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| This undated photo provided by her family via attorney Robert Allard shows Audrie Pott. A Northern California sheriff's office has arrested three 16-year-old boys on accusations that they sexually battered the 15-year-old girl who hanged herself eight days after the attack last fall. Santa Clara County Sheriff's spokesman Lt. Jose Cardoza says the teens were arrested Thursday, April 11, 2013, two at Saratoga High School and a third at Christopher High School in Gilroy. |
SAN JOSE, Calif.
(AP) -- 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's mother, Sheila Pott, said she hopes to change that with a new "Audrie's Law."
"I want to take serious steps to see that this doesn't happen to another one of our children," she said.
Sgt.
Mike Leininger, a retired San Jose police detective hired by the
family's attorney to investigate the case, said interviews of people at
the party showed the suspects were sober at the time of the attack in
Saratoga, a bedroom community on the fringe of Silicon Valley.
However,
a police report obtained by the San Jose Mercury News said the suspects
told authorities during the initial investigation that they did drink
at the party.
The police report also says
witnesses told investigators the three suspects took the drunken Audrie
to sleep in an upstairs room then assaulted her.
The
report says the attackers pulled off her shorts and partially removed
her bra, exposing her breasts, the newspaper reported. Markings were
found on her chest, legs, back and near her genitalia.
"They
wrote `Blank Was Here,' on her leg," said family attorney Robert
Allard, not using the actual name because the suspect is a juvenile.
"They marked her."
Lisa Pott, the stepmother
of Audrie, said the three suspects were removed from the football team
after her suicide but weren't expelled from school, despite their pleas
to the principal.
She said Audrie had been
dealing with bullying problems at school prior to the assault, and the
family had
asked the principal for help last spring.
Jane Marashian, a spokeswoman for the school district, said officials had no comment in response to that claim.
Attorney
Eric Geffon, who represents one of the three suspects, told The
Associated Press that attorneys representing all three suspects will
have a statement on Tuesday after a hearing in Juvenile Court.
Geffon
said the boys were cited last fall but no formal charges were filed
against them until Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies arrested two
boys at Saratoga High School and a third, a former Saratoga High
student, at Christopher High in Gilroy where he currently was a student.
They have been held in the county juvenile detention center since
Thursday.
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.
"With no assault,
with no cyberbullying, Audrie is in art class right now," he said, his
voice breaking as he held back tears. "What they did was disgusting."
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.
"I have to say we were unprepared for
the amount of media attention that we are getting," said Lisa Pott,
mother of Audrie's three younger siblings. "Not only is this scary and
intimidating, but just as we thought we might be starting to heal, it
rips open the wound and reminds us of everything our family lost."
