Wednesday, November 16, 2011

One of the black males accused of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old Hispanic girl has pleaded guilty

The boy is among 20 people charged with gang-raping the girl in an abandoned trailer in Cleveland in 2010. Authorities said that the girl was assaulted on at least five occasions from mid-September to early December at the trailer – sometimes by as many as seven or eight suspects at a time. The youngest defendant in the case is in middle school, and the oldest is 27. The Liberty County Attorney said that he’s working on plea deals for two other boys. Many of the defendants in the case have already pleaded not guilty. The investigation began in December 2010, after one of the girl’s friends told a teacher he had seen a lurid cell phone video that showed the girl being raped. The case became public after the first arrests were made in February 2011. Most of the adult suspects face charges of aggravated sexual assault of a child, but four have been charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child. The case shined an unflattering spotlight on Cleveland after some in the town of about 9,000 residents suggested that the girl was culpable in part for what happened, claiming that she wore makeup and looked older. Some also accused her parents, immigrants from Mexico, of not watching her more closely. Those suggestions were sharply criticized by many Cleveland residents and by community and religious groups outside the city. Also complicating the case was a belief by many in the predominantly black neighborhood where several of the suspects live that the arrests were racially motivated. All of the suspects are black, while the girl is Hispanic. In an April 2011 interview, the victim’s mother said that the family received threatening phone calls after police started making arrests. "The last call that I got is like, b----. you ain’t gonna live too long, or something like that," she said.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can't make this sort of thing legal, of course, but it's fairly apparent that the girl was willing participant.

Todd said...

It doesn't matter if she was willing. She was only 11.