REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, SAN JOSE - Awakening in a friend's bedroom after drinking too much at a sleepover, 15-year-old Audrie Pott looked down and realized she had been sexually assaulted and her attackers had written and drawn on intimate parts of her body, her family's attorney said Monday.
Over the next week, she pieced together one horrifying detail after another. She went online and tried to confront the three boys she had known since junior high who she believed had done it. At school, she saw a group of students huddled around a cellphone and realized that at least one humiliating photo of her was circulating.
"I have a reputation for a night I don't even remember and the whole school knows," she wrote in one Facebook message to a friend. "I cried when I found out what they did," she wrote in another.
Eight days after the attack, she called and asked her mother to pick her up at school. She said she couldn't deal with it anymore but would not say what was wrong. And then she hanged herself.
The Pott family disclosed the new details of the ordeal at an emotional news conference Monday in San Jose, discussing painful details of what their daughter was put through and demanding that three 16-year-old boys arrested eight months after the assault be tried as adults — a move that would be highly unlikely under California law.
The family members also announced plans to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the suspects, their parents and the family that owns the house where the Labor Day party took place.
The boys arrested in the case are each charged with sexual battery, dissemination of child pornography and possession of child pornography. Under California law, such less severe charges are filed if a victim does not have the ability to fight off a sexual assault because they are unconscious.
Audrie Pott's father, mother and step-mother said they were outraged by what they see as a refusal to take responsibility by the teens. Lawrence Pott, the girl's father, said he was astounded that defense lawyers for the three denied a link between the assault and the humiliating photo and his daughter's decision to end her life.
The AP does not routinely identify victims of sexual assault. But in this case, Pott's family wanted her name and case known, Allard said. The family also provided a photo to the AP.
The arrests and the details that came spilling out shocked many in this prosperous Silicon Valley suburb of 30,000 and have drawn international attention, especially coming just after two other similar episodes recently in the news — a suicide in Canada and a rape in Steubenville, Ohio.
Ikuti Whatsapp Channel Republika