Lawsuit: Alabama teen used as ‘bait’ to catch sexual predator, raped in bathroom
In a shocking story from Alabama, a 14-year-old student’s family is suing Sparkman Middle School after she was used as bait to catch an accused sexual predator but was raped in the school’s bathroom.
“It has essentially devastated her life,” attorney Eric Artrip, who represents the victim and her family, told CNN in a new Sept. 22 report.
photo/Fbi.gov public domain
If this horror was not enough, the girl has special needs and “told a teacher’s aide that she had been approached repeatedly by the accused assailant for sex.”
Court documents outline a scheme by June Simpson, the aide, who set a trap using the girl, 14, as bait. She was “meet the boy in the bathroom where teachers could be positioned to ‘catch him in the act’ before anything happened” and things went badly.
The boy met the girl in a different bathroom, no teachers were there to intervene, the girl was sodomized.
“She stalled for time. She continually tried to fight him off but ultimately was anally raped by this young man,” Altrip told CNN. “It was evident that this had been a severe trauma for her.”
Doctors found evidence of a condition “consistent with (the victim) being sodomized,” the brief stated. She refused to speak about what had happened, making it difficult to bring charges against the boy. The school did suspend him for five days for “inappropriately touching a female in boys’ bathroom,” and sent him to an alternative school.
He returned to Sparkman after 20 days.
According to the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, the boy had a history of at least 15 violent or sex-related proven incidents before the alleged rape. They cannot prove anything, though, because school administrators shredded the boy’s disciplinary files.
“A school board cannot avoid summary judgment as a matter of law when a school administrator willfully ignores a plan to use a 14-year-old special needs student as bait to catch a student with a known history of sexual and violent misconduct, and as a result, the student is sodomized,” a brief filed by the Justice Department read.
“We hope that the attention that this case is getting will spur a movement on these kinds of policies so that a girl can simply report sexual harassment without having a need to bring a witness with her or roll up her shirt and show bruises,” Altrip said.
