Justice Department sides with 14-year-old girl raped while serving as 'bait' in middle school sting

"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,” wrote attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice today.

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Medical evidence confirmed anal tearing and bruising. The girl withdrew from school and moved to another state.

The federal brief argues school officials minimized the incident, listing it in the boy’s extensive record as “inappropriate touching.” The federal attorneys note one assistant principal, despite seeing photos of the injuries, contended school officials could not know if the girl had consented.

“Vice-Principal Dunaway testified that (the girl) was responsible for herself once she entered the bathroom,” wrote federal attorneys.

Following a five-day suspension, the boy was sent to an alternative school, but soon returned to Sparkman Middle, writes the Justice Department.

The brief contends  ”…a jury could easily conclude that the school acted with deliberate indifference when, despite two sexual misconduct complaints against (the boy) days before he sodomized (the girl), it provided him unsupervised access to students and failed to protect (the girl).”

“In fact, Sparkman’s practice of recording unrevealing and misleading descriptions of past incidents, coupled with its failure to maintain any record of unsubstantiated complaints and documentation for proven infractions beyond the current academic year, amounts to intentionally closing its eyes to (the boy’s) dangerousness.”

So this happened in my home town, and it’s horrible. What’s even more horrible is that it doesn’t look as though any criminal charges are being brought against the adults at Sparkman Middle School who knew what was going on and allowed it to happen. Like I straight up don’t care where you’re from, this needs to have about 500% more media attention than it’s currently receiving. This happened in 2010, and has been so neatly covered up by my home town’s school board that I’m sick just thinking about it.

Here is the contact information for the Madison County schools administration. A friend of mine suggested titling any emails you send to superintendent with “Sparkman Middle School Rape Case,” just to drill home that in no way was what happened to this girl “inappropriate touching,” as was actually put into the school’s incident report.