Police have decided not to pursue charges against the teen classmates of a mentally challenged girl who was allegedly raped because they say the sex was "consensual"—due in part to the attackers' low IQs. According to the Daily News, school administrators had asked Nassau County police to drop the case, and they did, claiming that the mental deficiencies of both the victim and attackers made it “not something for us to get into.”
The family has filed a lawsuit against the Martin De Porres Academy, a school for special-needs kids and juvenile delinquents in Elmont. According to the suit, two boys forced the 15-year-old Manhattan girl to perform oral sex on them on May 8th last year; they then attempted to anally sodomize her, while another boy banged her on the head “making sure she couldn’t get out." The victim's mother told the News that her daughter “was quiet and very sad looking” when she got home that day, and had blood on her panties.
The school’s social worker called the next day: “She said my daughter was sexually assaulted,” the mother said. Even so, the school later sought to keep police out of the investigation. “The school administration request (sic) no further police action and will handle additional behavioral and social issues with traning (sic) and additional counseling,” reads the case report by Detective Beth McKenzie, which the mother’s attorney, Madeline Lee Bryer, provided to The News. “I’m very upset about that,” said the mother. “The school...acted as if nothing happened.”
Nassau County Police Department spokeswoman Jean DeLuca told them detectives decided to drop their investigation after determining “it was more of a consensual situation with their mental capabilities.” But the victim's attorney argued that the girl has an IQ of about 50 and “did not have the capacity to consent.” At the same time, one of the alleged attackers was found competent to be convicted of robbery, but not for the assault.
The alleged attackers also claimed that the girl was the aggressor during the incident. DeLuca added that police deemed the incident “more a failure to suppress these kids” on the school’s part than a crime. It was not something you could arrest someone for."
