high school’s principal and two assistant principals, who Engle said backed out of a Friday appointment to give statements to detectives.

“The fact that the administrators are not cooperating with a rape investigation, to me that’s unbelievable,” Engle said. “I don’t know what they are trying to do.”

Is this SOP in high schools? To me it is shocking that this girl was prevented from getting medical treatment for four hours after she experience this traumatic attack. Because she is a minor, any type of abuse should have immediately been reported to authorities.

Engle on Tuesday accused the school of interfering and delaying the police rape investigation. The delay in reporting allowed the suspect enough time to go home and possibly change clothes, Engle said.

But the Superintendent of Schools claimed that:

…the rape allegation had been “vague” in nature.

“There has to be some basis for which to notify the police,” he said. “As soon as something happens, though, we notify the appropriate authorities. Sometimes that is within the school district itself.

“Other times, when we have facts that are validated, we are including other authorities.”

That is unbelievable to me. It isn’t clear from the story whether school officials knew the identity of the perpetrator. I assume the girl must have named him, as he was a classmate. Yet, he was allowed to go home, while the principal and assistant principals apparently doubted the girl’s story for some reason. The boy admitted to police that he “knew he crossed the line” and the girl was pushing him away and saying no.

The girl said the boy grabbed her in the hallway and dragged her into the rest room, so it sounds like the boy is still trying to minimize what he did.

A perhaps significant sidelight to this story is that the girl who was raped was a resident at the Muncie Youth Opportunity Center, where children who have been taken from their parents or are in some kind of trouble are cared for. Could the fact that she was poor and didn’t have parents to come to her aid have contributed to the way officials treated her? I hope YOC workers will make sure she gets some counseling and support.

Tuesday Reads

Good Morning!! So far, it has been a pretty slow political news week. I guess we’re at the beginning of the holiday lull. But I did manage to find a few stories worth sharing.

Dakinikat posted this in a comment last night: 2 Dems claim Huffington stole website idea

Two Democratic consultants are accusing Arianna Huffington and her business partner of stealing their idea for the powerhouse liberal website Huffington Post.

Peter Daou and James Boyce charge that Huffington and partner Ken Lerer designed the website from a plan they had presented them, and in doing so, violated a handshake agreement to work together, according to a lawsuit to be filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. [….]

“Huffington has styled herself as a ‘new media’ maven and an expert on the effective deployment of news and celebrity on the Internet in the service of political ends,” says the complaint. “As will be shown at trial, Huffington’s and Lerer’s image with respect to the Huffington Post is founded on false impressions and inaccuracies: They presented the ‘new media’ ideas and plans of Peter Daou and James Boyce as their own in order to raise money for the website and enhance their image, and breached their promises to work with Peter and James to develop the site together.”

Wow! Something tells me Peter Daou won’t be blogging at Huffpo any longer.

In the Washington Post, Douglas Schoen and Patrick Caddell have a bizarre recommendation for President Obama: they want him to announce that he won’t run again in 2012.

This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.

To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.

If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party.

Okay, Pat Caddell is a complete crackpot, and that is not going to happen, but still it’s funny to imagine Obama reading the article and trying to figure out how he can “compromise” even more than ever with the Republicans in hopes they will finally like him.

The New York Times reports that the House Ethics Committee has found Charlie Rangel guilty of “13 counts of misconduct,” even though Rangel walked out of the proceedings because he didn’t have an attorney representing him.

The ruling came after a dramatic and puzzling appearance by Mr. Rangel, 80, in which he protested that he could no longer afford to pay his lawyers, and indignantly walked out of the proceedings, calling them unfair.

Committee members were unmoved. Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, noted dryly that Mr. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat, was responsible for paying his lawyers and that he had been advised by the committee beginning in 2008 to form a legal defense fund to do so.

With Mr. Rangel absent, the panel listened to its chief counsel as he methodically presented the evidence against Mr. Rangel, which was based on 549 exhibits, dozens of witness interviews and thousands of pages of financial documents. Members then met in executive session and later announced they had found the facts in the charges against Mr. Rangel to be “uncontested.”

Those charges included accusations that Mr. Rangel had accepted rent-stabilized apartments from a Manhattan developer, failed to pay income taxes on rent from a Dominican villa and solicited charitable donations from individuals with business before Congress.

I’m sorry, those charges sound like pretty small potatoes to me compared to the corruption I read about every day. I continue to believe that Rangel is being railroaded, perhaps because he didn’t support Obama during the primaries and didn’t come around until the bitter end.

There have been a couple of crime stories that I’ve found really disturbing in the past week or so. The first one took place in the town I grew up in (and where I am right now), Muncie, Indiana. A girl reported being raped at a local high school, and school administrators refused to report the crime to police.

When a Central High School student went to the principal’s office about noon Tuesday to report she had just been raped in a school restroom, administrators didn’t notify police — not even the Muncie Police Department detective working in the school that day as a security officer.

Instead, the 16-year-old girl was asked to provide a written account of the assault, then apparently sat in the office for 21/2 hours until a Youth Opportunity Center staff member arrived to take the teen back to that westside facility.

That woman said she wasn’t informed of the rape allegation until she arrived at Central to pick the girl up. The YOC employee responded by taking the girl to Ball Memorial Hospital.

At that point, city police finally became involved — about four hours after the girl initially reported she had been assaulted.

A veteran Muncie Police Department detective said Wednesday that the delay had created “too big a chance of losing critical evidence” and could hamper his department’s investigation.

The school Superintendent, Eric King, claimed the rape report was “vague” and the story needed to be “validated” before he could report it to authorities.

WTF?! Aren’t school teachers and administrators required to report any abuse of a minor immediately? Here’s what local victims’ advocates had to say: “Rape claims should prompt immediate calls to police.”

Your friend, your daughter, co-worker or employee comes to you — someone they trust — and tells you they’ve been raped.

You might be taken aback, surprised by what they’re saying, perhaps even wondering what they’re talking about and what you’re supposed to do.

But, according to victim’s advocates, your role is actually quite simple.

“Call the police,” said Teresa Clemmons, executive director of A Better Way, a local agency that handles sexual assault and domestic violence issues in the area. “If the person is an adult, you ask them what they want to do, let them make the choice. Otherwise, you call the police. And more importantly, you get in contact with someone trained to handle this situation as soon as possible.”

Believe it or not, school authorities are still claiming to be “investigating” this situation, even though it is now a police matter. The School Superintendent and the principal of Central High School should be fired!

The other crime story that has disturbed me a great deal took place in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. You’ve probably heard about it. A 13-year old girl named Sarah Maynard disappeared along with her mother, brother, and her mother’s friend. Sarah has been found in the home of a 30-year-old man, but the others are still missing and presumed dead.

Sarah Maynard was found bound and gagged in the basement of a home just outside Mount Vernon city limits around 8am local time yesterday. She had been missing since Wednesday, along with her mother Tina Hermann, her brother Kody Maynard, 11, and her mother’s friend, Stephanie Sprang, 41, who remain unaccounted for.

“Unfortunately as of right now, we have not located Tina, Stephanie or Sarah’s little brother Kody,” Sheriff David Barber said at the Knox County Sheriff’s Office. [….]

Sheriff Barber said it was unknown if the accused, 30-year-old Matthew J Hoffman of Mount Vernon, Ohio, had any connection to the family– though he said Mr Hoffman was not an ex-boyfriend of either Hermann or Sprang – or if he worked alone. Mr Hoffman has a previous conviction for arson in Colorado, for which he served prison time.

Police are searching for Sarah’s missing family members and family friend, but they don’t expect to find them alive.

Police called Sarah, 13, the “epitome of bravery” after surviving a five-day ordeal in which she was allegedly kept tied up in Hoffman’s basement.

Sarah was rescued by a police SWAT team Sunday. Police found the girl alone. Hoffman, 31, and a convicted arsonist ,was arrested and charged with kidnapping.

Despite the girl’s efforts to help police in their investigation, they fear Sarah’s little brother, mother and a family friend who disappeared at the same time may be dead.

“We still would like to retain a hopeful attitude, but we have to be realistic,” Knox County Sheriff David Barber said.

Sometimes I read a story that I just can’t get out of my mind, and this is one of them. I just can’t stand thinking of this poor child going through this ordeal and losing her mother and brother because some monster wanted her for god knows what sick purpose.

I’ll finish on a more cheerful note. Here’s a story to make you smile (or smirk): Westboro’s Tires Slashed at Funeral

When members of the Westboro Baptist Church finished protesting the funeral of a fallen Army sergeant Saturday, they returned to their car only to find their tires slashed.

The protesters were unable to find anyone in McAlester, Okla., where the protest took place, who would repair the front and back passenger-side tires that were damaged, according to the Tulsa World. Eventually, a truck from AAA was called to tow the van to a nearby Walmart for repairs.

The Westboro Baptist Church, you’ll recall, is the sick fundamentalist outfit run by Fred Phelps. These creeps travel around picketing funerals and making the lives of mourners a little bit more miserable. From Wikipedia:

The group carries out daily picketing in Topeka (purportedly six per day with fifteen on Sunday[13]) and travels nationally to picket the funerals of gay victims of murder, gay-bashing or people who have died from complications relating to AIDS; other events related or peripherally related to gay people; Kansas City Chiefs football games; and live pop concerts. As of March 2009 the church claims to have participated in over 41,000 protests in over 650 cities since 1991.[14] One of Westboro’s followers estimated that the church spends $250,000 a year on picketing.

Now there’s a little bit of justice we can celebrate.

What stories or blog posts do you recommend today?